The National Image Of China Portrayed By British Media

Over the past ten years, China has transformed itself from a regional power to aglobal power, attracting more media coverage around the world.This paper focuses on how China was portrayed by the British news magazinethe Economist over the past decade. Using both quantitative methods and qualitativemethods, it analyzed the cover stories about China in the Economist from2003to2012.Based on a systematic research, this paper concludes that the image of China wasconstructed as an “other”. This paper is consisted of five chapters as follows:The first chapter introduced the background, object, methods and framework ofthe study. Related domestic and foreign literature was reviewed and listed.The second chapter was a brief introduction of the Economist, which boasts along history of160years.The third chapter analyzed the cover stories from the angle of quantitativeresearch in three aspects: number, subject and tendency.The fourth chapter analyzed the cover stories using qualitative methods and wasdivided into China images and typical topics.The fifth chapter concluded that the basic image of China in the Economist canbe tagged as authoritarian and unstable.