Views on the U.S. Election in China: How the Xinhua News Agency portrays the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

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Views on the U.S. Election in China: How the Xinhua News

Agency portrays the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

Prof.dr. R.P.E. Sybesma

Asian Studies

2018-2019

06/30/2019

Word count: 13123

Bart Lokker

S1495100

b.c.lokker@umail.leidenuniv.nl

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1. Introduction

The presidential elections in the United States are one of the biggest and most widely covered political events in the world. The whole election is reported on in detail by news outlets worldwide, discussing every detail and intricacy surrounding it. It seems that everywhere around the world people have an interest in either the election results or the drama and controversy surrounding it. There was no lack of drama and controversy surrounding the U.S. presidential elections of 2016. Many major news websites had whole sections of their websites dedicated to the 2016 presidential elections (e.g. “US Election 2016 BBC” 2016; “US Elections 2016” 2016; “US-Präsidentschaftswahl 2016” 2016; “アメリカ大統領選挙” 2016). The Chinese news agency Xinhua was no exception. However, unlike their Western and Japanese counterparts, the Xinhua News Agency is run by the state and has very close ties to the Communist Party of China (CPC). This gives an extra dimension to their news reports on the American elections, and invites questions like the follow: How did Xinhua cover the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, China being a country that is politically the opposite of the U.S.? How does it portray and frame U.S.-style democracy and everything that comes with it?

According to Lecheler the framing of news is “a process by which certain facets of social reality are emphasized by the news media, while others are pushed into the background.” (Lecheler et al. 2015). The way that news is framed can construct or affect a social or political reality for the audience (Johnson-Cartee 2005). News framing can be used as a way to promote a certain narrative or discourse. Framing is also closely related to agenda-building in politics. The issues that journalists choose to cover can influence how audiences view the importance of that issue (Parmelee 2014). In my background section I will further discuss framing, as well as the unique role of the media in China and Chinese views on democracy. The main purpose of this thesis is to analyze a Xinhua website (“The 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections” n.d.) dedicated to the U.S. presidential elections of 2016. The Xinhua news Agency has very close ties to the Chinese government, it therefore can be argued that what they report is in line with the stance of the Chinese government (Keck and Tiezzi 2015).

According to the Xinhua website, the current president is Cai Mingzhao and the editor in chief is He Ping (“About Xinhua News Agency” n.d.). Both have close ties to the CPC as members of the CPC Central Committee (“Biography of Cai Mingzhao” n.d.; “Biography of He Ping” n.d.). Cai Mingzhao was a former deputy director of the Propaganda Department, former deputy director of the Information Office of the State Council (SCIO) and was

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in-chief for the People’s Daily (“Biography of Cai Mingzhao” n.d.). According to their own description the “Xinhua News Agency adheres to the center and serves the present conditions, it firmly grasps the correct political direction and orientation to public opinion. It faithfully fulfills the role of mouthpiece and eyes and ears[of the CPC].” (“About Xinhua News Agency” n.d.). The Xinhua news Agency is also the largest state news agency in China (Hong 2011), and ranked very high on a list of popular (in terms of number of visitors on their website) news agencies by the website 4imn.com (“Top 200 News Agencies in the World by Web Ranking” n.d.). Because Xinhua is a large, popular state-run news source they potentially have a lot of control over the narrative they want to provide to the Chinese audience. They can decide what narrative they want to report and show the audience a specific part of reality, which Zeng, Zhou and Li call a mediated reality (Zeng, Zhou, and Li 2015). By analyzing this website by Xinhua, I want to find out how the 2016 U.S. presidential elections were framed by Chinese state-media.

2. Background

2.1 Role of the media in China

Before I can discuss how the Chinese state media portrays the U.S. presidential elections of 2016, I will examine the role of the media in China. This role is very different from the role the media plays in western European countries or North America.

In China all publishing is under the supervision of the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPCPD) (Hassid 2008; Brady 2008). This control is not limited to just formal forms of news reporting media, but permeates through to the entertainment industry as well. Not only in digital media, but also in what Cai calls cultural activities such as performing arts and folk literature (Cai 2016). When discussing Chinese state news media it is important to remember that all reporting media in China is state media. According to Jacoby no media is allowed to contain any information which goes against the guidelines set out by the CPC (Jacoby 2014). The core principles for the role that the media plays in Chinese society align with the core principle of the CPC. According to Tong the media in China is a propaganda tool, the goal of which is “disseminating ideology, justifying governance and preventing dissent.” (Tong Jingrong 2010: 927).

The role of journalism in China is therefore very different from the role it has in liberal democracies, and China is ranked 176th_{out of 180 on the freedom of press index (Reporters}

Without Borders 2018). However, it is important to remember that the CPC does not see this ranking as a problem. They feel that the ranking is based on “western” values of good

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journalism, and the CPC does simply not agree with those values. The CPC will always value avoiding conflict and maintaining social stability over reporting the objective truth, if such a thing even exists. (Young 2012). Reporters who try to push the limits or report on a topic that has no clearly defined boundaries yet, always take the risk of being shut down (Young 2012). This threat of being shut down in turn encourages self-censorship. In most liberal democracies, journalists are expected to keep power in check, to report current affairs to the public without much regard for consequences to the current regime or society as a whole. Even though there is this difference between the two roles of journalism, the styles of journalism and reporting that are used in contemporary Chinese media have become more similar to the West than before (Stokes 2017). Stockmann and Gallagher note that current methods used are a combination of catering to the interest of the reader, while still according to state censorship demands. To the Chinese government, an important factor of these censorship demands is that when media outlets run stories there is a lack of conflicting sources (Stockmann and Gallagher 2011), which means that many different news outlets often run similar stories.

2.2 Framing

Chong and Duckman explain very well what framing is and what the basic facets of framing theory are. According to them, the point of framing theory is that the same issue can be viewed in different ways, and that this issue can be “construed as having implications for multiple values or considerations.” (Chong and Druckman 2007: 104). Framing is something that is done by the viewer, the audience, when viewing an issue. The viewer gives certain aspects of the issue more consideration or value which Chong & Duckman call the individual’s “frame in thought.” (Chong and Druckman 2007: 106). How the viewer thinks about an issue, however, can be influenced by politicians or media by using certain terms or connecting an issue to certain values to make the viewer frame the issue in a way that is favorable to that media or politician. Influencing the way the audience frames an event is also called “framing”. According to Entman it is to “select some aspects of perceived reality and make them more salient in communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, casual interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” (Entman, 1993: 52). The example that Chong & Duckman cite is about allowing or opposing a hate group holding a political rally. When respondents were asked whether or not they opposed the rally their opinions changed significantly depending on if the question was tied to the consideration of freedom of speech, or the consideration of the risk of violence (Chong and Druckman 2007). Lastly they discuss the effects of media emphasis on an issue. The authors argue that when mass

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media focusses on a particular issue they expect that issue to become more important to the viewer, and as a result it will have more weight in the evaluation of the viewer when they are framing in thought (Chong and Druckman 2007).

So how exactly do Chinese media frame certain large events and issues? As we just saw, framing is a way for the media to influence the way the meaning of certain issues are constructed (Chong and Druckman 2007). An example of framing by the Chinese media was seen during the Arab Spring uprising around 2011. According to Du, Chinese media focused less on the protesters and their message and more on official government statements and attributed much of the social unrest to economic troubles and not to “political dictatorship and tyranny” (Y. R. Du 2016). Specific items such as how the protesters circumvented censorship systems and how they used the internet to organize themselves were also left out of Chinese reports (Y. R. Du 2016).

An example more fitting for the current thesis is perhaps the framing of the Taiwanese elections in 2004. As is well known, Taiwan, an island off the Chinese coast, is considered a rogue province of China by the Chinese government. Both the democratic Taiwanese government and the CPC maintain a status quo in which Taiwan is to some extent de facto allowed to act as an independent nation, but in name may not declare independence from China. Because of these political tensions specific framing techniques are used by Chinese mass media. When it comes to elections on Taiwan, the influence of the so-called “Game frame” on the audience of Chinese media is discussed in a study by Han (G. Han 2007). The Game frame is a frame that focusses on the game that an election, a race between parties to see who will be the winner or loser, also is (G. Han 2007). According to Shehata (Shehata 2013: 172) “exposure to game-framed news induces political cynicism among news consumers and shows evidence of weakening institutional trust and interest in politics”. This is because use of the Game frame calls into question the motivations of the politicians because it “implies motives that are self-interested, not in the best interest of the public and not worthy of trust” (Cappella and Jamieson 1997: 145) After viewing the Game framed news stories, Chinese audiences were more favorable towards the reunification of Taiwan and China (G. Han 2007), which is one of the goals of the CPC under the one China policy. (Xie 2006) This is because the Game frame “emphasizes candidates’ winning or losing strategies” and therefore the elections in Taiwan are seen as political gambling, which “sends a somewhat negative message about the chaotic process of Taiwan’s democratization.” (G. Han, Chock, and Shoemaker 2009). The gamble to see whether or not whoever has the best strategy to win the election, is also fit to lead the country.

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2.3 Democracy

The reason why it is interesting to look at China’s view of American democratic elections is because China’s political system is so different. So how does China view the U.S.? China and the U.S. are often seen as opposites of the political spectrum, with China even being seen as a threat by the U.S.. According to the NYT, the U.S. sees China as a “revisionist power that tries to reorder international politics to suit its interests.” (Scissors and Blumenthal 2019). The article not only states this, but also agrees that seeing China as a dangerous rival is how China should be seen. The China threat is often debated in the media and by academics (e.g. Yee 2013; Machida 2010; Miller 2019; Peña 2018; Kimball 2018; Babones 2017). Likewise, the Chinese government does not view the U.S. as friendly either. According to Nathan, China has to deal with a lot of influence to its political system from abroad, and on that issue the U.S. is seen as the most intrusive actor by the Chinese government (Nathan and Scobell 2012). China also sees U.S. style democracy as a threat to the political stability of countries that have shifted to other types of political systems (Nathan and Scobell 2012). How then does China view democracy and is that different from democracy in the U.S.?

An article published in Qiushi (Seeking the truth), a journal that publishes the views and theories of the CPC, explains why China is actually a democracy. According to the article, Xi Jinping and the Chinese government say that China’s socialist democracy is the most extensive and effective democracy, and that China is the world’s largest democratic state (Z. Han 2017). China’s democratic system is just completely different from the “western” idea of democracy. The author argues that democracy is a process of negotiation arranged by society to achieve their interests. The view that the will of the people can only come to fruition when one person has one vote and not by other means is an attempt to monopolize the standards of democracy by “western countries”, according to the author (Z. Han 2017). It is true that one of the main reasons that China is categorized as a non-democratic country is because of so called western definitions of what a democracy entails. The article reflects that China has a completely different view of what a democracy should look like. Furthermore, it suggests that “western-style democracies” are not that great after all (Z. Han 2017), and specifically targets the U.S. and the perceived flaws in its democratic system. For instance it points at aristocraticization of politics with families such as the Clintons and the Kennedy’s, intra-party politics preventing certain candidates for being nominated and American democracy turning into money and populist politics (Z. Han 2017).

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Interestingly, the democracy index published by the Economist Intelligence Unit in some cases has very similar criticisms of the U.S. democracy. The democracy index for instance uses five factors to determine how democratic a country is. These are: Electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture and civil liberties (Economist Intelligence Unit 2018). A high score can be achieved by having a “competitive multi-party political system” and “free and fair elections conducted on the basis of ballots”. (Economist Intelligence Unit 2018). China lacks a lot when looking at these factors and is therefore classified as an authoritarian country, ranked 130th out of 167 (Economist Intelligence Unit 2018). It should, however, be noted that the U.S. is listed as a “flawed democracy” and is ranked 25th (Economist Intelligence Unit 2018). This is mainly due to the functioning of the government in the U.S., where party politics are sometimes more important than tackling the issue at hand, and policy decisions are based on blocking the opposition (Economist Intelligence Unit 2018). The same point is made in the Qiushi article, illustrated by the example of Trump trying to tear down “Obamacare” just because president Obama of the democratic party came up with this idea (Z. Han 2017).

It is interesting to note that when the Qiushi article and other similar articles (Li 2016) discuss western style democracy they mainly focus on the U.S.. The conclusion one could form is that this shows that to the CPC, the U.S. is the main representative of western style democracy. However, it could also be the case that the CPC primarily focusses on the U.S. because the U.S. is a more useful example when arguing against democracy. If the Qiushi articles would pick a country like Norway or New Zealand, countries that are ranked at the top of the democracy index, for their comparison, the Qiushi author might have a much harder time defending their case. Rule of law is another topic that is not often brought up in official Chinese literature when comparing “western” and Chinese political systems. This is because according to He there is no true rule of law in China, in China “relevant laws can be ignored or distorted to fit the desired outcomes of those who hold the most influence” (He, Thornton, and Li 2012: xi).

To find out how the Xinhua News Agency frames the 2016 U.S. presidential elections it is important to remember the different role of the media in China, all media is under the purview of the CPC and especially Xinhua has close ties to the party. Therefore it is interesting to analyze political news reported by this news agency because it may provide an insights to how the CPC wants to report certain news to its people and from that find out its views and priorities. Framing theory plays an important role when analyzing the news articles and reports published by Xinhua. By analyzing how Xinhua frames certain issues in the 2016 U.S.

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presidential election, one can find out more about their goals. In this thesis I will look at three frames that I have identified using the methods described in the next section. The frames are as follows: 1) The Money-Politics frame. The Money-Politics frame is a frame that is used to emphasize the need for money and powerful (rich) allies to win the U.S. elections instead of a more meritocratic method that is favored by the CPC. 2) The Unvirtuous-Leader frame. This frame is used to portray the presidential candidates of the 2016 elections as unfit leaders according to Chinese standards. 3) The Game frame. Earlier in this section I have alluded to the Game frame, which is a way to portray the elections as a game instead of focusing on actual issues which can increase cynicism towards politics and politicians and can decrease trust in them as well.

3. Methods

To analyze the frames that are used on the various articles on the Xinhua news website I will be using both a qualitative and a quantitative approach. For the qualitative approach I will look closely at an article and an image directly related to the frame I want to discuss. This is to show how the news agency uses the frame, what types of words and phrasing they use when writing their article. Since the website has 115 articles, I will not be able to do a qualitative analysis of all of the articles, therefore I will use a quantitative approach to show the pervasiveness of a particular frame throughout the other articles published on the website. Using both a quantitative and qualitative analysis I can show in detail how a frame is used in a specific article, while at the same time showing that these frames are used extensively in news articles published by Xinhua. I think the extend of frame usage will show that the type of reports Xinhua publishes systematically use similar language to create these frames. After the methods section I will present my results starting with the quantitative analysis, this is because I think it will create the framework on which I built my more extensive qualitative analysis and gives further insight into how I identified the frames.

3.1 Quantitative analysis

For the quantitative analysis I have started by following a guide on quantitative textual analysis by Nichols & Nielbo (Nichols and Nielbo n.d.). Nichols & Nielbo have identified a number of important steps that have to be taken before one can even start the quantitative analysis process. They recommend using AntConc, a powerful and free textual analysis program created by

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Laurance Anthony (Anthony 2019). AntConc offers a range of functions, the most interesting to my research being the concordance tool, the clusters tool and the collocates tool. The concordance tool allows you to plot what keywords are being used in what texts, how many times they are used and where in the text they are used. The clusters tool will show the user word clusters that often appear together in a preset range. For example, the word Měiguó美国 ‘The United States’ appears most often together with dàxuǎn 大选 which means ‘elections’. The collocate tool is similar to the cluster tool, the difference is that it uses a different method of ranking to show the results. While the cluster tool looks at the frequency of words used directly behind the word that is being searched for, the collocation tool measured the observed frequency divided by the expected frequency (Nichols and Nielbo n.d.).

First the text files need to be preprocessed to work with the analysis software. AntConc requires plain text files to work with. I downloaded every article from the website in pdf format, and deleted the duplicates. I ended up with 115 unique articles. I copied the content of each article to notepad++ for cleanup. I used the built-in macro function to remove punctuation marks and numbers. Then I used another tool created by Anthony called SegmentAnt (Anthony 2017), which is designed to separate Chinese words by spaces using a Chinese frequency dictionary. This is necessary because without spaces between words AntConc will not be able to recognize where a word starts and ends. The files are now ready to by analyzed.

The way I have designed my quantitative analysis is to use a list of keywords that are directly or indirectly related to the specific frame. The lists of original keywords can be found in the appendix (appendix tables 1-3), while I will supply the translated versions in the next chapter. The way I have chosen the keywords is too look closely at the homepage as well as the articles that strongly correspond to a certain frame and pick words that I think are related. To avoid counting articles that use a certain word randomly without the context of the frame I have set a minimum frequency range of five words. This means that a word or multiple words on the keyword list need to be mentioned five times or more before they are counted as promoting a certain frame. I have also made sure that compared to the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (McEnery and Xiao 2004), the keywords had a statistically significant ‘keyness’ factor. A keyness factor is a number that shows if a word in my target corpus is used more often compared to a much larger reference corpus (Wei 2019). I will further clarify keyword choice when presenting my qualitative analysis.

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3.2 Qualitative analysis

For my qualitative analysis I will be doing a discourse analysis of a selection of articles from the Xinhua website. According to the Linguistic Society of America, discourse analysis is “the analysis of language beyond the sentence.” (Tannen 2012). For this type of language analysis semiotics is also an important theory to consider because certain types of language can signify something other than what it might look like at face value, it can have a hidden meaning that requires context. Semiotics is the study of signs, how a certain message is communicated (Schneider 2013a).

If there are any images displayed in the articles, I will also analyze those images. Just like text, images can have a lot of information hidden inside them. I will use the chapters on semiotics and iconography in the Handbook of Visual Communication to analyze those images (Van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2004). These chapters help to answer the question of what is represented by those images and if there is any hidden meaning behind them (Van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2004).

The way I have selected these articles is by looking at which articles are most closely related to the frame I want to discuss. For example, the first frame I will discuss in my analysis will be the “Money-Politics” frame. A number of articles on the Xinhua website discuss the U.S. presidential elections through a frame of money politics. I will systematically analyze one of those articles to see what type of language and words are used, what references are being made and what rhetorical devices are used by the author. For my analysis I will mainly be following a guide on discourse analysis published by Florian Schneider (Schneider 2013c, 2013b).

According to the guide the first step of a discourse analysis is establishing context and doing a more thorough background check on the producer of the material (Schneider 2013b). I have done so in the introduction background section of my research. The next steps are to do the actual analysis. I will set this up by splitting up the article into sentences. For each sentence I noted the relevant discourse strand, cultural reference and linguistic mechanisms (Schneider 2013b). Discourse strands are the themes I will analyze in the text that are related to the frame. For example, in the “Money-Politics” frame I will be looking at powerful families, expenses and buying influence. I will also translate each sentence into English, when translating I will stay as close to the meaning of the original sentence as possible. This part of the analysis can be found in the appendix. Finally, I will publish my findings in the next chapter.

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4. Quantitative analysis

For my Quantitative analysis I have analyzed all the written articles that have been published on the U.S. election section of the Xinhua website. There were a total of 159 articles on the website divided in three sections: Hot News, Deep analysis and special report. However, the three sections were not too rigid, with many of the same articles displayed in more than one section. There were a total of 115 unique articles on the website, this is the number of articles I will use in my quantitative analysis. When I first started my analysis I noticed that even in the 115 unique articles, there were articles that had 90-100% of the same content, but were published under a different title. There were 16 sets of articles meaning that 8 of the 115 were copies. I have chosen to not remove these articles because they were published with a different title on a different date. For a regular user it would not be obvious that these articles were almost identical when looking at the titles.

The first thing I did is compile the 115 articles into AntConc and check the word frequency list. For the purposes of my research I removed words that have no connection to the topic, such as: “and, also, day, all, but” etc. The top 50 words are represented in the word cloud below. I have translated these words from Chinese into English and then placed them into the world cloud (figure 1).

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Chinese English Frequency Chinese English Frequency

美国 America 1333 大选 General Election 345

特朗普 Trump 963 投票 To vote 259

希拉里 Hillary 815 媒体 Media 231

总统 President 583 选民 Voters 227

选举 Election 428 共和党 Republican Party 200

政治 Politics 397 竞选 Run for office 196

候选人 Candidate 350 辩论 Debate 184

Table 1 List of the top 14 most frequent words across all articles

These words by themselves do not provide very interesting results. They do not show what issues the Xinhua website focusses on. They are more generally, words used to describe any U.S. election. It starts to get interesting when we use the collocates tool that I mentioned in my methods section.

When looking at the collocates of some of the top words used in all the articles these are some of the interesting results that I have found:

Query: Trump Hillary Politics

1. Donald Interrupt Collect donations

2. US Republican Party US Democratic Party System

3. Lead story To lead Huge sum

4. Putin Verdict Super PACs

5. Wife To (be) sue(d) Money

Table 2 Collocates of several highly frequent words

It shows that when I dive deeper into in what type of context these words are used, they give a good insight on what issues the authors of the articles focused on. For example, when discussing Trump, words like “Lead story”, “Putin” and “wife” are frequently used. When the authors write about politics, money, donations and super PACs are a common topic. Now, there are endless amounts of topics one could analyze on the Xinhua website, there probably are many issues reported on the website that I have not analyzed. However, the above table is constructed by looking at some of the most frequently used words. The issues that I have selected to analyze are partly based on these results, and partly based on what I have observed when actually

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reading all the articles. I have decided to look at the above subjects more in depth. I have done this by creating the keywords lists for the frames I wanted to analyze, which I have discussed in detail in the methods section.

4.1 The frames

I have created three lists of keywords, translated versions of which I will use in this chapter, the original Chinese list can be found in tables 1-3 in the appendix. Note that all the keywords in the translated table are single search terms in Chinese, even though they are multiple words in English. The first list of keywords (table 3) shows the words I used to analyze the Money-politics frame on the Xinhua website. The concordance plot shows that there are a total of 531 hits over 51 of the 115 articles. 26 of these articles mention one of the words on the Money-Politics frame keyword list more than 5 times. This means that according to my standards the Money-Politics frame is present in 22,6% of the articles. More interestingly, in 6 of the articles there are 25 hits or more, which means that these articles almost exclusively discussed topics related to the Money-Politics frame, represented in the graph below.

Gap between rich and poor

Money and power transactions

Rich and powerful person

Large sum (of money) Wealth To collect donations Poor and rich Tycoon

Prosperous Multi-millionaire Riches and honor Richest individual

Extremely rich Most rich Money Money game

Billionaire Burn money Wealthy To spend money

Money Master Billionaire Billions of dollars Millions of dollars

Aristocracy Aristocrat Bigwigs Family

Oligarch Donation Loans fundraising

Funding Contribution To raise funds To collect money

Total funds raised To spend Family name Rich

Rich Man Super PACS Bankroller Interest groups

Table 3 Money-Politics frame (original appendix table 1)

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Each bar represents an article, every black line is one hit of a word from my keyword list found in the article. Among these articles are also the articles I used for my qualitative analysis.

The keywords used in my Unvirtuous-Leader frame can be found in table 4. Searching for the words in this keywords list results in a total of 545 hits over 82 of the 115 articles. In 36 of the 82 articles keywords were used five times or more, which means that in about 31.3% of the articles the Unvirtuous-Leader frame is present. Compared to the Money-Politics, the Unvirtuous-Leader frame is more spread out over the articles. The Unvirtuous-Leader frame has about the same amount of hits as the Money-Politics frame but it is spread out over 82 articles instead of 51. Only 3 of the analyzed articles have 25 hits or more.

Email*1 FBI Scandal Putin

*doll* Russia *Benghazi* Puppet

*fund* Discrimination *to insult* Female

Table 4 Unvirtuous-Leader frame (original appendix table 2)

Finally, the “Game frame”. The keywords used for this frame can be found in table 5. The search resulted in a total of 490 hits over 87 articles, this is the lowest amount of hits over the highest amount of articles. This means that this frame is the most spread out over all the articles of all the frames that I have discussed. Out of 87 articles, 41 have five hits or more which means that the Game frame is present in 35.6% of the 115 articles. None of the articles have more than 25 hits which signifies that no article has the Game frame as its main focus.

*Game* *Win* To aspire to the

throne

To run for office*

To compete To fight The battle of* War of words

Election War To contend Fierce battle Battlefield situation

Decisive battle To tussle Throne To fight for

To vie over

Table 5 Game frame (original appendix table 3)

The purpose of this quantitative analysis was to show how a frame permeates throughout the whole website. It shows that the frames are systematically used throughout the articles on the Xinhua website In my next section I will take a closer look at some of the articles that

1_{Note that the asterisk means that for my Chinese search query I have allowed AntConc to include words that had} part of the keyword included. E.g. Email, Email server or mailgate are all included in the search query Email*

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exemplify these frames. To create a better understanding of what the frame actually is and what it looks like when used in an article

5. Qualitative analysis

5.1 Preliminary analysis: Game frame

For the first qualitative analysis I will start by doing a preliminary analysis of the front page of the Xinhua website. The reason I have decided to do it this way is because compared to the other two frames, the Game frame is not a frame that has articles which clearly use the Game frame. Instead it is more spread throughout the whole website. The Game frame is also connected to the other frames in some way. The front page is actually one of the few obvious examples of the Game frame being used. The front page also serves as a nice introduction to things that I will discuss in more detail in my other two frames. As mentioned earlier the Game frame is a way to look at the U.S. elections as a game. This competition decides who will be the

next leader of the U.S.. What qualities, skills or assets are required to win this competition? These are the questions that the author focusses on. Because you need to win this competition to become the president, one could argue that being good at the game is more important than being good at the job.

The homepage of a website is usually the first point of contact between the end user and the website. Just like on the front page of a newspaper it shows the headlines, news, and images that the creator wants the end user to look at first. Which stories, headlines or pictures will make the user click on the link to the full story, what information does the creator think is the most relevant at the moment? These questions can be answered by analyzing the homepage of a website. From this analysis I will distill the main themes for the analysis of the content of the website, which are the articles and videos.

5.1.1 Narrative and language

The portrayal of the U.S. elections as a game where two people have to fight to become the president of the U.S. is made clear in the text of the third main image on the website, I have included a translated version of the image below, for the original image see appendix (appendix image 3).

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Image 3 Translation of image used on Xinhua frontpage

In the left and right top corner, the faces of Clinton and Trump are floating above the White House staring at each other. Using a large font “PK Shéi néng wèndǐng báigōng 谁能问 鼎白宫” ‘PK, Who can win the White House’ is written in the in the center of the image. PK or ‘player kill(ing)’ is a term that was originally used in online video games to differentiate between one player killing another player and a player killing a computer controlled character which reinforces the impression of the U.S. election as just a game. However, in Chinese speaking countries the term PK is also used in a similar fashion as vs. ‘versus’ is used in English, i.e.,to signify two people or teams that will face off to win something. Speaking of winning, I translated wèndǐng问鼎 as ‘winning’ but some context is required to fully grasp the meaning of this word. A dǐng is a type of cauldron with three legs. According to Chinese legends, nine of them were cast by the legendary Chinese ruler Yu the Great, some 4000 years ago. The

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person who held these cauldrons would hold the political power to rule the country (“词语‘问鼎中原’的解释” n.d.). This means that in this case the “winning” seems to specifically mean gaining the political power that comes with being in the White House. More recently the term is also used to speculate who is going to win a sports championship, for example the soccer world cup (CCTV 2018). The use of PK and wèndǐng picture the election as a game, implying that to gain the highest amount of political power in the U.S. you have to be good at that game to beat your opponent. The reason why there is so much focus on this “game” aspect leads into the next section of the analysis.

The lower half of image 3 states information about the two presidential candidates, such as political allegiance, age and their catchphrase. However, more interestingly, it also mentions family, main (job) experience, what type of people support them and what their pros and cons are. To me it seems this information is listed as if the author is listing the pros, cons and other statistics relevant to a team participating in a sports match. On such a list it would seem logical to only include information that is relevant to the game, and the type of information listed in image 3 gives an insight into what is relevant to winning the election according to Xinhua. This information itself is less relevant to reinforcing the Game frame and more relevant to emphasizing what kind of game the U.S. election is.

Starting with family, why does the website mention the family situation of the two candidates? It shows that Hilary Clinton is married to Bill Clinton and has one daughter, it shows that Donald Trump has had three wives and has five children. This can be interpreted such that it implies a judgement of character as well as reinforce the factors that are important for winning this game. They mention the fact that Hilary is married to a former president, implying she comes from a politically powerful family. In the image Xinhua also focusses on the fact that Trump has had three wives. They could for example have said that Trump is married with five children, but they specifically mentioned him having been married twice before. I think the authors mention this because the Chinese government has a very specific idea of what type of person is suited to become the political leader of a country. In an article about what type of person leads China published in Qiushi, it mentions moral self-discipline, righteousness and morality of the family as important factors (Mei 2016). Having had multiple wives is likely not seen as morally virtuous and is not a good quality for a leader according to Chinese standards.

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Job experience is also a very interesting point. This is because the CPC prides itself on being a meritocracy. In a recent speech by Xi Jinping at the National Organized Work Conference, the chairman said the party should persevere in finding members with both integrity and talent, who are virtuous, and to appoint them on basis of merit (People’s Daily 2018). Not just anyone can become a party member or lead the country, this requires years of training, mentoring and above all governing experience starting at the lower levels of the government. According to an animated video, “How leaders are made”, made for the Chinese government targeted at a Chinese and English speaking audience, you have to work your way up from townships to governing bigger cities, provinces and ultimately the country (Shen 2013). The lack of this process and lack of governing experience seems to be pointed out by the image because almost no relevant governing experience is mentioned for either candidate. This is especially the case with Donald Trump, according to the image his main experience comes from being a real estate tycoon, a poison tongued reality show host and the Chairperson of the Miss Universe contest. This again seems to portrays the presidential candidate as less than ideal according to Chinese leadership values. Clinton fares slightly better, the image at least mentions that Clinton has a background as a lawyer and worked as secretary of state. Her experience as the secretary of state is the only achievement listed that shows any governing experience. However, even then the focus seems to be on the fact that she has been elected as a top lawyer, was the third female secretary of state and was the first female to become a presidential candidate. Her experience as a two term senator for the state of New York for example, is not mentioned by Xinhua, even though this is relevant especially considering a meritocracy is highly valued by the Chinese government.

Last but not least are the final two points that I want to analyze; the advantages and disadvantages of each candidate. Unlike what you might expect, these are the advantages and disadvantages for the candidates personally, that affect their chance of winning the election. They are not the advantages and disadvantages for the people voting for either candidate. Starting with Hilary Clinton, her advantages are actually quite positive. The image starts by saying she has a rich political background and that she has a solid female voter base. However, her disadvantages are every scandal Hilary Clinton allegedly has been involved in. The “mailgate” email incident, the Clinton Foundation scandal, the Benghazi incident and finally the claim that she has “left behind” the middle class. This again shows a lack of integrity and moral character that according to the article in Qiushi is so highly valued by the CPC. Throughout most other articles on this website as well, the main focus when talking about

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Clinton are the controversies she has been involved in. The Chinese media is not alone in this, of course, , in the U.S., Clinton’s media coverage was also mostly focused on scandals (Faris et al. 2017).

Moving on to Trump, the advantages listed for him are his straightforward speech, tough attitude and him being “unconventional”. His disadvantages are being exposed as discriminating and abusing women, discriminating against immigrants and his refusal to make his tax return public. The advantages listed are advantages for Trump to win the election, to win the game. To me they do not seem important skills that are related to governance, but instead are important to win the popularity contest that is the U.S. election. They are reasons for some people to like him personally. Trump being discriminatory does also not fit into virtuous morality that a leader is supposed to have, especially his refusal to publish his tax returns point to something that especially during Xi Jinping’s reign has been a hot topic, corruption.

The last image on the bottom of the website explains some of the common terms used during the election.

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This figure is very informative and clearly explains various concepts regarding the U.S. election. However the first two parts of the figure again mention fighting and winning an election.

5.1.2 Visual analysis

I will start by analyzing the main images on the front page. These are the images that are not related to any specific news stories since those images would have changed over the course of the election. The first image (appendix image 1) that immediately grabs the attention is the main banner at the top of the page. It shows the two presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton with a backdrop of the American flag which is colored to represent their respective political parties. Blue for the Democrats and red for the Republicans. This banner is the first sign of the “game” frame that was mentioned by Han in the study on portrayal of the Taiwanese elections (G. Han 2007). The second image (appendix image 2) emphasizes the competition aspect even more, the two center images show Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton wearing boxing gloves and facing each other. Last but not least is image 3, where in the top of the image the two presidential candidates face off above the white house. With below the list of states as if these were sports players.

5.2 Money politics

The second frame that I have researched and identified is what I call the frame of “Money-Politics”. This is a frame that portrays the elections as an activity where money is an important or even the most important factor in deciding the election results. The reason that I have chosen to delve into the frame of Money Politics is that I had noticed in my previous research that “money” is a topic that is more often discussed by Chinese authors when talking about the U.S. election process (Lokker and others 2018). My quantitative results confirmed that on this section of the Xinhua website “Money-Politics” is a frame that is used in 22% of all the articles published on the website. For my qualitative analysis for this frame I have chosen to analyze two articles which both have “Money-Politics” as their main topic. The First is called: “Uncovering the secret: How is the money game behind American politics actually played?” (Lu and Yan 2016) (appendix original article 1), the second is called: “Why has American politics been reduced to a game for the powerful?” (Yang 2016) (appendix original article 2).

5.2.1 Narrative:

Both titles start of by calling American politics a game, a game played with money by powerful people. The most important point the authors want to drive home is that money is the most important factor needed to be successful in American politics and the presidential election. This

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point is made especially clear in the first article. The authors start with a quote by Mark Hanna, a republican Senator in the 19th century which says: “There are two things that are incredibly important to American politics, the first in money and the second is also money” (Appendix 1 line 3). According to the authors this money mostly comes from political contributions by rich Americans who actually control the elections (Line 3). These donations have become unrestricted after 2010 decision by the Supreme court, a point which the authors repeat several times (Line 8, 9, 16, 31, 34). The authors seems to want to show the hypocrisy of the presidential candidates by saying that the candidates at first either opposed this system or are immune to outside influence (Line 7 & 8), however the candidates later have accepted “huge” amounts of money and not breathed a word about restricting donations (Line 11, 12). The reason for this is left implied in a quote, saying that “… after all they are both direct beneficiaries of this corrupt system” (line 13). The final focus of the first article is looking at the exact amounts that have been either spent on the presidential election, naming it the most expensive election ever (Line 15, 19, 20, 23, 33). I think they mention these large amounts because it further reinforces the point that the U.S. election is not for everyone but only for the rich and powerful, which the candidates either already are, or if not they can be influenced by other rich and powerful people. Other than the issues mentioned above, the second article primarily focusses on family background and inequality in society. The article starts by extending an olive branch and saying that the story of president Obama is an encouraging one (Line 5). However, the authors then quote The Economist which said that U.S. politicians mostly are wealthy and the influence of powerful families is rising, calling it the “new aristocratic system” (line 7). The chances for “regular people” to perform a “counterattack” and regain power becomes more and more difficult as a future with the equality of people is drifting further away (line 6). The importance of a powerful family background is repeated many times (Line 7, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 24). According to the authors it is especially important in politics (Line 26). Lastly the article focusses on the gap between the rich and poor, and the inequality in opportunities this brings. The authors start of by stating that among “rich” countries, the U.S. has the largest gap between rich and poor, they do however not mention which countries belong to this group of “rich” countries, or what data the authors used so I am unable to verify this (line 28). Then the authors state that since 1933 the wealth of the bottom 95% of people has not increased (Line 30). I assume this is relative wealth, and the wealth of the top 5% has probably increased faster than the bottom 95%. According to the authors, due to high tuition fees and high interest loans there is a barrier for most students to attend a university, especially a famous one like Harvard.

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Therefore, the children that can easily afford such education have an “innate” advantage in business or politics” (Line 35). This all basically boils down to the same point again, money is the most important factor when one wants to become the president of the United States. If you have a lot of money, you will have many advantages and opportunities in your life. If your parents are rich, they probably are also more influential giving their offspring an even larger advantage. If they are more influential, for example in politics, then chances are their children will be too.

5.2.2 Language analysis.

Now that I have discussed the narrative that the authors want to convey in the “Money-Politics” frame I want to talk about what framing methods they use to convey the message. What words do the authors use, what methods such as rhetorical mechanisms do they use to make their points?

References. Looking at both articles there are an incredible amount of quotes and references to either opinions made by both laymen and experts or various data confirming the argument made by the author (e.g. Line 3, 6, 9, 13, 14, 18, 20, 22, 24, 27, 28, 31, 32). That is only in the first article. The authors often do not explicitly express their argument but let others express them for them. For example in line 3 where they quote 19th century senator Hanna saying that money is the most important thing in American politics. Or when Vijiano says that: “Unrestricted political contributions have abducted American politicians…” (line 9). Using a lot of data and quotes in this way makes them seem unbiased, after all the authors are only reporting on what American people have said. However, I think the arguments they present are quite one-sided. For example in the first article they quote Angela Abel who works for the NGO “Represent us” (line 27). She expresses that “… U.S. lawmakers are like commodities for sale” and that it is very difficult to change the status quo of money politics in the U.S.. However, the authors do not mention the NGO’s plans to solve these problems, plans that are stated on their website (“Represent Us” n.d.). Lastly, the way the authors quote is very different from what one might be used to when reading articles by the BBC or the Guardian. Unlike the latter two, the articles on Xinhua do not offer any links to the references that are made. When you read an article on the BBC website, if they reference research data, or another news outlet you can click on those words and be re-directed to the source (e.g. BBC-News 2016) The problem is exacerbated by the fact that all names of persons and institutions are translated into Chinese. For example, in article two line 11, the U.S. website Gōngkāi mìmì 公开秘密 is referenced, which translates to something like “public secret”. When searching for 公开秘密 on either

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Baidu or Google you will not find any results related to the actual source. Even after using the English translation on Google, combined with some extra search queries e.g. “Public Secret U.S. elections” Or “Public secret senator” you will not get the correct results. Only later I found out that the website they are referring to is called Open Secrets, Center for Responsive Politics (“Www.Opensecrets.Org” n.d.). The same problem occurs when quoting persons, their name will be translated into Chinese and it is sometimes almost impossible to get the correct English translation of their name, let alone their quote.

These two articles also have a lot of other interesting uses of language I will discuss, starting with repetition. Points made in both articles are often repeated two or three times. For example the authors mention “American politics cannot get rid of the power game” thrice (Line 2.20, 27, 38). This shows the author found that point especially important and this can help us find their main point or argument. The authors also use strawman arguments in article two. The strawman fallacy is “exaggerating, misrepresenting or just completely fabricating someone’s argument to make it easier to attack”. For example, in article 2 line 3 the authors state that American school teachers teach their children that “If you study hard, you can become a senator or even president…”. In line 19 they say that American politics flaunts itself as providing equal opportunities for everyone. After making that statement the authors attack it by saying that if it were true that there are equal opportunities for everyone, “then why has it become more like a privileged game for a small number of bigwigs?” Although the statements that the authors react to are plausible, it would be more believable if the authors would provide their sources for these statements, especially when criticizing the statements. Now it just seems as if the authors have made up this statement as a strawman to attack later. This type of argument is reinforced by the use of evidentialities (Schneider 2013b) in article two (e.g. Line 21, 24, 42). “As everyone knows, … , more important is their ability to raise money” or “This type of confidence undoubtedly had to do with Clinton’s resounding family name”. There is no way for the authors to know this, it is pure speculation.

5.2.3 Visual Analysis

Four images have been used in these articles in total, all of them are used in the first article. The pictures reinforce the narrative that is present in the text and can be divided into two groups, image 5 and 8 and image 6 and 7. Image 5 shows one hand handing 100 dollar bills to another hand, in the background we can see the capitol building, house of the U.S. congress. Image 8 shows Hillary Clinton against a background of 100 dollar bills. These two images reinforce the money narrative of this article, it shows that money plays an important role for presidential

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candidates, as well as that money is being handed to members of congress, implying outside influence. Image 6 and 7 show protesters holding signs that say: “Get $ out of politics”, “Sack the super PACs” and “We’ve been colonized by corporations”. These images show U.S. citizens protesting against the exact things that the authors discus in the article. Not only do the authors reference and quote a lot of American voters, they can show that citizens do not agree with the way things are run in the U.S.. It reinforces the authors’ narrative, enhances their criticisms and makes them look objective. After all, they are not the ones that make these allegations, U.S. citizens do it themselves.

5.3 Unvirtuous Leaders

The third frame I have identified I call the “Unvirtuous-Leaders” frame. Using this frame, the presidential candidates, the potential new leaders of the U.S., are portrayed as unfit leaders as judged by Chinese standards. I have many reasons for focusing on this frame. As I explained in the preliminary frontpage analysis, the Chinese government has a specific idea of what counts as a good leader. It is something the Chinese government dedicates a lot of attention to when looking at their own leaders. Image 2 shows the U.S. presidential candidates’ scandals as weaknesses. Furthermore, my quantitative analysis showed that in about 31% of articles, words from my keyword list (table 4) have been used five times or more. For this analysis I have chosen two articles with a high number of hits from my keyword list. The first article is called: “The United States presidential election “mutual vilification”: The digression and personal attacks of the third debate” (Zheng 2016) (Appendix original article 3), the second article is called “The FBI once again “shakes”, Hillary’s campaign assistants question about fairness” (J. Du 2016) (original article 4).

5.3.1 Narrative

The title of the first article (line 2) is already a brief summary of what happened during the 3rd presidential debate. There was mutual vilification, and the methods used during the debate were digression and personal attacks. It is a good title because this is basically all the authors talk about in this article. Even though in their first sentence (line 3) they mention that the candidates will talk about and elaborate on hot issues such as gun control, immigration, taxation, trade, ISIS and healthcare reforms (line 9), none of the presidential candidates’ elaborations are shared in this article. Instead in line 4 they immediately state that the candidates “as before are not able to escape the vicious circle of digressing and personal attacks”. Therefore, it is no wonder that some of the audience said that they do not want to pick either candidate (line 5). The conclusion so far is that the candidates cannot help themselves to attack each other, which implies that

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according to the authors these candidates cannot control themselves and are therefore unfit to be leaders. This opinion is strengthened by the authors’ use of the evidentiality “No wonder”: apparently the authors do not find it strange to not want to vote for these candidates.

The authors then start to report on the actual debate. They start with talking about the candidates’ clothing choices but quickly jump to all the accusations and attacks made by the presidential candidates since “As always, the two quickly went off topic, questioning the seriousness of the debate” (line 10). Many scandals are mentioned directly by the candidates themselves (Line 11, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26). Scandals such as behind closed doors speeches by Hillary, Trumps involvement with Russia being “Putin’s puppet”, the Clinton Foundation and Trumps tax evasion and sexual harassment of women. According to the authors all this vilifying did not take away any doubts the voters had about the presidential candidates (line 16). The last section of the article focusses on the debate as a failure to address issues which resulted in voters not wanting to vote for them. The authors quote various netizens saying, for example, that the host was the winner in this debate (line 33), or that when watching the candidates talk seriously about a topic something must be wrong, implying that the candidates are not serious most of the time (line 31). The authors conclusion is that many people think both candidates are unqualified (line 37), and people do not buy into what the candidates say (line 35), instead they protest (line 38, 39) and do not want to vote for either candidate. It is interesting that in the last line the authors tack on that people were holding posters saying that the U.S. political system is fundamentally flawed. It seems like an afterthought, it is not a conclusion but just another allegation against the U.S. political system.

The second article is about the release of old court documents related to a clemency case when Bill Clinton was in office. These court documents refer to the time when Bill Clinton as acting president at that time granted clemency to Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was an important fund raiser for the democrats (Smith 2018). At first glance this article seems not directly related to the U.S. elections. However, after mentioning Bill Clinton, the authors immediately mention Hillary Clinton and the FBI investigation into her mail server, as well as a retort by Hillary’s campaign assistant about Donald Trump and Russia. After this sidestep the authors correctly and objectively report what has happened surrounding the old court documents, for the most part. In line 10 and 11 however, the Chinese report starts to differ from other news reports about the same topic. According to the Xinhua authors the newly released documents show that the FBI suspects a donation has been made in exchange for clemency. Though it is true that the FBI suspects that, this was not a new insight gained from the newly released documents.

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According to Politico, the files were heavily redacted and offered no significant new insights (Gerstein 2016). Furthermore, the Xinhua authors mention that the presidential pardon did not follow the stipulated procedures. Though this is technically true, the Xinhua authors do leave out that the president does have the right to grant executive clemency, which Bill Clinton made use of (Gerstein 2016). Finally, the authors change the topic of the article to the topic of changing your vote. In some states in the U.S. you are allowed to change your vote, after the news hit about Clinton, Trump pleaded to voters to change their minds and vote for him instead. This change of topic seems strange since it does not seem related to the main topic of the Xinhua article, it is also not mentioned in any other articles that report on the Bill Clinton documents. It seems to be tacked on just to show another flawed part of U.S. politics. In this article the Xinhua authors connect the release of court documents related to Bill Clinton to Hillary Clinton and the 2016 elections. To me it seems as if the authors are grasping at straws trying to write an article relevant to the election, leaving out important information and tacking on not so relevant information.

5.3.2 Language analysis

The authors use many of the same methods as the previous 2 articles, most of their allegations or comments about an issue are not directly made by the authors, they simply report on what is said by either voters or the candidates themselves. Again, there is a lot of repetition. In article 2, the mail gate issue is mentioned three times (line 2, 19, 27) even though this is not the main topic of the article. What the authors report in both articles is factually correct. However, the interesting part is what they choose to report and what they choose to ignore. It often seems like they have cherry picked the exact comments that fit with their narrative of U.S. leaders as unfit. By doing this they seem to want to hide their true intentions of writing this article. For example, in article one, the authors sometimes mention that the audience laughed, and sometimes they do not. When one candidate makes an accusation, the authors mostly report the accusation (Line 12, 19, 20, 21, 24). When the accusation is denied by the other candidate, the authors add that the audience laughed (13, 14, 22). The authors indirectly report that the denial of the accusations made in earlier parts are laughable. Compared with other articles on the same issue by for example the BBC, I noticed that the Xinhua authors often left out any redeeming parts. While the BBC article mentions many of the same issues as the Xinhua article, the author of the BBC article also mentions that Hillary has a lot of experience, they do talk more about the responses of the candidates to the allegations made, which are not always ridiculous and laughable (Zurcher 2016).

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6. Conclusion

In this thesis I want to find out how the U.S. elections of 2016 are portrayed on the dedicated Xinhua website. I have designed the parameters of identifying frames and identified three different frames in the articles and reports published by Xinhua on their website. The Game frame, the Money-Politics frame and the Unvirtuous-leader frame. First the results of my quantitative analysis have shown how prevalent the three frames are throughout the articles published by Xinhua. I have compiled lists of keywords each associated with one frame to find out the degree of pervasiveness of these frames throughout all Xinhua publications on the website. Respectively the Game-frame the Money-Politics frame and the Unvirtuous-Leader frame could be identified in 35.6%, 22.6% and 31.3% of the 115 articles. The results show that the frames are not just one-off occurrences, but are systematically set up by the Xinhua authors. For my qualitative analysis I have done a detailed analysis of a selection of articles and images that I think best show off each frame, to get a better understanding of how each frame is set up. The Game-frame is set up by the Xinhua authors by using a lot of game or sports match related language and images such as the terms as “PK” or “the winner takes it all”. This frame can lead to increased cynicism and decreased trust in political institutions and politicians among audience members (Shehata 2013; Cappella and Jamieson 1997). Images used give the impression of emphasizing the gameness of U.S. politics by showing candidates facing off or wearing boxing gloves. The Money-Politics frame is a way for the Xinhua authors to critic how the U.S. elections game is run by focusing on the need for a lot of money and powerful allies to have a chance at winning the elections. The elections are not any game, but a money game for the powerful with an unequal playing field. This is reinforced by frequently quoting U.S. citizens criticizing money politics and showing images of politicians and political institutions with dollars bills in the background or foreground. The authors will quote people criticizing the current state of U.S. politics, but will not mention any solutions or redeeming factors offered by those same people or the sources of these quotes. The Unvirtuous-leader frame is used emphasize the candidates negative and positive traits relevant not to governance but to winning the election. Traits related to governance such as Hillary Clinton having served two terms in the senate are omitted, while traits such as being able to vilify one’s opponent during a debate, being born rich or being married to a former president are repeated.

Though the topics that the Xinhua authors choose do not seem to be out of the ordinary, the things they do write about those topics are selective and always seem to be more

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on the negative side then on the positive side. Because of the connection between Xinhua and the CPC I suspect there is an ulterior motive of publishing these news articles. Xinhua does not seem to provide balanced reports on the U.S. elections. Instead, by focusing on the flaws of the U.S. elections in light of the ideal values that China holds about its own political system, it seemingly makes the U.S. system look worse, while legitimating the Chinese system.

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7. Appendix

(image 1)

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(Image 4)

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(Image 6)

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34 (image 8) Tables: 贫富差距财富亿万富翁富人富有富豪贫富富商巨贾富裕亿万富豪富贵首富极富最富金钱金钱游戏权钱交易钱权烧钱有钱花钱钱钱主万亿美元数亿美元亿美元数百万美元万美元亿多美元多万美元数千万美元贵族最贵权贵家族寡头捐款贷款筹款资金献金筹得筹集共筹得花费姓氏巨额募捐利益集团金主超级政治行动委员会 Appendix table 1 Money-Politics frame

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邮件* FBI 丑闻普京

*偶* 俄* *班加西* 傀儡

*基金* 歧视 *侮辱* 女性

Appendix table 2 Unvirtuous-Leader frame

*戏* *赢* 问鼎竞选* 竞争

斗争 *之争口水战选战论战

激战战况决战角逐宝座

争取争夺

Views on the U.S. Election in China: How the Xinhua News Agency portrays the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election