Mitigating or mediatising extranational conflicts?

In 2024, India and China engaged in a series of conflict-resolution measures and dialogues, garnering prime news space. With the historical-ongoing conflict over the border and contest over economics between India and China considerably determining the political dynamics of at the least Asia, it becomes imperative to analyse how the news media framed the latest bilateral events between these powerful Asian giants and identify whether the news discourse represented peace and conflict resolution from a positive-pacifist standpoint or was (hyper) critical about unresolved or emerging contentious issues — displaying a lack of trust, exposing deceptive duplicity and expressing fears or concerns. To analyse the popular online news discourse on India-China ties and bilateral developments during August-November 2024, a corpus of news text was created from 200 online news articles and examined using a mixed-method research approach. A qualitative thematic analysis identified four primary editorial themes (i.e., political offensive, economic sanction, diplomatic dialogue, and economic affirmation) that represent the open (news) codes, and four compound secondary news codes (i.e., conflict, political pressure, economic manoeuvre, and cooperation) that point to two overarching news discourses: amiable and adversarial. Based on this analysis and the identification of the themes, a quantitative analysis of the actual sample was performed for frequency and relationship tests. Furthermore, the study examined the news types and sources quoted in them to associate them with the identified discursive themes.