Framing of China's Belt and Road Initiative by the U.S. and Indian News Media (2013-2018)

Abstract

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has attracted worldwide attention since it was proposed by China’s President Xi Jinping in 2013. There is a lack of research, however, focused on news framing of the initiative, which offers a blank slate on the study of the BRI as China’s top level national project. Using framing as a theoretical framework, the current study examined how U.S. and Indian news media framed China’s BRI between 2013 to 2018 based on a content analysis of 400 articles from four English-language news outlets: The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Times of India, and Economic Times. The findings show that the economic project was the most frequently used frame, but the overall framing was still negative because of the threat, competition, and expansion frames. Indian and the U.S. media framed China’s BRI with many similarities and a few differences in length, topics, frames, dominant sources, and dominant tone with the consideration of each country’s stand on national interests and strategic foreign policies.