National images, media representations and geopolitical reconfiguration: China’s image in Nouvelles d’Europe

China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is known as the “New silk road”, has attracted attention on a global scale since it was announced in 2013. Although China declares that this initiative is designed to enhance economic and cultural understanding between nations, the western world powers such as the U.S. are wary of an increasingly assertive superpower’s push to spread its influence. In this context, China’s images portrayed by western media has often become one-sided and even distorted, whereas the portray of Chinese stated media in its coverage is too propagandistic to be accepted by western audience.
In this regard, this paper places a focus on another media group, that is, overseas Chinese media. This takes Nouvelles d’Europe as a case and intends to explore how it portrays China in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative. The content analysis employed in this study complies mostly with the typical standards of content analysis but is distinct in a two-step cluster analysis. The advantage of this method rests on exploring the textual associations implied in media frames in a computational way. After analyzing 587 news articles (2013–2017), this paper found out that its overall positive narratives overshadow many problematic images. This paper also found out that there exists resonance between media frames and geopolitical relations.