A Comparative Study On The News Frames Of International Public Opinion On Confucius Institute

With China playing an increasingly important role on the international arena and the development of China's economy.the Chinese language has drawn more and more attention,and the demand for learning Chinese has been increasing rapidly.Committed to promoting the understanding of the Chinese language and culture to the world,Confucius Institutes have become platforms for promoting friendly relationships and cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries.Since the establishment of the first Confucius Institute in Seoul in 2004.Confucius Institutes have attracted prevalent interest from the international community.While the international public opinion environment is constantly changing,however,inadequate studies have been conducted to investigate international public opinions on Confucius Institute(CI).Based on that,this paper selected 215 reports from the US,Canada.UK,Australia and Pakistan related to Confucius Institutes in the academic database of LexisNexis,and analyzed the media attitude and CI's international public opinion environment.This paper applied framing theory and summarized the four most frequently appeared news frames adopted by the five countries and focused on the dominant news frame of each country.In terms of methodology,the author conducted a content analysis to explore the association between news frame and media attitude,and concentrated on the valence of comments.Overall,international public opinion has taken a neutral attitude,which has changed substantively compared with the past-from negative attitude domination during 2005 to 2010 to positive attitude domination from 2004 to 2013.Different countries vary in the reporting frame and reporting attitudes.The United States and United Kingdom are rather neutral;Canada shows a strong sense of negative attitude;Australia is neutral but partially negative while Pakistanis neutral but partially positive.The negative opinion of the international public opinion on Confucius Institute lies in its relationship with the Chinese government.There is the concern that the Confucius Institute would serve as the Chinese government's foreign propaganda tool and may cause damage to the local academic freedom where a CI is set up.On the other hand,positive comments mainly come from those international communities which welcome the Confucius Institute to promote Chinese and Chinese culture and look forward to the Confucius Institute to bring more economic benefits and strengthen business cooperation.In conclusion,it is impossible to completely eradicate negative attitude at present due to ideological difference and economic interest divergence.Therefore,the present study suggested that Confucius Institute should take a diversified development path,slow down its development speed in developed countries and seize the opportunity of One Belt and One Road Initiative in developing countries to concentrate on its own construction so as to be more sustainable and more attractive in the future.