EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Media Studies 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 214 Lupano Emma (University of Milan) From Policy to the Press: China’s Media Discourse on Terrorism after the 2015 Paris Attacks Key words: public policy, media, terrorism, commentaries, editorials The series of terrorist attacks that hit Paris in November 2015 have shocked many countries in the world, including China. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Chinese media have expressed clear opposition to radicalism and violence, in line with the Chinese Communist Party discourse on national terrorism and its support to the idea of a global war against terrorism. The controversial Anti-Terrorism Law, released in December 2015 to seal a dramatic year on the international stage, is among the most recent public policy document that outlines China’s principles and strategy to fight terrorism in the country. Earlier in September, the White Paper on Ethnic Equality, Unity and Development, which describes the govern- ment’s goals and strategies for Xinjiang, illustrated the measures aimed at maintaining social stability and curbing terrorism in the autonomous region, where the local Uygur minority, of Muslim religion, has in the past been accused of unrest and terrorism. Moving from a corpus of articles published in the Chinese online edition of the party-run Global Times (Huanqiu Shibao 环球时报 ) and the commercial Beijing News (Xin Jing Bao 新京报 ), this paper aims to find conformity (or lack thereof) between Chi- nese public policy discourse on terrorism and Chinese media discourse in relation to the Paris attacks. The selection of the corpus (over a period of four weeks following the attacks) has focused on two sub- genres within the genre of the commentary (pinglun 评论 ): the commentary on current affairs (shiping 时评 ) and the editorial (shelun 社论 ). The paper will examine the corpus based on the hypothesis that, as articles defined by the communicative goal of expressing opinions, commentaries could be expected to partially differ from official discourses. Yet this hypothesis has to be verified when dealing with a sensitive topic such as terrorism, in a media system that is still required to embrace the Party line despite the significant reforms of the last decade. Moskaleva Natalia (Saint Petersburg State University) Tibetan Newspaper The Tibet Mirror as a Tool for Propaganda? Key words: early Tibetan media, The Tibet Mirror, anti-communist discourse, propaganda, media leverage In the beginning of the 20th century Tibetan newspapers were still practically non-existent, The Tibet Mirror (also known in Tibetan as Yul phyogs so so’i gsar ‘gyur me long or 西藏明镜 in Chinese) was among the first examples of emerging Tibetan media and, as a matter of fact, the first one that was published by a Tibetan editor. Dorje Tharchin, a Tibetan by birth, but an Indian by citizenship, started issuing his newspaper in Kalimpong, India in 1925. Since then and up to 1963 The Tibet Mirror served as a major media source for Tibetans that ‘mirrored’ on its pages some of the most controversial moments in the modern history of the Tibetan population as well as various milestone events in history of the whole People’s Republic of China and the rest of the world. In the 1950s, especially after the official establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the editor of the newspaper, known as an anti-communist activist, was using his newspaper as a chief venue for campaigning against the Chinese communists and their successful advancement in Tibet. The recurrent anti-communist topics in The Tibet Mirror could be grouped within Tharchin’s anti-communist discourse and present three major types of materials: articles in Tibetan, articles in Chinese and politi- cal cartoons. Current paper aims to explore The Tibet Mirror from the perspective of its propaganda dissemination, paying specific attention to materials published by the editor in English. Since The Tibet Mirror was a Tibetan newspaper designed for Tibetan readers, it seems particularly interesting to study the materials that Tharchin published in English in his newspaper. What was his target group for those publications? Why would he publish materials in English instead of Tibetan? Who read those publications? The research is going to be conducted based on the content analysis of a selected number of The Tibet Mirror issues dated from 1949 to 1963.