China's newsmakers: official media coverage and political shifts in the Xi Jinping era

Xi Jinping’s rise to power in late 2012 has brought political change to China, but the precise nature of shifts remains unclear. In this paper, we evaluate whether the perceived changes associated with Xi Jinping’s rise—increased personalization of power, centralization of authority, party dominance, anti-Western sentiment—are re- flected in provincial-level official media. As past research makes clear, media in China have strong signaling functions, and media coverage patterns reveal which actors are up and down in politics. Using innovations in automated text analysis on several million newspaper articles, we identify and tabulate in a comprehensive fashion the individuals and organizations appearing in official media to answer unresolved questions about political shifts in the Xi Jinping era. We find substantively mixed and regionally varied trends in media coverage of political actors that qualify our picture of China’s “new normal.” Provincial media coverage reflects modest increases in the personalization and centralization of political authority, but we find a drop in the media profile of party organizations, and see uneven declines in the media presence of foreign actors. More generally, we highlight marked variation across provinces in coverage trends