Trade politics and China's image in the United States : congressional discourse on the People's Republic
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- China has played a role in American politics since the nineteenth century when politicians worried about a flood of immigrants coming across the Pacific, while today, their concerns center on topics such as trade policy, human rights, and national security. With China's growing international clout, understanding the logic behind politically motivated depictions of the PRC becomes increasingly important. This dissertation seeks to do that with a systematic analysis of the nature of American political rhetoric about China and how it has varied across time and space. Examining twenty-five years of Senate speeches, using natural language processing techniques and machine learning, demonstrates that trade politics play an important role in shaping rhetoric. First, while congressional conversations about China in the 1990s covered a variety of topics, since the early 2000s, they have focused primarily on trade, often with the goal of depicting China as an economic threat. Likewise, trade interests determine the sentiment of language used, as senators from states highly dependent on manufacturing are more negative, while senators from states that send a lot of exports to China are less so. Public opinion data confirm that there is a public constituency for negative rhetoric about the PRC.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Haskell, Jennifer C |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Political Science. |
| Primary advisor | Oi, Jean C. (Jean Chun) |
| Thesis advisor | Oi, Jean C. (Jean Chun) |
| Thesis advisor | Blaydes, Lisa, 1975- |
| Thesis advisor | Grimmer, Justin |
| Advisor | Blaydes, Lisa, 1975- |
| Advisor | Grimmer, Justin |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Jennifer C. Haskell. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Political Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Jennifer Claire Haskell
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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