How US and Chinese Media Cover the US–China Trade Conflict: A Case Study of War and Peace Journalism Practice and the Foreign Policy Equilibrium Hypothesis

This article examines the news coverage of a nonmilitary conflict: The US–China trade conflict by major news media outlets in the USA and China using the war and peace journalism framework. Role in the conflict as initiator/responder, medium difference, the press role in each press system, and partisanship of news media were hypothesized to affect the war and peace journalism practice. Moreover, the trade conflict was divided into three stages to test the applicability of the “foreign policy market equilibrium hypothesis” by analyzing the changes in the uses of sources and presence of competing frames over time. US news media were found to employ more war journalism and less peace journalism than their Chinese counterpart. They also had much lower coverage of the conflict than their Chinese counterpart. Newspapers were more likely to use war journalism than television. US partisan liberal media selectively supported and opposed the US government trade policy.