Views to the East: the Image of China in German Weeklies

The perception of a country is not only manipulated by certain events themselves, but also by the media reporting about events. Indeed, reality is important, but it is mostly media that bring the facts to the audience. In this sense, undoubtedly, media play a crucial role in shaping the way how people perceive the facts. In doing so, influential events have always been instrumentalised by western media as critical junctures to create an image of China. This thesis aims to examine the articles on China, which were published in 2010 by four influential German weekly magazines, namely Der Spiegel, Focus, Die Zeit and Stern. The research question will reside in what image of China has been portrayed in the context of these four German weeklies. In doing so, the research will apply both the quantitative and the qualitative methods. Respectively, the paper will on the one hand side specifically focus on what kind of topics and concepts German media often deal with when reporting about China, and on the other hand side present in detail how China is depicted by conducting a thorough analysis of sample articles. By categorizing 1059 German articles in total, the empirical research conducted by this thesis has managed to show, that with regard to reports about China there is a clear preference of selection of topics in the examined four German weeklies. In articles that are really contributing to the discussion about China as well as in articles that make marginal reference to China in the context of other topics, the majority of the articles lays focus on the domains of inner politics, economy and international politics. However, in the mean time, research outcomes from the quantitative content analysis also illustrate the discovery that author’s criticism differentiates with regard to the topics that they touched upon when China was studied. Articles with an inclination to stay neutral, in which clear judgments by the author are hard to trace, reside widely in those less popular domains, notably culture, society and sport, etc. On the contrary, among the three most concerned fields, variations of being critical are also found. In the field of inner politics, surprisingly the absolute majority of the articles, regardless from which subgroup, consensually express the strongest criticism; while in the fields of international politics and economy, most of the articles stay neutral. Furthermore, three selected texts have been analyzed by using the Image Theory of Intergroup Perceptions and the Critical Discourse Analysis approach in order to raise the accuracy of the results. In conclusion, German weeklies present China as a barbarian in matters of inner politics on the one hand side, but on the other hand side they present a pluralist image of China in a combination of ally, enemy and imperialist in economy and international politics.