Through the Lens of History: Methods for Analyzing Temporal Variation in Content and Framing of State-run C hinese Newspapers (2025)

Abstract: State-run Chinese newspapers are believed to strategically select and frame news articles to align with the shifting political tides of the country. This paper describes methods to quantify these changes in content and framing over time. Looking at more than 50 years of articles from the People’s Daily and Reference News, we analyze differences in name mentions and sentiment in news articles for politicians before and after their deaths, as well as during and not during certain political events. We find significant estimates of difference, reflecting the changes in various aspects of the political environment in China during different time periods. We also apply change point detection methods to identify turning points in time series data of name mentions and sentiment. The identified turning points show a high co-occurrence with crucial political events and deaths of politicians. Furthermore, we utilize topic modeling to analyze the framing choices for articles written in different decades. The changes in frequent topic words are more significant in People’s Daily than in Reference News, which is consistent with the focus shifts of the Chinese central government in history. Finally, by using pre-trained language models to predict masked names in news articles, we analyze the distinctiveness of the language used to report individuals.

## introduction throughout the history of the people's republic of china, the rhetoric of state-run newspapers has reflected the ideologies and power dynamics of party and government leaders. who appears on the front pages of the newspapers and how political figures are described and framed with regard to particular political events reflect shifts in the agenda of influential leaders @xcite . furthermore, it is widely believed that the chinese government has utilized various methods to control the spread of information and influence public opinion in order to stabilize society @xcite . among these strategic controls, the existence of radical changes in reporting on politicians due to the occurrence of certain political events is an interesting phenomenon worthy of close examination. when and how such changes occur provide a unique perspective for studying the interaction of government action and societal changes in modern china. in chinese state-run newspapers, the language used to report political figures is often carefully chosen to show where the politicians stand in various power struggles. figure 1 shows two excerpts from articles in the people's daily that mention peng dehuai, a well-known and controversial political and military figure of the prc, published in two different time periods. the first was published during the korean war, when peng was the commander of the people's volunteer army and was highly regarded by mao zedong as a war hero. the second was published during the cultural revolution, when peng was completely removed from power and labeled as a "counter-revolutionary revisionist." the word choices and the overall sentiments of these two excerpts reflect the changing political status of peng during two political periods. given the example above, we ask: is there a systematic strategy utilized by state-run chinese newspapers that gives quantifiable evidence of difference in reporting for articles written during certain political periods? moreover, does such evidence also manifest itself in the difference in reporting when certain political figures are alive or dead? if such evidence exists, it would strongly support the claim that chinese newspapers select the ways in which news is reported according to changing political tides and the impact of political events in the central government. furthermore, we would also like to understand the shifts in framing choices of articles from different decades in order to have a holistic picture of changes of focus in chinese society that could be influenced by the government in different time periods of the regime. lastly, we wonder whether the context used to report certain politicians is unique enough so that it can be easily identified by pre-trained language models when the actual names of the politicians are not given. in other words, can language models encode such context so that the separation of the embeddings for different politicians is significant? if so, it would imply that reporters in china take politicians' identities and power status into consideration when constructing language and rhetoric in their writings. the contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) as far as we know, this is the first work to analyze the complete text of two widely-circulated, state-run prc publications, people's daily and reference news, for the effects of political events and the deaths of certain politicians on changes in news reporting. (2) we measure features of news coverage and employ change point detection methods to quantify such effects and discover their social meaning. (3) we use topic modeling to identify the framing choices of news articles from different decades, examining the implied change of focus of the chinese government. (4) we use a pre-trained bert model to predict masked names in news articles and quantify how unique the language used to report different politicians is. ## related work previous work has focused on strategies chinese state media use to shape the perspectives and opinions of a global audience @xcite . specifically, sun (2009) discusses the vast difference in the coverage of current events between chinese and international media outlets. @xcite outlines the interplay between nationalism and globalism in chinese media. in addition, @xcite examines the strategies used by chinese state media on twitter in order to reach foreign publics. @xcite explores the changing rhetoric of chinese political discourse in different periods in the prc era. although previous research has examined the corpus of the people's daily, most of this work focuses on studying particular political issues, such as international relations @xcite , gay portrayal @xcite and public health policy @xcite . liu and chang (2020) study the changes in different aspects of citizenship rights through news articles in different eras. looking at changes in us news coverage, @xcite introduce a model to analyze the framing of news articles related to immigration. @xcite use an approach based on contextual embedding of text to analyze 140 years of us political speeches that reveal changing framing of immigration by different political parties. ## methods in this section, we detail the main methods used to perform our experiments, including the extraction of descriptive statistics, change point detection, topic modeling and masked token prediction by a pre-trained language model. ## datasets and results in this section, we first report the details of the datasets used in our experiments. we then proceed to analyze our experimental results. ## conclusion we extract statistics on coverage of selected politicians and employ change point detection methods to news articles from people's daily and reference news to discover the difference in the ways of reporting during different political events and when deaths of political figures occur. results show that such differences exist and can be traced to changes in political tides and public opinion in different eras of the prc. furthermore, through topic modeling we discover the changes in framing choices on news articles in different decades, which reflect the evolving agenda and shifts of focus of the chinese government. finally, by predicting masked names of politicians using a bert model, we identify the difference in the uniqueness of the context used to report different politicians. we discover that those who have held power for a longer period of time tend to have more uniqueness in the language used to report them in articles. we hope that the methods used in this work can be applied to news articles from other media outlets and political systems. future work may involve inferring power networks among politicians by examining the closeness of language used by reporters when discussing them during political events. it would also be interesting to compare the results with existing discoveries of "inner circles" among chinese political elites. in addition, it would be informative to study the framing choices adopted by newspapers published under different regimes on certain chinese political events, since they might reflect the links between rhetoric in news reporting and ideologies of news agencies. we believe that these are exciting directions that could add valuable knowledge to our understanding of how news reporting is done in the prc.