Methods of News Media Propaganda: Chinese External Propaganda on Taiwan from November 2021 to January 2022

Chinese external propaganda has gone through major developments in the last halfcentury to meet the needs of a perpetually changing world of news media and to respond to a push by the Chinese Communist Party for more soft power in global politics. This thesis identifies three major trends 1n this development: commercialization, fragmentation, and internationalization. Commercialization speaks to how Chinese papers utilize methods to increase the sales of their papers. Fragmentation explains how, even in a heavily censored and state-managed propaganda system, different voices and types of media must be represented by news media to cater to different readers with varying degrees and types of political interests. Finally, internationalization is what allows a media entity to situate itself in the global media landscape using foreign voices and discussions of international events. This paper investigates two of China’s English language newspapers: Global Times and Shine Magazine, via a discourse analysis to identify these three major developments and how they are carried out in their reporting. This thesis investigates how the Taiwan issue in US-China relations was reported on in the days and weeks following the 2021 November 15th summit between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. The analysis identified three important editorial strategies in each paper, then uses these to characterize China’s response to the summit. This qualitative method interprets how official directives and newspapers’ business incentives are reflected in media coverage disseminated to an Englishspeaking audience. While these two newspapers cannot represent the entirety of China’s external news propaganda, they give insight into two vitally important pieces of China’s external propaganda.