Framing NATO in China during the 2022 war in Ukraine

This research elucidates the power dynamics of framing at the nexus of state, news media and netizens during international conflicts in China. The authors explore how three actors or stakeholders – namely, foreign policy apparatuses, the news media, and netizens – frame NATO in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Employing Entman’s cascading activation framing model, they discover that the dominant frames adopted by the government, the news media and the public vary significantly between these actors. Specifically, the government predominantly uses a morality frame, whereas both the news media and netizens mainly employ a conflict frame. Additionally, our findings suggest that a new ‘peace’ frame has emerged in Chinese international conflict discourse. This study sheds new light on the applicability and expediency of the activation framing theory, particularly in addressing the specificities of framing through the non-Western lens in the social media age.