Political Cuteness! Charting News Narratives of China’s Panda Diplomacy in Recipient Countries of Australia, Scotland and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Panda diplomacy is a unique animal diplomacy practice of China yet it has received little academic attention and seldom dissected in the literature. This research quantitatively measures and qualitatively analyses the achievement of this diplomacy practice reflected in the local news production regarding the panda in three select panda host countries (Scotland, Canada and Australia), and charts narratives of concurrent events corresponding to each panda loan deal with information extracted from the news content. Journalism terms such as news values, framing, and narrative theory are used as theoretical tools to examine the news content to understand the influence the journalistic process exerts on the \nmental association formed among the readership regarding the panda. Findings of this study suggest that while the panda is perceived to have a wide range of news values by the media outlets of all three studied countries, the portrayal of the \nimage of the animal as well as the levels of success of the panda diplomacy varies significantly. Scotland shows a high level of diplomatic achievement, with unanimous recognition of the political value of the panda as a goodwill ambassador from the Scottish media, public and government. In the case of Canada, while the journalists hold sceptical views towards the symbolic values of the panda in the development of the Sino-Canada relationship, the cuteness of the image of the panda was nevertheless portrayed, separately from the political dimension. Finally, Australian media outlets demonstrate the least amount of enthusiasm in the panda, yet a critical concern was kept in the journalistic focus on the economic dimension of the loaned animal. \n \nThe data coding method designed for the research may be applicable for analysts of journalism when investigating news content in terms of the frames, tones and viewpoints employed in the journalist process that are intended to exert an \ninfluence on the perception and ideas formed among the readership in regards to the news subjects. The narratives charted from the data provide diplomacy practitioners with insights for use in adjusting public diplomacy activities in order \nto generate enhanced publicity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".