Communicating a Contested Chinese Diplomatic Initiative: A Frame Analysis of Chinese Official Rhetoric and Foreign Media Coverage on the Belt and Road Initiative

Officially, China has been presenting the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as an investment and development project to deliver infrastructure finance and strengthen connectivity in Eurasia and beyond. Yet since the outset the Chinese diplomatic initiative has been heavily contested due to its ambiguous and Janus-faced nature. Facing suspicions and doubts, Beijing has constructed an eclectic set of political discourse with a view to legitimating the BRI to the global community. Yet repeated pledges and assurances have failed to quell criticism and distrust of the initiative remains high in foreign political elite. Many heads of state or government declined China’s invitation to attend the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in May 2017, and thus far, most established powers have shunned the project. Contestation, politicization and problematization in the political circle have drawn extensive attention from media. They played a pivotal role in the framing contest surrounding the BRI not only by selectively representing frames advocated by elite political actors, but more important, by adding critical reflections and proposing rivaling views and alternative interpretations via carefully-chosen sources. To get a refined and integrated understanding of the dynamic BRI debate, it is useful to identify the frames—defined here as a specific interpretation of an issue embedded in political discourse and media coverage, and study how different actors applied them to justify and promote their preferred interpretation. Substantively, this research focuses exclusively on Chinese official rhetoric and foreign media coverage. As such, the overarching research question is formulated as: What frames—or combinations thereof—were applied by China and foreign media to communicate the BRI? Conceptually, the study leverages the analytical purchase of the cultural constructionist approach to framing. Empirically, it is grounded on a purpose-built dataset comprised of 497 Chinese official texts aiming to legitimate the initiative, and 886 BRI-focused news articles collected from quality media in India, the United Kingdom (UK), the US, Japan, and Australia. Methodologically, it performs a two-phase frame analysis: an inductive phase to identify and construct the frames, followed by a deductive phase to examine the frame use by different actors over time. In so doing, the study fulfills two goals. First, it uncovers and articulates all the interpretations—in the form of frames—in a competitive opinion environment where substantial cleavages exist and diverging views compete. Second, it evinces the frame use across countries, and incidentally, gauges the reception of China’s political discourse among foreign media.