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• 1 2018-11-26T19:25:35-08:00 Comparison between Chinese and Western Media 8 Midterm Media Project plain 2018-11-29T22:52:34-08:00

  I believe that social media and news platforms can give people a sense of national consciousness. Media and politics work in sync, and the media often shapes how people think and behave. According to Kantar.com, a website for the world’s leading research, data and insights brands, 62% of U.S. adults use Facebook, Twitter or both and 56% of Chinese adults use Weibo, Wechat or both in 2016. This number has been increasing over the years. I personally consume news from all of the social media and news platforms previously mentioned, which allows me to readily compare and contrast the news in the two countries.

   For my media presentation, I chose to do a photo collage on the recent news about the JD.com CEO, QiangDong Liu (Richard Liu). Last month, Chinese billionaire Richard Liu was arrested in Minneapolis on suspicion of sexual misconduct.  Liu is the founder and CEO of one of China’s biggest e-commerce site, JD.com, and one of the richest men in China. I took screenshots of news from both Chinese and U.S. media sites and organized them together. I chose cyan to represent the news from Chinese media and magenta to represent the news from U.S. media. Personally, I felt overwhelmed with all the news stories coming at me and I still do not know who to believe since this case is still under investigation. In order to demonstrate this feeling of confusion and uncertainty,  I layered images on tops of each other to make it difficult to read. However, I highlighted Richard Liu’s mugshot and news titles from Business Insiders and The New York Times over the other images to bring contrast and clarity to my design.

  For the cyan part of the collage, I have a long strip of pictures from Wechat because I first heard the news while I was browsing my Wechat the day after the event. The account Daily News for Abroad Students in North America  (北美留学生日报) posted a blog about this breaking news. I kept up with the event mainly through blog posts on Wechat. I included Richard Liu’s mugshot and a screenshot of Phoenix New Media’s (凤凰网) Weibo post on my collage. While browsing on Wechat about this situation, I immediately realized that blogs got their sources from American news platforms. I wanted to see what the Chinese media had to say about this event, so I looked it up on Baidu and Weibo. However, I found nothing except one Weibo post from Phoenix New Media about Richard Liu being arrested in the U.S. on suspicion of sexual misconduct, along with his mug shot. Lastly, I have a screenshot of an announcement that the news I was trying to access was being blocked because it violates Wechat policy. I think this is important for me to include as part of my project because last weekend (10/1/18), I looked up the old blog posts on Wechat about the arrest and found that the posts were either deleted or “unable to view” because they violated Wechat policy. As many Chinese residents know, big news like this will either be blocked by censorship or kept quiet through payouts by JD.com to the news outlets. Situations like these are normal for me.

  For the magenta part of the collage, I have multiple screenshots of Google news results on Liu’s arrest in stark comparison to the lack of coverage from Chinese media. After being disappointed in the lack of results from Chinese news outlets, I tried searching “JD.com CEO” on Google instead. There were at least 7 different news websites reporting on the event the day after it happened, and I was surprised that this event got so much immediate attention in the U.S. I also included a post from The New York Times on China’s Internet Obsesses Over Arrest of JD.com Founder Richard Liu because it nicely laid out my opinion on this situation and how I see Chinese media on this issue.

  While working on the project, I realized that Chinese and American media have different ways of reporting the news, and that media can help to raise someone’s national consciousness. This was breaking news in China, and Chinese residents are still obsessed with this topic. Because this event happens in US, US news outlets have better access to the event, and Chinese blogs mainly got their sources from those news outlets in US. Chinese government still tries to keep this incident away from public's attention (Even JD.com posted a statement about this incident in their English website instead of their Chinese website). I found many blogs and discussion posts on Baidu TieBa (贴吧) and Weibo posts, but very few of the major news outlet in China officially reported this event.  Since there is not final conclusion to this event, I think it is typically for Chinese to seek those posts more than the official news in China because they want to know more about the incident and there are nothing to find through official news website in China.I read some of the blog posts and comments about Liu’s arrest. Some Chinese believe that Richard Liu is guilty and some compare him with Alibaba CEO, Jack Ma Yun. I was also not surprised to hear that some believe that America set a trap for Richard because of the ongoing trade war between China and the United States. People like my dad, who live in China and heard about this event in China, think that U.S is setting a trap for Liu in order to control China.

  On the other hand, U.S. news outlets reported this event and continue to follow its current progress. Many news outlets mentioned how JD.com’s stock is being strongly affected by this event. I did not get many comments from Americans about this event. Although I know Liu is a high profile Chinese businessman, I am still surprised at the amount of news reported on this incident because there was a lot of things going on in U.S politics during that time. After reading many of the news reports, I did feel like the U.S media was trying to make China looks bad in some ways.