Framing Climate Change Negotiations in Chinese News Media

Climate change is a pressing ‘wicked problem’ of our time. Given today’s controversies surrounding climate change, communication is part of problems as well as solutions. As a leading emerging economy and the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, China has been exerting growing influence on the area of global climate governance. Understanding how climate change is portrayed by Chinese media and how actors participate in the media construction of the issue is helpful to learn China’s climate actions.

As such, this dissertation investigates Chinese media representation of climate change negotiations with news content and news production as two focuses. On the part of news content, the first empirical study took the 2015 UN climate change conference in Paris (COP21) as a case in point and analyzed the Chinese media coverage in comparison with the UK and US coverage. The study inductively developed an array of frames that can serve as the basis of cross-cultural evaluations of climate arguments. It also revealed contrasting characteristics of the three countries’ news coverage. The second study then examined the evolution of China’s top Party paper, People’s Daily’s coverage of climate change, from the first global climate conference in 1995 onwards. This special nature of the newspaper allows this study to reflect on the national development policies and their influences on the media climate discourses in China.

On the part of news production, two empirical studies address the role of journalists and stakeholders in the media representation. Study 3 examined the Weibo and Weibo posts of Chinese journalists and Twitter posts by UK and US journalists. Like the comparison of COP21 coverage, significant differences of Chinese and Western journalists in using social media will also be discussed. Study 4 brought to light an important, yet highly under-explored stakeholder, NGOs. This four-year-long (COP21—25) study of the interaction of NGO professionals and climate journalists in China demonstrated in detail how NGOs take advantage of their climate expertise and interpersonal relationships with journalists in order to get involved in the news making process.

This doctoral dissertation is one of the first full PhD projects that has systematically examined China’s climate journalism and communication, and thus it fills an important gap in the present climate communication research that has yet to examine the climate communication in developing countries sufficiently.