Media policy analysis and diplomatic interactions during COVID-19 between China and the United States in a comparative perspective

Abstract

This is a comparative study of official diplomatic speeches regarding COVID-19, released by spokespersons for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and documents from the United States Department of State China Archive. It explores how these speeches and documents reflect the US–China relations and the conduct of policies surrounding digital media in the two countries. We focus on the period from the start of the Wuhan lockdown, 20 January 2020, to the city’s reopening on 8 April, and use several forms of content analysis to analyse the documents: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling, sentiment network analysis and word clouds. We argue that the diplomatic relationship and political ideologies adopted by different political and media systems can have a major impact upon media policy implementation and guidance.