Xiaoying Hou

China-Angola relations after 2008 global crisis is characterized Angola’s trade surplus and Chinese increasing investment in economic dimension, and Chinese Public Diplomacy (PD) activities in cultural dimension. China’s PD activities in Angola aim to generate soft power, and furthermore, collect political supports in bilateral trade and international multilateral regime from both Angolan government and public. China’s PD activities in Angola are characterized by media outreach, immigrants, student exchanges, and companies PR activities. Since 2017, the US government began to consider China’s increasing influence in African states as threat to American influence in this region and entered in soft power competition with China. EU institutions take the same stance of the US since 2018. In this context, various IR actors compete with each other to influence Angolan elites’ perceptions and behaviours towards China via Mediated Public Diplomacy (MPD). This thesis attempts to answer the question how Angolan and Chinese elites, by influencing media coverage on China’s PD activities in Angola, to shape Angolan perception on China. To answer this question, I follow Entman’s Cascading Network Activation model, hypothesize that, the Angolan natives’ opinion is highly consistent with salient issues and attributes in news written in Portuguese while the opinion of Chinese communities in Angola, with salient issues and attributes in news written in Chinese; Angolan elites’ motivation, strategy, control over media, determine media coverage in Angop. I firstly conduct content analysis with MAXQDA program of the news samples collected from Chinese online newspaper Xinhua.net and Angolan newspaper Angop. The qualitative analysis identifies, congruent and divergent issues, attributes, and attitudes regarding China’s PD activities, presented in Chinese and Portuguese news on from the two newspapers. The quantitative content analysis describes the salience of issues, attributes and attitudes. Then, I compare the similarity and difference between the media coverage of the two newspapers in terms of issues, attributes, attributes, and their salience.