Expanding The Boundary Of Speeh: A Textual Analysis Of The Global Times’ Coverage Of Sensitive Issues In China(2000-2014)

There are some sensitive subjects in journalistic reporting about China. In order to examine ways of reporting such subjects and the stance on them by a Chinese mainstream newspaper-the English-language edition of the Global Times, this study selected six sensitive issues:Xinjiang, Tibet, dissidents/activists, social grievances, democracy and historical issues, using keywords of these issues to collect articles from its official website. To measure the newspaper’s reporting scope on these subjects, a statistical analysis was conducted on the selected and filtered news items. The number and percentage of both reports and opinion items on each subject were calculated in general and respectively. Except for statistical analysis, the study also employs textual analysis to find out the paper’s stance on and attitudes toward different sensitive issues. To make the textual analysis operational, the selected reports aforementioned would be used as the population, and a stratified random sampling was conducted based on Joann Keyton’s95%confidence level and5%sampling error. The sample data was subjected to J. R. Martin’s attitudinal appraisal analysis. The textual analysis results would again be subjected to another round of statistical analysis.Through descriptive statistical analysis and textual analysis, the study found out that the English edition of the Global Times reports extensively on such sensitive issues like unrests in Xinjiang and Tibetan areas, dissidents and activists, social grievances and other issues related to the subjects of human rights and democracy. But on the more sensitive historical issues, like the Cultural Revolution and some other historical political issues, it cautiously toed the party line with limited number of reports on them, and the tone was also very delicate. The newspaper uses a substantial number of op-ed articles to express opinions on these subjects as an approach to tackle sensitive issues, and to voice the paper’s unequivocal stance on them, especially through editorials. The overall stance of the newspaper is consistent with the Chinese central government, while it holds different attitudes toward some specific cases or people, such as the artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, and the grass-roots democracy in Wukan village, etc.