Evolution of China's water issues as framed in Chinese mainstream newspaper

Yonglan Xiong; Yongping Wei; Zhiqiang Zhang; Jing Wei

Journal article

Evolution of China's water issues as framed in Chinese mainstream newspaper

Yonglan Xiong, Yongping Wei, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jing Wei

AMBIO | SPRINGER | Published : 2016

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-015-0716-y

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Abstract

There is an urgent need globally to trigger fundamental societal changes in water management away from existing unsustainable paradigms. This paper attempts to understand the evolution of newspaper coverage of water issues in China by analyzing water-related articles in a major national newspaper, the People's Daily, over the period 1946-2012 using a content analysis approach. The major findings include the following: (1) water issues were in relatively prominent positions in the newspaper; (2) the reporting of water issues in China experienced three stages: 1946 to the middle of 1980s-flood and drought control and water for food production, the middle of 1980s to 1997-water for economic dev..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Yongping Wei Author Infrastructure Engineering

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Grants

Awarded by Natural Science Foundation of China

Awarded by Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS

Awarded by Australian Research Council

Awarded by Commonwealth of Australia under the Australia-China Science and Research Fund

Funding Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Scientific Data Sharing Platform for Lake and Watershed for providing the data of river basin boundary. This work was funded by the Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 91125007 and 41401623), Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS (Project No: 2015381), the Australian Research Council (DP120102917 and FT130100274), and the Commonwealth of Australia under the Australia-China Science and Research Fund (Project No: ACSRF800).