A contemporary example of the ways in which news media can reproduce and reflect the meanings, ideologies and emotions that influence cultural representations and national discourses can be seen through the Australian and Chinese media’s coverage of the dynamic Australia-China bilateral relationship. The central motif that has become increasingly evident in Australia’s media framing of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) has been the dance between the entrenched reductive polarisation of China as a prosperous economic ‘opportunity’, and fearing China as a geopolitical and security ‘threat’ (Sun, 2021). This has been countered by the increasingly assertive, emotionally defiant, nationalistic tone of the state-sanctioned, Chinese mass media, which aims to reinforce China’s reputation, and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) legitimacy domestically. In analysing news coverage in The Australian and Global Times newspapers at the height of deteriorating Australia-China relations between 2020 and 2022, Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical framework, dialogism, and the methodologies of Reflexive Thematic Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis will be used to examine the specificities, and transformation of the national discourses inherent in the media coverage on Australia-China relations. Through the expressivity, contextuality, and relationality in the national discourses inherent in China and Australia’s media, this study will explore the depth of complexities in how, and why, Chinese and Australian newspaper media outlets each negotiate their multiple and often conflicting dialogical voices, linked to and shaped by voices of power, culture, values, tradition, and nationality, which is sustained by the dichotomy of liberalism and authoritarianism.

Authors:
Jordan Hogan, Edith Cowan University, Australia

About the Presenter(s)
Mr Jordan Hogan is a University Doctoral Student at Edith Cowan University in Australia

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