The European Story of China in Africa: Examining the Token “Cautionary Tale”

Ever since the European Union launched its first Africa Strategy in December 2005, the question of China's presence and interest in the continent has been bothering European policymakers, spilling into the media discourse over China's role, approach, and agenda for Africa (Deutscher Budestag in Das Engagement der Volksrepublik China in Afrika. Interessen, Strategien und Auswirkungen, 2007). With this context in mind, this chapter aims to examine how the story of China’s presence on the African continent appears in the European media by identifying specific frames and the tone of reporting. Preliminary data on the European reporting of China’s activities in Africa were collected via Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), further applying frame and sentiment analysis. Qualitative analysis was performed to detect the tone of the reporting, frames, information sources mentioned in the context of China's presence in Africa, reporting specificity (whole-of-continent or country specific). Additionally, an unsupervised lexicon-based document level sentiment analysis of news articles has also been carried out employing two different sentiment analysis methods and four well-known and robustly established dictionaries. The contribution of the study is the conclusion that the polarity of news coverage is not consistent over all media outlets, and application of varied news frames to China's coverage is associated with different sentiment polarity outcomes. Whilst the frames that focus on the harmful consequences China's activities have in Africa are clearly negative, all the other frames look at China with a recognition of strategic success, keeping the overall polarity of the reporting neutral or in many cases even positive.