Comparing China’s Self-image and Western Media Projected Image:

From the Perspective of Davos Forum

Guang Xu and Ming Ren

School of Information Resource Management, Renmin University of China, Zhongguancun St, Beijing, China

Keywords: National Image, News, Text Summarization, China, Davos Forum.

Abstract: This paper is an attempt to assist the national image studies with text summarization techniques. Based on

the collected western news and Chinese speeches in the context of Davos Forum, this paper aims to provide

evidence in a specific context to understand the national image building. Specifically, the paper examines

the discrepancies between the self-image and the media projected image, as well as the trend, and the

images are compared by countries and newspapers. Discrepancies are found and they are not vanishing in

the past years. A positive signal is found in 2017, which has implications for the national image building of

China. Besides these findings, this paper also offers a framework of computing the national image with text.

1 INTRODUCTION

With increasing globalization, there has been a surge

in national image building. It is agreed that one’s

prestige determines one’s role in society. National

image, as is acknowledged by governments, enlarges

a country’s global influence and is deemed as one

part of a state’s soft power. The prestige and

reputation often influence the interactions with other

countries, e.g., when a country desires to integrate

with global markets, to participate in global affairs,

and to enhance the status on the world stage (Li and

Chitty, 2009). A good image generates trust and

cooperation, whereas a bad one provokes hostile

reactions and undermines the security (Kopra, 2012).

Recent years have witnessed the genuine efforts

of China in promoting its national image. A series of

comprehensive programs have been implemented,

including communications with the world through

diplomatic opportunities. Among these is Davos

Forum held in Davos, Switzerland every year, which

provides an important platform for countries to

transmit information, shape images and create

influence. China has actively taken part in Davos

Forum since 2005 and communicated with the world

about the development of China, the vision for

development, and the desires for cooperation, etc.

As image is ‘a human construct imposed on an

array of perceived attributes projected by an object,

event, or person (Nimmo and Savage, 1976), the

perceived national image is possibly in discrepancy

with reality. Especially for China, which has been

experiencing rapid development, it is even more

difficult for the perceived national image to keep

update and consistent, which may result in obstacles

in building trust and understanding. Many prejudices

about nations are carried forward through

generations, so that historical events of long ago

remain decisive in a nation’s image (Kunczik, 1997).

Mass media as the essential channel for people to

get information on international issues, acts as a key

player in formulating and disseminating the images

of nations (Kunczik, 1997). Professional journalists

wish to tell people what is happening as objectively

as possible. However, there is no doubt that national

images are a kind of reproduction. Whether a ‘story’

will be selected for airing in the public domain of a

country largely depends on its ‘news value’ or the

consistency with the value of that country. Thus, it is

necessary to identify the discrepancies between the

‘self-image’ and the media projected image, in order

to improve the understanding between countries and

provide the means for promoting China’s image.

This paper attempts to examine the discrepancies

between the ‘self-image’ and the media projected

image of China from the perspective of Davos

Forum. Our research questions are:

1. What are the discrepancies, if any, between the

western reports and the Chinese speeches?

2. Are the discrepancies, if any, vanishing with the

efforts of national image building?

3. What are the discrepancies, if any, between the

398

Xu, G. and Ren, M.

Comparing China’s Self-image and Western Media Projected Image: From the Perspective of Davos Forum.

DOI: 10.5220/0007232003980406

In Proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2018) - Volume 1: KDIR, pages 398-406

ISBN: 978-989-758-330-8

national images projected by the media?

A data-driven approach is used to understand the

discrepancies. Relevant news is collected from four

major newspapers in US and UK, and the speeches

by Chinese leaders in Davos are collected from

Ministry of Commerce of China. Then text

summarization techniques are used to analyze and

compare the content in the western news and the

Chinese speeches, in order to find out the answers

for the questions above.

2 RELATED WORK

Many scholars discuss the concept of image and

national image from the social-psychological

perspective. Image is ‘a human construct imposed

on an array of perceived attributes projected by an

object, event, or person’ (Nimmo and Savage, 1976).

Boulding identifies perceived images as the ‘total

cognitive, affective, and evaluative structure of the

behaviour unit or its internal view of itself and the

universe’ (Boulding, 1956). National image is ‘the

cognitive representation that a person holds of a

given country, what a person believes to be true

about a nation and its people’ (Kunczik, 1997). It

deals with ‘the climate of opinion formed by

collective expressions of perceptions and

judgements of a country by its overseas publics’

(Wang, 2008).

Media portrayal of a country, whether positive or

negative, can affect the general public views and

subsequently change cross-national personal

associations, public opinion regarding foreign policy,

or the practice of public diplomacy (Brewer et al.,

2003). Framing occurs during media production. By

framing, media paints the pictures of our world

(McCombs, 2002). Reporters are assisted by media

frames knowingly or unknowingly, such as news or

documentary structures, in repackaging the huge

amounts of information quickly and routinely into

reports. Media practitioners act as dominant national

image-shapers, and journalistic framing serves to

examine the media projection of national image.

The frame and framing theory have been studied

in e.g. (Li and Chitty, 2009), mostly in theory. The

accumulated data together with the advent of text

mining techniques enable us to analyze how media

portrays a given country and to understand the

framing in national image building.

3 METHOD AND DATA

3.1 Method

Figure 1: Framework of computing national image.

A framework of computing national image with text

is shown in Figure 1. In order to compute national

image with text, data is to be collected from e.g.

news, BBS, social websites. Targeted crawling is

usually useful in order to obtain the data that is

useful in computing national image. Based on the

data, query is used to extract a subset of text related

to a specific keyword or topic, and natural language

processing (NLP) is always a necessary step which

helps to process large natural language corpora.

Then text analysis techniques can be used to explore

the text. Text summarization can automatically

create a shortened version of a text for a given

document or a set of documents, while preserving

important concepts of the document. It can be

categorized as extractive and abstractive according

to the way the summary is created. The extractive

method selects a subset of existing words/

phrases/sentences in the original text to form the

summary, and abstractive methods build an internal

semantic representation using natural language

generation techniques, which itself is a growing field.

In addition, topic models can be used to discover the

abstract ‘topics’ that occur in a collection of

documents. Then visualization provides a national

image in the form of word cloud, topics,

summary/sentences, and so on.

This study is an attempt to assist the national

image study with extractive summarization

Query&processing

Textanalysis

query

Hotwords

Visualization

Wordcloud sentences

…

Nationalimage

Webdata  Internaldata

Topicmodel

Topics

Naturallanguageprocessing

sentiment

summarizatio

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Comparing China’s Self-image and Western Media Projected Image: From the Perspective of Davos Forum

399

techniques. Query-based summarization is used

during the exploration of the news, which extracts

the most important information from a set of

documents and creates a summary for a query. First,

a set of news collected through queries are

summarized and hot words are extracted, in order to

understand the general topics. Then, in order to

better understand the differences with respect to year,

topic, country, media, a subset of news related to the

query will be extracted from the existing set of news

and be further summarized. For example, when

specific information about trade issues is needed, a

query on trade will provide the sentences containing

trade, which enables a precise understanding of the

issues.

In text representation phase, word embedding are

used to learn distributed vector representations of

words using neural networks, which can probe latent

semantic and/or syntactic cues that can in turn be

used to induce similarity measures among words.

Then a sentence is represented by averaging the

word embeddings of words appearing in that

sentence. Thus, each sentence also has a fixed-length

dense vector representation.

In the extraction phase, word extraction and

sentence extraction are used. The words with highest

term frequency will be extracted to ‘tag’ the

news/paragraphs. In some cases, whole sentences

will be extracted as a summary, since a sentence is

easy for people to understand, e.g. when a topic is

concerned. Since supervised methods generally

requires a huge amount of annotated data, which is

costly and time-consuming, this paper uses

unsupervised approach (Zhang, et al., 2016) to select

the sentences from the original documents, which

tends to score and then rank sentences based on

semantic, linguistic or statistic. First, the sentences

are clustered using X-means, which determines the

best number of clusters; then a sentence is selected

from each cluster, which has the highest average

similarity with other sentences within the cluster.

These selected sentences are integrated to form the

summary.

3.2 Data Collection

The data used in the analysis consist of two parts:

the speeches by Chinese leaders at Davos Forums

during 2005-2018; and the related news about China

around the forum by four major newspapers in US

and UK during 2005-2018. These newspapers are

The Wallstreet Journal, The New York Times, The

Guardian, and The Financial Times, abbreviated as

WSJ, NYT, GU, FT respectively in Table 1.

Table 1: Summary of news on China.

Yea

2005 3 10 3 18

2006 7 10 7 33

2007 2 12 15 26

2008 1 35 11 48

2009 6 27 7 42

2010 13 37 8 63

2011 18 48 7 47

2012 8 24 1 38

2013 7 10 3 33

2014 19 12 3 77

2015 15 9 5 35

2016 19 17 24 60

2017 32 47 14 94

2018 21 61 6 128

Total 161 359 107 742

The news is selected through a query ‘Davos and

China’ during 2005-2018. The date is restricted to be

between Jan 14 and Feb 20, since the news about the

forum usually appears before the forum starts and

lasts for about two weeks. For a piece of news with

China/Chinese in the title, the full text will be

selected. For a piece of news with China/ Chinese in

the body not the title, the paragraphs with China/

Chinese are selected.

It can be seen that in the past 14 years China’s

topics are gaining more and more attention in Davos

Forum. The reason lies in that China has become the

second largest economy in the world and starts to

play an important role in international affairs. In

addition, China is actively seeking the opportunities

for dialogue and setting up the national image.

Among the four newspapers, The Financial

Times in UK pays the most attention on China,

followed by The New York Times in US. The other

newspapers Wall Street Journal and The Guardian

are more concerned about China’s issues than before.

4 NATIONAL IMAGE ANALYSIS

It is interesting to see the national image of China

projected by the western news and whether there is

discrepancies compared with the image conveyed in

the speeches by Chinese leaders. The two parts of

texts will be analyzed and compared to examine the

discrepancies in topic, content, and the tone, by

extracting words/ sentences and sentiment analysis.

4.1 Self-image and Western Media

Projected Image of China

After removing the stop-words, the words with

highest term frequency are extracted to form a word

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400

cloud. An English version of the word cloud is

shown in Figure 2. It can be seen that the topics are

centred on economic issues. The leading words

including development, economy, cooperation,

international represent information China aims to

convey to the world through Davos Forum. Other

hot words including reform, advance, innovation,

growth, enterprise are trying to present the

economic achievements of China to the world, and

the desires for open up and cooperation.

Figure 2: Word cloud for Chinese speeches.

Figure 3: Word cloud for western news on China.

According to the word cloud for western news on

China (Figure 3), the leading words including US,

government, market, growth, economy are the

information that the newspapers convey to their

readers, which is crucial in framing the national

image of China. The topics are centred on economic

issues, e.g. economy, growth, market. Meanwhile, it

shows different interest of western media on China.

First, it is normal that China is mentioned

together with other countries (ie., US, India) in the

context of globalization, and the relations with US

obviously gains high attention.

Second, the different terms reveal different

interest. For example, in the western news, growth is

more popularly used rather than development. The

latter as the No.1 hot word in Chinese speeches does

not even appear in the hot words in western news.

Although often used interchangeably, growth

focuses more on quantity, and development is a

more comprehensive concept. Obviously, China

focuses on development of high quality rather than

growth in quantity, and it is what China aims to

introduce to the world. However, the world focuses

on the growth in quantity, as well as slowdown,

stimulus of China’s economy, rather than the

development of China. Thus, it is no wonder that

China’s appeal of cooperation is not ever included

in western news.

As for the RQ1, the discrepancies are found in

the news on China in the context of Davos Forum.

4.2 The Varying National Images

As for RQ2, this section examines the varying

national images of China and compares the images

by year. Top 10 hot words in Chinese speeches and

in western news are shown in Table 2 and 3

respectively.

4.2.1 Varying Topics on China

From the hot words in the Chinese speeches (Table

2), topics are centred on economic issues, besides

response to important political issues in certain years.

Economy and development have always been the

leading words throughout the 14 years. Other hot

words vary from e.g. resources, investment in early

years to crisis in 2009-2010, to reform and

innovation in recent years. The varying topics are

closely related to the situations in China or around

the world, or represent the appealing and desire of

China.

Let’s look at the new hot words. Reform has been

a hot word since 2012, since China is going through

an extraordinary economic reform and would like to

share the achievements and aspirations with the

world. Alike, Innovation begins to appear in the

speeches as a new hot word in recent years, which is

deemed as the driving force of economic

development and transformation of China.

On the other side, hot words and the reflected

topics in the western news are different. As is

discussed in 4.1, China is often mentioned together

with other countries, and US is the mostly

mentioned country in the news. Note that India is

largely mentioned and compared with China before

2011, and there was ever a keynote speech titled

“China vs. India” (2006), and panel discussions ever

in Davos forums, which reflect the world’s keen

interest on the two Asian countries. However, the

world has shifted the interest from comparison of

India and China to the relations with US.

Another big concern reflected in the western

news is trade, which has almost always been the

Comparing China’s Self-image and Western Media Projected Image: From the Perspective of Davos Forum

401

interest of western countries and is especially the

focus in recent years. It is obvious that the western

countries are interested in trade with China and

emerging markets, which is the concern of China but

not the only one. As is known, the leading position

of trade in the recent two years is mainly because of

the trade war between US and China, which has

been the focus of the world.

Obvious gap exists in certain years. Take the

year of 2009 as an example. At the time of the

global economic crisis, the prime minister, Jiabao

Wen, gave a speech about the domestic measures to

deal with financial crisis and stability of domestic

situations, conveying confidence and determination

of China. But it is not positive according to the

western newspapers on crisis. Among the 88 pieces

of news on crisis, only 28 pieces hold positive

opinions, which is rather few compared with the

general positive ratio in total (to be shown in Figure

4). A piece of news with negative opinions is shown

as follows, which provides a rather negative national

image of China.

Despite its rise as a global production hub,

China -- like emerging Asian economies such

as India -- is too small, too poor, and too

export-dependent to provide much of a buffer

for the global economy in the next few years.

(WSJ)

Also, the discrepancies between Chinese speech and

western news are not vanishing. Even in 2017 when

Chinese president attended the forum, which is a

major diplomatic action, the discrepancy in the

discourses is obvious. The trade war received the

most attention, while the great reform happening in

China does not appear in the newspapers, as well as

the appeal for cooperation. Besides a new hot word

Xi Jinping showing up in the western news, other

hot words/topics remain almost as they were in the

past, e.g. trade, tariffs, etc.

This implies that the national image building

activities are not effective in some extent.

Furthermore, it is necessary to note that the speeches

by a national leader are a different form/genre of

material to the news of an event or speech, i.e., the

speech is pushing a specific message, while the news

reporting the event or speech is not necessarily

conveying the same information.

4.2.2 Opinion Polarities by Year

Sentiment analysis is used to measure the attitude of

western media towards China. Each piece of

news/paragraph is categorized with Python NLTK as

positive, negative, or neutral.

Figure 4: Ratios of polarities of western news on China.

According to Figure 4, the ratio of positive news

is mostly above 50%, which shows that the western

media hold relatively positive opinions towards

China. Especially, the year of 2017 witnessed a high

positive ratio, together with a low negative ratio,

when Xi Jinping, the president of China, attended

the Davos Forum and gave a keynote speech. It can

be seen that Xi’s speech has a positive impact to the

western countries.

A maximum of negative ratio appeared in the

year of 2014. Four representative sentences are

extracted from those with negative opinions, which

gives us a general idea about the negative opinions,

i.e., including the uncertain about China’s economy,

and the conflicts with neighbour countries.

Some indices had already said that China’s

economy was doing worse than advertised.

Concerns on the slowdown of the Chinese

economy, the withdrawal of global stimulus by

the world's central banks, and local strains on

emerging-market economies contributed to the

negative shift in global sentiment.

China’s neighbors in the South China

Sea—in particular the Philippines and

Vietnam—are angry at what they view as

increased coercion by Chinese security forces

to assert control over the disputed Spratly and

Paracel islands.

Unfortunately, the actions of the Chinese

and Japanese governments are doing nothing to

make conflict less likely.

China’s efforts to reorient its economy—

colliding with domestic political and economic

tensions, unsettling investors at home and

abroad.

4.3 Different Media Projected Images

As each media has its own political positions, it is

likely the media projected images of China are

different. In order to extract the different media

projected images of China, the top hot words in each

year are extracted, and are shown in Table 4.

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Before going into media, we examine the

discrepancy between the media projected images in

US and UK. The hot words by year are extracted

respectively from US newspapers and UK ones, and

the two series of hot words are quite similar. The

results of sentiment analysis are shown in Figure 5.

Here the annual positive ratio for each country is

computed as the ratio of positive news from the

media of a country in a year within the whole news

from the media of the country in the year. It can be

seen that the positive ratios by US and UK are above

50%, and the two series of ratios keep close in recent

five years. The two countries are shown to share

similar views and common interests as China is

concerned.

Figure 5: Ratios of positive news by US and UK

newspapers on China.

Now let’s examine the national images of China

projected by different media. According to the

words/topics shown in Table 4, the four newspapers

talked about various issues in early years, but they

are moving toward consensus especially in the past

two years that the trades issues between US and

China was the focus of every newspaper. According

to the ratio of positive news (Figure 6), the

newspapers are mostly positive toward China. Note

that the low ratios of Guardian is partially due to few

pieces of news included (i.e., 7 in 2009, 3 in 2013),

which results in an easy decrease of the positive

ratio. This also accounts for the minimum positive

ratio of WSJ in 2009 and the large variance of its

ratios. By comparison, FT and NYT with more

related news included have less variant positive

ratios.

The positive ratios are also related to the political

positions of newspapers. As for the two newspapers

in UK, the ratios of the Guardian are relatively low

because it as a radical leftist independent newspaper

expresses sharp opinions in some cases. The other

newspaper in UK, the Financial Times, is usually

deemed as business conservative and shows more

positive opinions.

Figure 6: Ratio of positive news by newspapers towards

China.

It is interesting to note the overall high positive

ratios in 2017, when the Chinese president Xi

Jinping attended the forum and gave a speech. Based

on the topics in Table 4, the globalization addressed

in Xi’s speech has been adopted by the news papers,

which ranks 2 in the hot word list of The Guardian,

5 for The New York Times, 6 for The Financial

Times and 12 for Wall Street Journal. This is a first

positive signal that the western newspapers show

interest in the Chinese speech, or on the other hand

the Chinese leaders are addressing the crucial issue

of the whole world. Globalization is an unstoppable,

monolithic trend but is facing powerful headwinds.

The world found reasons for optimism as Xi

delivered a forceful critique of the protectionism and

offered encouragement and confidence. It is reported

that “China did move up in the direction of asserting

the kind of global leadership role that the US has

had for about a century and might wilfully be

abdicating.”

5 CONCLUSIONS

This paper contributes to the national image studies

by offering a framework of computing the national

image with text and presenting a case of computing

national images of China with text summarization

techniques. In order to compute the self-image and

the media projected image of China in the context of

Davos Forum, relevant data is collected from four

major newspapers in US and UK, as well as the

speeches by Chinese leaders in Davos forums. Text

summarization has been used to analyze the self-

image reflected in Chinese speeches and the media

projected image reflected in the western news.

This paper also contributes to the national image

studies by providing evidence of the media framing

in the specific context of Davos forum. While the

frame and framing theory have been studied mostly

in theory, this paper uses text mining techniques and

Comparing China’s Self-image and Western Media Projected Image: From the Perspective of Davos Forum

403

the related data to analyze the images and provides

evidence of the media framing of a given country.

Specifically, this paper has examined the

discrepancies between the self-image of China and

the media projected image from the perspective of

the Davos forum. First, the speeches and the news

seem to be in different discourses. The concern

reflected in western news has always been around

trade issues, no matter what is conveyed and

appealed in Chinese speeches. So the western news

seems not interested in the great reform and

innovations happening in China and the appeal for

cooperation, at least not as interested in the trade

war. An obvious example is in 2009, when China

presented the efforts devoted to deal with the

financial crisis and maintain financial stability, the

western media hold negative opinions (57 out of 88)

towards China and frames a rather negative national

image of China.

The different terms used in western news shows

the western perspectives. For example, the growth is

a big concern reflected in the western news, as well

as slowdown, stimulus of China’s economy, rather

than development, reform of China. China is more

like a market, rather than a partner for cooperation,

which has been addressed a lot in Chinese speeches

but is not ever included in the hot words in western

news.

These discrepancies offer evidence of the media

framing of China. Although the framework of media

and that of the individual are not necessarily

correlated, the media framing does affect how the

readers handles information, how they thinks and

draws the attention of the reader to some aspects of

the facts while ignoring the other aspects. Long-term

stylized reporting inevitably produces a stereotype,

restricting the reader's cognitions of China.

According to Alexander and Levin (2005), images

or stereotypes that a nation has of another depend on

three structural features of interstate relations: goal

compatibility, relative power/capability, and relative

cultural status, or sophistication. The assessments

towards these structural relations will determine the

kind of images that are classified as ally, enemy,

barbarian, imperialist, and dependent (colonial)

images, and subsequently influence compatible

international behaviours. As for the image ally, the

potential action is cooperation, while for enemy it is

attack or conflict. The fact China is likely with the

image enemy accounts partially for the discrepancies

in the communication. Besides, there are other

factors to be accounted for the discrepancies. The

speeches by a national leader are a different

form/genre of material to the news of an event or

speech, i.e., the speech is pushing a specific message,

while the news is reporting an event or speech from

a comprehensive perspective or a different

perspective. We try to mitigate this effect by

focusing on texts related to a specific event and

restricting the time of news to about one month

around the forum, but cannot eliminate it.

The discrepancies are not vanishing with the

efforts of national image building in the past years.

It is interesting to note that in western news China

was often addressed together with other countries

like US and India. The compare with India once

gained high attention but is not a heated topic any

more. Now the relation with US is the focus of the

world and is deemed the most important one among

the bilateral relations in the world.

The discrepancies has implications for the

national building activities. Despite the

discrepancies in the years, the western newspapers

‘listen’ to the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in 2017.

A main reason is that he is addressing the right

concern of the whole world during that time. To a

certain extent, Xi’s act is definitely a success in

building national image of China. This has

implications for the national image building

activities of China that only by addressing the right

concern in a right manner, and assuming obligations

can China promote a fine national image.

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Table 2: Top-10 hot words in Chinese speeches by year.

Y ea r Top 10 hot words

20 05 development, economy, cooperation, Asia, resource, construction, economy society, environment, reform, peace

20 06 development, economy, construction, market, resource, cooperation, energy, environment, innovation, investment

20 07 development, economy, peace, construction, rural, employment, harmonious, market, efforts, system

20 08 development, economy, trade, innovation, product, investment, resource, cooperation, synergy, mutually beneficial

20 09 economy, development, crisis, confidence, financial, cooperation, stable, measures, enterprise, implement

20 10 economy, development, recovery, deal with, cooperation, crisis, investment, open, structral, market

20 11 WTO, trade, negotiation, export, import, economy, open, member, ten years, Doha

20 12 development, enterprise, economy, investment, responsibility, reform, ten years, economy society, GDP, system

20 13 economy, development, South China Sea, Diaoyu Islands, ambassador, China, Geneva, attend, Japan, disputation

20 14 economy, development, reform, innovation, advance, transformation, enterprise, kinetic energy, upgrade, investment

20 15 economy, development, reform, innovation, government, peace, stable, cooperation, structural

20 16 economy, development, innovation, G20, investment, cooperation, driving force, summit, market, reform

20 17 economy, development, growth, globalization, innovation, driving force, reform, path, cooperation, difficulty

20 18 economy, development, future, policy, tough fight, risk, Xi Jinping, reform, system, supply

Table 3: Top-10 terms in western news by year.

Year

Top 10 frequent terms

2005

US, bank(China), policy, economic, currency, global, India, democracy, Europe, oil

2006

India, US, economic, global, growth, business, trade, energy, oils, people

2007

US, India, economy, power, development, market, energy, Korea, military, climate change

2008

US, India, growth, funds, Russia, investment, Beijing, oil, trade, wealth

2009

US, economic, crisis, Wen Jiabao, financial, growth, currency, trade, domestic, Treasury

2010

US, economic, growth, global, power, India, Li Keqiang, currency, crisis, emerging markets

2011

US, India, global, economy, growth, European, business, the United States, growing, inflation

2012

US, trade, economic, growth, global, India, Europe, business, crisis, executive

2013

Growth, US, economy, government, Zhu Min, India, Li Keqiang, Africa, Companies(China), people

2014

US, Japan, Growth, war, trade, South China Sea, Abe, WTO, India, investors

2015

Growth, economy, US, global, slowdown, Bank, investment, Li Keqiang, GDP, stimulus

2016

economy, growth, US, global, market, currency, oil, crisis, prices, slowdown

2017

US, trade, Xi Jinping, Trump, economic, growth, market, trade war, investment, climate

2018

US, trade, Trump, economic, Xi Jinping, tariffs, growth, Liu He, trade war, financial

Table 4: Top-5 terms in western news by newspaper.

Year FT GU NYT WSJ

2005

Democracy

worker

economic

global

Debt

relief

president

Lula

delegate

Bank

currency

policy

Bush

Hainan

percent

conference

progress

poverty

2006

India

growth

economic

global

Global

India

trade

Brazil

Bank

India

economic

business

India

the united states

growth

trade

product

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Table 4: Top-5 terms in western news by newspaper. (cont.)

2007

India

global

market

Asia

India

Korea

power

lobal

Rates

tax

growth

India

television

concerned

drug

2008

India

growth

private

funds

India

economic

power

Europe

Emerging market

water

India

land

Funds

the united states

Russia

India

investment

2009

Crisis

financial

economic

Wen Jiabao

National

Wen Jiabao

crisis

Russian

Economy

growth

global

financial

Wen Jiabao

the united states

global

crisis

currency

2010

Economic

growth

global

trade

Google

growth

global

pressure

Global

growth

economic

policy

the united states

Economic

global

Li Keqiang

Western

2011

India

global

economic

growth

Exchange

emerging market

India

Britain

Global

India

trade

investment

the united states

India

growth

business

economic

2012

Trade

India

growth

global

Asia

refugee

run

experience

vague

trade

economic

Undervalued

currency

Power

the united states

India

growth

crisis

2013

India

growth

global

people

Resource

increase

extraction

global

development

Growth

Li Keqiang

capital

financial

Banks

India

respondents

lanterns

release

2014

Japan

global

growth

war

shadow

Climate

change

Abe

war

global

Japan

growth

Abe

WTO

Japan

Asia

Singapore

the united states

China South Sea

2015

Growth

business

global

Asia

Global

overregulation

concern

Germany

Growth

economic

central

slowdown

Wanda

business

global

artist

Singapore

2016

Global

currency

growth

renminbi

Global

growth

financial

economic

Growth

global

currency

market

economy

Global

market

growth

the united states

Xi Jinping

2017

Trade

Xi Jinping

Trump

economic

Trade

globalization

Trump

Xi Jinping

Trade

Xi Jinping

Trump

globalization

Trade

the united states

Trump

Xi Jinping

economic

2018

Trade

trump

Xi Jinping

tariffs

Trade

Trump

business

union

Trade

tariffs

Trump

economic

Trade

Trump

the united states

economic

Xi Jinping

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