The Network Agenda Setting Effect Of The Belt And Road Initiative On Twitter By Xinhua News Agency

The Belt and Road Initiative has been continuously promoted exchanges among different countries in the world in the field of economy,politic,culture,etc.and increasingly being widely recognized by the international community since it was proposed.However,the international communication of this initiative still faces negative voices such as confusion and doubts from overseas.As one of the main actors of international communication,China's mainstream media undertake crucial duties and tasks.In the practice of mainstream media's international communication,overseas social networks have gradually become an important channel and platform that cannot be ignored because of their unique interactive quality.The agenda setting about the Belt and Road Initiative by China's mainstream media on overseas social networking platform and the interaction of overseas audiences provide us with fresh materials to study international communication effect.This thesis focuses on the status quo of the international communication of the Belt and Road Initiative by China's mainstream media and the overseas audiences' recognition of this initiative,taking the tweets involving the Belt and Road Initiative released by Xinhua News Agency's main English Twitter account(@XHnews)from 2015 to 2017 and the "Top Tweets"about this initiative posted by personal accounts on Twitter during the period as the objects of the research.1272 media agenda data and 502 audience agenda data were obtained by keyword search.Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the sample data,this paper examines the correlation between the media agenda network and the audience agenda network by using the frontier theory of the agenda setting,the network agenda setting theory model,to evaluate the network agenda setting effect of the Belt and Road Initiative on Twitter by Xinhua News Agency.This study first codes various issues in those sample tweets and then evaluates the network agenda setting effect of Xinhua News Agency's Twitter Account by using social network analysis in three steps.The first step is to transform the collected sample data into matrices representing the interrelationship among topics according to the co-occurrence frequency of every two issues.The second step is to transform the matrices into network diagram with the help of the visualization analysis software Net Draw in which the interrelationship among issues is reflected by the size of the nodes and the thickness of the connection lines between the nodes.The third step is to examine the correlation between the two matrices of media agenda and audience agenda by adopting the Quadratic Assignment Procedure(QAP)within the social network analysis software UCINET.The results of this study show that the Xinhua News Agency's media agenda network of the Belt and Road Initiative on Twitter and the overseas audience agenda network of the initiative are significantly correlated and the correlation between them increases over time.When China's media communicate the initiative on overseas social network,there are still some problems and shortcomings including the lack of balance and accuracy in agenda setting,the lack of discussion and interaction,the lack of spreadability of content,and the lack of audience voice in the media discourse system.Through analysis,this study suggests that China's mainstream media should pay attention to the interaction with overseas audiences and enhance the effect of network agenda setting when communicating Chinese voices including the Belt and Road Initiative on overseas social media and the specific ways include highlighting the advantages of agenda setting and laying equal stress on both vertical and horizontal aspects;setting issues around major events and enhancing influence;paying attention to the ratio of coverage of the contents of issues and implementing precise communication;improving the popularity of issues and enhancing the density of audience's network agenda;innovating the form of international communication and enhancing the spreadability of content;changing the concept of communication;abandoning "self-centered" and strengthening "doubts explaining and dispelling";enriching sources channels and constructing a comprehensive discourse system..