This study investigates how party and nonparty newspapers in China frame sensitive political issues differently, depending on their geographic relevance. Extant studies indicate that political control influences how news organizations present an issue. The assumption is that the framing of nationally sensitive issues is similar across Chinese news outlets, while the framing of locally sensitive issues diverges. An examination of the news frames used by six newspapers in Guangzhou in their coverage of a nationally sensitive issue and a locally sensitive issue confirms this assumption. In the coverage of the nationally sensitive issue, all newspapers use more leadership frames and factual information than responsibility, conflict and human interest frames. Contrastingly, the party newspapers use more leadership frames, whereas nonparty newspapers use more conflict frames in the reporting of the locally sensitive issue.

In recent years there has been a proliferation of scholarship on protests and other forms of collective action in China. Important insights have been gained into how conflicts between social groups and local governments begin, which strategies and instruments protesters apply, and under which circumstances protests are likely to succeed or fail. However, comparatively little is known about the mobilizing structures and how such collective action can be sustained over a long period of time, in some instances over several years. Such perseverance would be remarkable even in a democracy, but it is more so in an authoritarian system where the risks of participating in collective action are higher and the chances to succeed much smaller. This article compares the development of public protests in two research locations and identifies four factors instrumental to overcoming the formidable challenges of sustaining collective action in China: the continuing existence of substantial grievances; the re-activation of strong social ties; the presence of unifying frames; and an adaptive protest leadership. The comparison shows that the last factor is particularly crucial: while the two villages were similar in all other respects, leadership in village B was far more adaptive than in village A, which goes a long way towards explaining why collective action could be sustained twice as long in village B.

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Abstract

This research explores the variations between Chinese party and non-party newspapers in the framing of trans-edited international news. Existing studies on the framing of Chinese domestic news show that the variations depend on the sensitivity of news, which invokes government control. However, it is not clear how strictly the government would control international news and whether party and non-party news organizations would show similarities or variations in the framing of it. To address these issues, we conducted a comparative quantitative content analysis of 806 pieces of trans-edited international news from one party newspaper and one non-party newspaper. The findings show that the party and non-party newspapers show similarity on the use of three frames but small variations on the other four. This implies a strong control of the Chinese government on the reporting of international news. By comparison, the government control has stronger effects on the party newspaper than on its non-party counterpart.