How ASEAN and Western media covers China’s Belt and Road Initiative: a case study of representation of the Laos-China railway under international news flows framework

The research uses the coverage of the Laos-China railway as a case to compare how media in ASEAN versus Western countries represents China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Under the framework of international news flows, through investigating the agenda-setting, news source distribution and frames of 137 stories by 42 news outlets in seven ASEAN and seven Western countries, the study finds that the long-existing imbalances in volume, direction and content of information in international news flows have seen continuities and changes. On the one hand, the international news flows remain unidirectional from the center toward semi-peripheral and peripheral zones in the world system, rather than the other way around. On the other hand, the dominance of Western media in the flows as major news suppliers providing the master narratives of most international events has been disrupted due to the emergence of counter-narratives offered by alternative news providers such as China’s Xinhua and Asian News Network. Such continuities and changes in international communication flows exemplified by the media coverage of a China’s BRI project serve as both empirical evidence of a broader global power shift and a thermometer measuring the Global North’s and Global South’s reactions to such a shift.