Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Twittering China’s Image: The Case of Xinhua News Agency

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Mobile Storytelling in an Age of Smartphones

  • 356 Accesses

Abstract

In response to the popularity and importance of Twitter in people’s lives, news organizations in China have also adopted Twitter to enhance globally their efforts in national image communication. This study investigated how Xinhua News Agency has used its Twitter account (@XHNews) to enhance its global efforts for communicating the national image of China and analyzed its audience responses. It used Mozdeh to collect data and SentiStrength to do sentiment analysis. The findings show that @XHNews used specific generic frames to report news in order to construct a friendly and powerful identity of China through various hashtags and ego-retweeting to manage the impression of China image while most of its audience remained neutral in their responses.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 99.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Abisheva, A., Garimella, V. R. K., Garcia, D., & Weber, I. (2014, February). Who watches (and shares) what on YouTube? and when? using twitter to understand YouTube viewership. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (pp. 593–602).

    Google Scholar 

  • Bae, Y., & Lee, H. (2012). Sentiment analysis of twitter audiences: Measuring the positive or negative influence of popular twitterers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(12), 2521–2535.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Boiy, E., & Moens, M. F. (2009). A machine learning approach to sentiment analysis in multilingual Web texts. Information Retrieval, 12(5), 526–558.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Boyd, D., Golder, S., & Lotan, G. (2010). Tweet, tweet, retweet: Conversational aspects of retweeting on twitter. In 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, IEEE (pp. 1–10).

    Google Scholar 

  • Bruns, A. (2012). How long is a tweet? Mapping dynamic conversation networks on Twitter using Gawk and Gephi. Information, Communication and Society, 15(9), 1323–1351.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • De Vreese, C. H. (2005). News framing: Theory and typology. Information Design Journal and Document Design, 13(1), 51–62.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fan, Y. (2006). Branding the nation: What is being branded? Journal of Vacation Marketing, 12(1), 5–14.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gamson, W. A., & Modigliani, A. (1989). Media discourse and public opinion on nuclear power: A constructionist approach. American Journal of Sociology, 95(1), 1–37.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gamon, M., Aue, A., Corston-Oliver, S., & Ringger, E. (2005, September). Pulse: Mining customer opinions from free text. In International Symposium on Intelligent Data Analysis (pp. 121–132). Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Golder, S. A., & Huberman, B. A. (2006). Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems. Journal of Information Science, 32(2), 198–208.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Golbeck, J., Grimes, J. M., & Rogers, A. (2010). Twitter use by the US Congress. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(8), 1612–1621.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grant, W. J., Moon, B., & Busby-Grant, J. (2010). Digital dialogue? Australian politicians’ use of the social network tool Twitter. Australian Journal of Political Science, 45(4), 579–604.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gulati, G. J. (2004). Members of Congress and presentation of self on the World Wide Web. Harvard International Journal of Press/politics, 9(1), 22–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Halupka, M. (2014). Clicktivism: A systematic heuristic. Policy and Internet, 6(2), 115–132.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hua, X. (2000). Morality discourse in the marketplace: Narratives in the Chinese television news magazine Oriental Horizon. Journalism Studies, 1(4), 637–647.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jackson, N., & Lilleker, D. (2011). Microblogging, constituency service and impression management: UK MPs and the use of Twitter. The Journal of Legislative Studies, 17(1), 86–105.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lee, K. C., Kwon, O., Kim, C. R. et al. (2013). Factors affecting the intensity of emotional expressions in mobile communications. Online Information Review.

    Google Scholar 

  • Neiger, B. L., Thackeray, R., Burton, S. H., Thackeray, C. R., & Reese, J. H. (2013). Use of twitter among local health departments: An analysis of information sharing, engagement, and action. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 15(8), 177.

    Google Scholar 

  • Papacharissi, Z. (Ed.). (2010). A networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites. Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Paltoglou, G., & Thelwall, M. (2012). Twitter, MySpace, Digg: Unsupervised sentiment analysis in social media. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), 3(4), 1–19.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Semetko, H. A., & Valkenburg, P. M. (2000). Framing European politics: A text analysis of press and television news. Journal of Communication, 50(2), 93–109.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stewart, P. (1975). Or of the press. The Hastings Law Journal, 2(6), 634.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sobaci, M. Z., & Karkin, N. (2013). The use of Twitter by mayors in Turkey: Tweets for better public services? Government Information Quarterly, 30(4), 417–425.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stieglitz, S., & Dang-Xuan, L. (2013). Emotions and information diffusion in social media—Sentiment of microblogs and sharing behavior. Journal of Management Information Systems, 29(4), 217–248.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Supadhiloke, B. (2012). Framing the Sino–US–Thai relations in the post-global economic crisis. Public Relations Review, 38(5), 665–675.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Szondi, G. (2010). From image management to relationship building: A public relations approach to nation branding. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, 6(4), 333–343.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tang, H., Tan, S., & Chen, X. (2009). A survey on sentiment detection of reviews. Expert Systems with Applications, 36(7), 10760–10773.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thelwall, M., & Buckley, K. (2013). Topic-based sentiment analysis for the social web: The role of mood and issue-related words. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64(8), 1608–1617.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thelwall, M. (2017). The Heart and soul of the web? Sentiment strength detection in the social web with SentiStrength. In Cyberemotions (pp. 119–134). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43639-5_7

  • Vergeer, M., Hermans, L., & Sams, S. (2013). Online social networks and micro-blogging in political campaigning: The exploration of a new campaign tool and a new campaign style. Party Politics, 19(3), 477–501.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Valkenburg, P. M., Semetko, H. A., & De Vreese, C. H. (1999). The effects of news frames on readers’ thoughts and recall. Communication Research, 26(5), 550–569.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Waters, R. D., & Williams, J. M. (2011). Squawking, tweeting, cooing, and hooting: Analyzing the communication patterns of government agencies on Twitter. Journal of Public Affairs, 11(4), 353–363.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wang, H., Can, D., Kazemzadeh, A., Bar, F., & Narayanan, S. (2012). A system for real-time Twitter sentiment analysis of 2012 us presidential election cycle. In Proceedings of the ACL 2012 system demonstrations, Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 115–120).

    Google Scholar 

  • Wasike, B. S. (2013). Framing news in 140 characters: How social media editors frame the news and interact with audiences via Twitter. Global Media Journal: Canadian Edition, 6(1), 5–23.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilkinson, D., & Thelwall, M. (2011). Researching personal information on the public web: Methods and ethics. Social Science Computer Review, 29(4), 387–401.

    Google Scholar 

  • Xin, X. (2006). A developing market in news: Xinhua news agency and Chinese newspapers. Media, Culture and Society, 28(1), 45–66.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yang, J., Morris, M. R., & Teevan, J., Adamic, L. A., & Ackerman, M. S. (2011). Culture matters: A survey study of social Q and A behavior. In Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (pp. 409–416). Menlo Park.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zavattaro, S. M., French, P. E., & Mohanty, S. D. (2015). A sentiment analysis of US local government tweets: The connection between tone and citizen involvement. Government Information Quarterly, 32(3), 333–341.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zeitzoff, T. (2011). Using social media to measure conflict dynamics: An application to the 2008–2009 Gaza conflict. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 55(6), 938–969.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhou, Y., & Moy, P. (2007). Parsing framing processes: The interplay between online public opinion and media coverage. Journal of Communication, 57(1), 79–98.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Humanity Social Science, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Ningbo, China

    Zhiying Zhang

Authors
  1. Zhiying Zhang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhiying Zhang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Film and Animation, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

    Max Schleser

  2. University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Ningbo, China

    Xiaoge Xu

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Zhang, Z. (2021). Twittering China’s Image: The Case of Xinhua News Agency. In: Schleser, M., Xu, X. (eds) Mobile Storytelling in an Age of Smartphones. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87247-2_7

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation