ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 examines news coverage of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics by analyzing New York Times and Washington Post articles, as well as NBC’s televised news coverage. I argue that U.S. journalists constructed China as a political threat by casting the United States and China as opponents in a zero-sum ideological competition. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post portrayed the Beijing Olympics as a metaphor for China’s troubling eclipse of the United States as a world power. Highlighting the dangers of Chinese communism in news stories regarding a series of scandals plaguing the Olympics, both of these papers described China’s rise as a threat to the United States and to Western democratic ideals. Revising yellow peril memory frames of the Chinese empire and Chinese immigrants as threats to U.S. political stability, the newspapers evoked Cold War fears regarding communist collectivist ideology to frame China’s rising power as a red peril that threatened Western democratic values. However, the press tempered this dire portrait of China’s rise by crafting a counter narrative in which the West’s demise was not certain. U.S. journalists situated China’s current social problems against a dreary historical backdrop of past Chinese Communist Party failings. In so doing, they created a compelling narrative to assert Chinese support for communist rule was waning and to reassure readers of the superiority of Western democratic ideals.
