Hostile enemies: Measuring China’s de-legitimizing propaganda towards foreign journalists

There is a substantial literature on how authoritarian states employ pro-regime propaganda to legitimate their power. However, less is known about how regimes use de-legitimizing propaganda to neutralize perceived threats and protect its authoritarian public sphere. Using the case of China, I show how the party-state employs de-legitimizing propaganda to discredit resident foreign journalists and the values they represent. These critical messengers, who view the role of the press as a watchdog, have been singled out for criticism in official speeches by current Chinese leader Xi Jinping. To quantify this de-legitimizing propaganda, I apply a semi-supervised scaling method to over 20,000 Chinese state media articles from 2003 to 2022 that mention foreign media. I do this by creating bespoke ‘seed words’ framing the institution of journalism as friendly and as hostile. I find that hostility towards the institution of journalism increased after potentially destabilizing events, and that Chinese state media’s hostile language tends to be targeted at specific media outlets in the US and UK.