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A new China: Media portrayal of Chinese mega-cities

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Abstract

During the last two decades, China has started to leave its closed-door policies in the international arena behind, and has shown signs of participating in the global economy. Politically and economically, China has been developing further relations with the rest of the world. The country points to its mega-cities in its official 5-year plans to facilitate and execute the outreach attempts. In this article, we analyze the media representations of two of these mega-cities – Beijing and Shenzhen – with the objective of understanding how their brand images are portrayed and whether these portrayals are in line with the Chinese objectives. We focus on the media representations by arguing that international print media is a crucial platform that has the potential to influence the brand reception of audiences. Consequently, we analyze the volume and subject of Beijing and Shenzhen in English language Chinese and international print media outlets. We evaluate the coverage through a place branding framework. The findings of this research suggest the low-level and narrow coverage of the print media hinders the potential of these cities to become world-renowned centers and help facilitate Chinese interaction with the rest of the world.

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Notes

  1. Mega-city is a commonly used term to describe metropolitan areas with a population of 10 million people or higher.

  2. Xinhua is a news agency with its own outlets. For the purposes of this research, it is treated as a media outlet together with the other seven newspapers included in the dataset.

  3. The generator can be found in this website: http://www.lrs.org/interactive/randomdate.php, last accessed 1 September 2013.

  4. The intercoder reliability was calculated using ReCal2 develop by Deen Freelon (2013). The software can be found on this link: http://dfreelon.org/utils/recalfront/, last accessed September 2013.

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  1. Department of Public Relations and Information, Kadir Has Caddesi, 34084, Cibali / Istanbul, Turkey

    Efe Sevin

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  1. Efe Sevin
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  2. Emma Björner
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Correspondence to Efe Sevin.

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Sevin, E., Björner, E. A new China: Media portrayal of Chinese mega-cities. Place Brand Public Dipl 11, 309–323 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/pb.2015.9

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