RUSSIAN-CHINESE RELATIONS IN THE MIRROR OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA DISCOURSES OF RUSSIA AND CHINA AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON THE PUBLIC PERCEPTION OF THE STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP

Qin Yingyue

The media discourses of Russia and China assemble the public representation of the bilateral partnership out of different sets of thematic frames and deliver it with unequal intensity of coverage. The link between media representation and mass perception, meanwhile, is postulated far more often than it is tested on a shared body of material. The aim of the study is to determine which frames prevail in the Russian and Chinese segments of the media coverage of Russian-Chinese relations, and how the configuration of these frames relates to the dynamics of public perception of the strategic partnership. The material is a corpus of publications from leading Russian and Chinese outlets for 2019–2026, compiled by the author; content analysis with frequency counting of frames, framing analysis and critical discourse analysis were applied. Mass perception was assessed from the published measurements of VCIOM and FOM. The Russian segment rests on the frames of economic interaction and foreign-policy coordination: together they account for over half of the coded units. The Chinese segment is shifted towards historical continuity and humanitarian-cultural rapprochement, while in intensity of coverage the Russian corpus exceeds the Chinese one by more than twofold. Aligning the frequency profiles with the growing share of Russians who assess the relations as friendly (from 60% in 2014 to 72% in 2024) shows that a positive trend in perception coexists with the asymmetry of the two media images, and that perception responds primarily to the dominant of its own national segment.

Keywords:media discourse, country image, Russian-Chinese strategic partnership, framing, content analysis, public perception, media communication, narrative.