The Politicization of Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Media Coverage: A Computational Text Analysis

The sustainability of the debt associated with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has long been a source of concern (Shepherd et al., 2016). While the issue was originally confined to academic and business circles, the controversy over Sri Lanka’s Hambantota International Port project and China’s alleged ‘debt diplomacy’ brought this issue to the attention of mainstream global media in 2017 (Schultz, 2017). The emergence of the debt sustainability narrative has coincided with an increase in debt renegotiations between China and other countries participating in the BRI. This raises the question of whether the emergence of this narrative has impacted loan negotiation outcomes within the context of the BRI, or whether other factors (such as a participating country’s relative ability to repay a proposed loan at a particular rate of interest or the availability of alternative sources of financing) are the key determinants of such outcomes. In order to provide a comprehensive answer to the question of whether such narratives have affected loan negotiation outcomes, it is necessary first of all to determine the degree to which the politicization of domestic media coverage of the BRI has varied across the countries participating in the initiative, it is necessary to first of all determine the degree to which the politicization of media coverage of the BRI has varied across countries participating in the initiative, since the degree to which this media coverage is politicized in each participant country is likely to constitute a significant mediating factor with regard to any potential effects of host country media coverage on loan negotiation outcomes. This article examines the politicization of media coverage of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It applies and builds on existing concepts of politicization in order to identify potential factors that may impact variation in the degree of politicization of domestic media coverage between BRI-participant countries, and to generate several hypotheses concerning this potential variation. This involves the further conceptualization and operationalization of interest group mobilization as one element in the broader phenomenon of politicization. The primarily non-Western setting of the BRI necessitates going beyond conventional operationalizations of interest group mobilization in order to capture the effects of the mobilization of both associational and non-associational interest groups. A computational text analysis approach is employed to measure both issue salience and the degree of actor expansion (as a proxy for interest group mobilization) within media coverage in BRI-participant countries. The effects of both economic (including both macroeconomic and sectoral variables) and political factors (including regime type and electoral system) on any variation in the degree of politicization of media coverage across BRI-participant countries are then determined by using a fixed-effects model.