Division of Chinese opinion on Russia-Ukraine War: Analyzing Key Actors’ Strategic Framing on Weibo



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Submitted Nov 8, 2022
Published Dec 14, 2022
10.24018/ejpolitics.2022.1.5.45

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Is strategic framing in authoritarian regimes fully under the control of the government? How could opinions on the Russia-Ukraine war of Chinese key actors differentiate from each other? Based on strategic framing theory, we use Structural Topic Models (STM) and a computational corpus-based approach to conducting a discourse analysis of 576 blogs produced by Chinese media outlets and opinion leaders on Weibo, the most popular social media platform in China. We argue that the strategic framing of private media is internally linked and influenced by state media in terms of topic distribution, topic trending, and position. However, the neutral position of the state is designedly to give space for private media to challenge the dominant frame of the state, which reflects an actively weakening control over the media ecosystem in China.

Keywords: discourse analysis; media relationship, STM; strategic framing.

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