Communicating Eurozone Debt Crisis in China: The Role of and Challenges to Chinese Media Elites

This paper addresses the workshop’s ‘big question’: how do governmental actors and other domestic elites react to shock events in IR in order to secure or gain domestic support, particularly in the context of EU-China relations? Despite the growing relationship between the EU and China, the Eurozone debt crisis has had a negative impact on the perceptions of the EU by Chinese governmental actors and other domestic elites, including businessmen, intellectuals, civil activists and media workers. However, China still sees the EU as one pole in the multi-polar world order that it seeks. When the government intended to buy the national bonds of some European member states, a multiplicity of views were expressed in the Chinese media. One common theme of these responses was opposition to using the hard earned foreign reserve of the poor Chinese to bail out the rich Europeans. Although there are many studies investigating the political and economic relationship between the EU and China, little research has been conducted on the role of the media in this relationship, particularly given that Chinese media has been reformed along with the country’s economy. The paper investigates how Chinese media elites manage their newfound autonomy in representing China-EU relations. Based on the image theory and Entman’s ‘cascading activation’ model, the paper focuses on the role of, and the challenges to, the media elites of state-owned media organisations in communicating the crisis to Chinese public. It uses media content analysis, semi-structured interviews and questionnaire surveys with editors and journalists to explore how those Chinese media elites balance journalistic professionalism and national interest in reporting the Eurozone debt crisis in order to reduce to a minimum the negative impact of this crisis on Chinese public’s perceptions of the EU, and therefore securing domestic support of government’s closer ties with the EU.