Representation of African Countries and Sino-Africa Relations in Chinese Newspapers

Abstract China’s neocolonialist expansion and domination in African continent has been well documented and extensively studied by scholars across various fields and disciplines. But what these studies didn’t pay attention to, or what they failed to pay enough attention to, was the ways this type of neo-colonialist exploitation was legitimated and justified by the powerful media outlets that support the Chinese government and have strong impact on public perceptions of the domestic and global situations. This research project aims to fill that gap by examining three Chinese newspapers’ coverage of African countries and their complex business relations with the Chinese government. The critical analysis reveals the newspapers’ strategic construction of the communist state’s neo-imperialistic domination of African countries. The findings demonstrate that Reference News, People’s Daily , and the Global Times , the three most influential newspapers in mainland China, glorified the state’s intervention in African countries’ economic and political affairs as salvaging the “friends in needs” and fighting the imperialistic West. These newspapers appropriate the socialist discourse of building global equality to support the communist regime’s growing domination of the developing world.