| In recent years,the rise of China has attracted widely attention from all over the world.With the strengthening of China’s economic and political power and the continuous improvement of its comprehensive national strength,the image of China in the eyes of different foreign media also presents a trend of diversified changes.At present,the research perspectives on "China’s national image" can be divided into two types;one is the "The other shaping",which is the image of China shaped and disseminated by foreign media.The other is "Self-shaping",which refers to the national image that China creates and spreads by itself.There have been abundant research resulting on "Self-shaping" and "The other shaping" by western countries,but there is still little understanding of China’s national image shaped by Asian countries,especially its important neighbors,such as Thailand,is still relatively unknown to the public.Unlike the ideological confrontation between the West and China,which has been caused by differences in political ideas for a longtime,China and Thailand enjoy long-standing friendly relations,both official and private,so will the Thai media’s portrayal of China’s national image be different from that of the Western media? Taking advantage of the native Thai speaker,the author selected three mainstream Thai media,namely Thairath,Daily News and Khaosod as the subject of the study,where the contents are published after "Belt and Road" initiative(2013-2019);and use the content analysis to map out how the Thai mainstream media can shape China’s national image through news selection and news construction framework.Finally,through the questionnaire,it found out how well the local audience in Thailand agrees with the image of China’s country created by the mainstream media.In general,this paper adopts questionnaire as a research method,through comparative analysis of the three mainstream Thai newspapers’ coverage of China,the Thai media’s portrayal of China’s national image and the local Thai people’s portrayal of China’s national image made by the Thai mainstream media.This paper found that Thai Rath reported mostly on the positive political theme of "ChinaThailand Belt and Road Cooperation".Daily News reported the most positive news on Chinaforeign relations and good diplomatic relations with other countries.Khaosod reported most of the general news that focuses on social topics.Most of the positive reports in the three newspapers were positive,with Thai Rath accounting for 64%,25% neutral and 11% negative,the Daily News with 52%,32% negative and neutral 16%,and Khaosod 46%,neutral 30% and24%.According to the contents of the above three popular Thai newspapers,from the perspective of report tendency,it found that the image of China is close to that made by Thai media.In terms of the number of reports,the Daily News has the highest number of reports.Thai Rath has the second highest number of reports.Khaosod is the lowest number of reports.The three popular Thai newspapers have reported heavily on political topics.The Thai Rath reported more positively on China’s image,while the Daily News and Khaosod were neutral. |
