A frame analysis of political-media discourse on the Belt and Road Initiative: evidence from China, Australia, India, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States

Abstract

A frame analysis of political-media discourse on the Belt and Road Initiative: evidence from China, Australia, India, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States Substantively, the study analyses Chinese official rhetoric and political-media content retrieved from India, the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Australia. 2 The overarching research question is formulated as: What frames, or combinations thereof, did Chinese officials and foreign political-media elites apply to communicate BRI? To address the question, the research leverages the analytical purchase of cultural framing, an apparatus of inquiry suited for uncovering the diversity of views and perspectives on a given issue (Van Gorp 2007).Empirically, it is based on a purpose-built dataset of 644 Chinese official texts aiming to externally promote the scheme, and 77 BRI-related official texts and 1,116 BRI-centric news articles gathered from the five foreign countries. Methodologically, it performs a two-step frame analysis: an inductive phase to identify and reconstruct frames, followed by a deductive phase to examine the frame use by different key actors.The rest of the article proceeds as follows. The first part gives an overview of the bourgeoning body of literature on BRI with a view to contextualizing this study. The second part presents framing in broad strokes before fleshing out the cultural framing approach applied here.The third part explains the selection of cases and the collection and analysis of data. The empirical parts describe the set of frames uncovered in the inductive phase and analyse the frame use by key actors. Finally, some implications of this research are discussed. Situating the researchAs a potentially game-changing initiative, BRI has attracted significant attention from policy pundits and scholars, resulting in a burgeoning body of literature. Extant studies on BRI generally fall in four related but distinct categories. The first and probably most dominant category considers BRI as a grand strategy, discussing China's geopolitical and geoeconomic motivations and potential implications for the international

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