Currency Wars with China and Japan in Western Newsmagazines

This book explores China’s currency wars with its trading partners in four Western newsmagazines: Time, The Economist, L’Express, and Der Spiegel.

Based on both quantitative and qualitative approaches, the interdisciplinary approach adopted in the research draws on two analytical frameworks from the realm of critical discourse analysis; van Leeuwen’s socio-semantic inventory of social-actor representation, and van Dijk’s concepts of macro-rules as the overarching approaches to understand the changing dynamics of international relations and the global economy through Western media.

The sample in this study consists of 160 texts, half of which are focused on China and the other half on Japan, across a period of 12 months in 2010 (China) and in 1987 (Japan).

Through the comparison of Western representation betwen China and Japan, the similarities and differences in their coverage have been revealed as even more striking, with regards to global politics and the international economy.