Friends and enemies: external threats and the delegitimization of foreign media in China

There is substantial scholarship examining how states use negative propaganda and threat framing of outgroups to various ends, including popular mobilisation, diversion and scapegoating, and to delegitimize threats. Yet we know less about how authoritarian regimes negatively frame international media – a group with powerful agenda-setting capabilities – as threats. Using the case of China, this paper asks, what types of external threat events induce Chinese state media to portray foreign outlets more negatively, and do media-related threat events elicit stronger responses than other pressures? To address these questions, I apply a semi-supervised text scaling method to over 17,000 Chinese state media articles from 2014 to 2023. The analysis shows that hostile framing of foreign media sharply increased from 2019 to 2022, and that media-related threat events, such as the UK regulator’s revocation of CGTN’s license in 2021, were particularly associated with surges in anti-foreign-media propaganda.