Reporting Sino-Russian Relations

The aim of this thesis is to examine how Russian and Chinese media report the state leader's official visits,with a purpose to find out the change of Sino-Russian relations and Russian foreign policy from 2012 to 2019.Kommersant and the People's Daily as two major newspapers in Russia and China have been selected for content analysis.Total number of 241 articles connected with 18 state visits of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have been analyzed.All articles were divided into paragraphs,which were then analyzed as separate units of content.Topics,tones,main actors and other important features were identified.Trends in two newspapers' media coverage of state visits were highlighted and compared.The assumption that the changing of Russian foreign policy and the increasing role of Asian policy(Chinese in particular),would increase mutual media coverage turned out to be incorrect.Major topics of two newspapers came out to be drastically different,and changes in Russian foreign policy have not influenced Chinese news coverage much.The news in both newspapers is mostly neutral.The People's Daily only has neutral news(83%)and positive news(17%),there is no negative news at all.In contrast with this,Kommersant has neutral news(93%),positive news(4%),and also negative news(3%).Furthermore,an attempt to explain the differences was made.