CHAPTER 5. DISCUSSION & INTERPRETATION
5.2 CHARACTERISTICS OF BRI REPORTS IN EACH COUNTRY
5.2.4 BRI Media Content in Asean
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infrastructure projects. Singapore is in competition with Hong Kong, which is also an international hub offering law, financial services. However, Singapore’s knowledge of and connections in Southeast Asia is a gateway for Chinese investors.
5.2.4 BRI media content in ASEAN
Political and economic factors influencing the reporting of BRI exist at a regional level. Although this study only looks at Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, three of ten ASEAN members, each of them have been the Chair of ASEAN in 2015, 2017 and 2018 (ASEAN, 2018). There are two ASEAN summits every year, and issues of BRI and the SCS has been discussed during the summit, which have been covered by most southeastern Asian press. Based on the news reports collected in this study, ASEAN members do not seem to have a unified attitude towards BRI. The win-win scenario become unreal when examples such as Sri Lanka and Pakistan conceding its sovereignty to China due to unrepayable debt are reported. While the Philippines seek Chinese investments, countries such as Myanmar has canceled, Malaysia has suspended and reviewed some Chinese project for the fear of high debts from China. Furthermore, ASEAN members are divided in territorial disputes. Vietnam, along with other claimant states such as Malaysia, Brunei, want to mention China’s expansion in the statement during the summit. On the other hand, the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, who have been receiving Chinese investments, try to avoid conflicts with China by not bringing up the issue (Heydarian, 2017, May 4). The similar argument for political threat and economic frames is the threat from China as a regional hegemony. Although China has claimed to rise peacefully since 2003 under Hu Jintao, not all southeastern Asian media buy it.
If China cannot ensure the integrity of neighboring countries’ sovereignty, political concern frames will continuously feature in media.
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CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSION
On January 26, 2019, Malaysian official made a statement that ECRL will be canceled due to huge cost (Reuters, 2019, Jan 26). This suggests that the success of BRI does not solely depend on one promoter, but based on reasonable, transparent cooperation and the premise of benefits to the local. China has been trying to understand how other countries see BRI and why there are oppositions and setbacks in some BRI countries. This study has shown that time, topics, news origins, sources all can affect the distribution of frames, and explained the reasons behind the variance of BRI reports.
Different media ownership background also show various preference in reporting on BRI. The opposition parties, scholars and media in these three countries also serve as main contributors for concern and threat frames. This suggests that two-party or multi-party systems, freedom of press and academic freedom are crucial for different voices.
Malaysian and Philippine political figures from opposition party monitor how ruling party deal with Chinese investments. Although Singapore does not have strong opposition parties, its media and scholars help identify the problems of BRI and let its government understand. How other countries perceive and report BRI will also depend on the above factors.
The contribution of this study is conducting a thorough study of around 1,200 BRI-related articles from Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, and presenting BRI frame analysis in a multi-perspective way. In addition, this study covers from September 2013 to August 2018, which is one of the most complete BRI media studies. Former BRI study often linked media to a specific frame to show their attitude based on local reports, and depict frames in a static position. In addition, how frames compete with each other and what factors affect their composition lack explanation. The finding of this study shows the content of frames is dynamic and keeps developing when new related events
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appear. This study not only study local BRI reports, but also reports with foreign, Chinese and other origins to understand how local press receive and distribute BRI information.
The biggest difficulty of this research is to find more related and meaningful BRI articles among a sea of news and commentaries. Human analysis is irreplaceable because computers cannot tell you what kind of frames an article features. Computer might tell you the most frequent words or most related terms around the keywords, but it still needs human analysis to present the context of news. The function of data mining in journalism can work on this are to further help scholars identify frames in a time of information explosion. The Philippines has around 130 BRI news after system sampling, which is relatively lower than the other two countries with around 400 each. The result of RQ8 is less valid because the samples are too few. Therefore, it is suggested that to find the competition of frames, the news for each country should be more than the samples collected for the Philippines for this study.
Other limits of this study include that this study only examines three countries of ASEAN. Indonesia and Vietnam are not included because of language barrier and that previous studies have already been conducted. There is not sufficient time for analyzing every BRI articles for Malaysia and Singapore. Each has around 1,300 pieces of related articles. Due to the insufficient of time and human power, this study uses system and purposive sampling to select the widest possible and most related BRI content.
Although mainly based on human analysis, Excel and SPSS are necessary for the statics section. In addition, AntConc, a data mining program, is helpful for locating keywords and further help building up frames.
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