abstract: The World Economic Herald was a newspaper founded in April 1980 and was closed down by the Chinese government in May 1989 due to its dissident voice. The World Economic Herald was widely regarded as the most influential and important weekly newspaper in China in the 1980s. It became the leading publication pushing political as well as economic reform in China. This key publication in history has yet to receive much scholarly attention. By examining the evolution of the World Economic Herald from 1980 to 1989, this thesis explores the political and financial support behind the newspaper and, more importantly, the changing contents of the World Economic Herald. The year 1985 is seen a turning point for the World Economic Herald. After 1985, the World Economic Herald moved gradually toward being more of a politically dissident newspaper from an economic newspaper. The changes in the political patronage behind the newspaper played a crucial role in the fate of the World Economic Herald. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. History 2010

viii, 89 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / The Olympics games are not only a sport but also a media event. In 2008, China hosted the Olympics Games for the first time. The coverage of the Beijing Olympics Games in the Chinese media can reflect the characteristics of media and societal development in today's China. The study examines qualitatively the use of frames in coverage of the Beijing Olympics Games in 11 dailies and 2 weeklies in China. Four new issue-specific frames are found in the Chinese newspapers. The use of the existing six generic and five issue-specific frames are discussed in the Chinese context. The study finds that the Chinese media get more freedom in some areas that do not have direct links with politics. In the areas related to politics, the government is still controlling the media. / Committee in Charge: Patricia Curtin, Chair; John Russial H. Leslie Steeves

The suicide and the media research field are generally concerned with the effect, content, and production of mass-disseminating suicide information. Most of the previous studies in the field were conducted in western countries. This dissertation is devoted to extending the research map to the Chinese contexts and moving the field forward into the new media era. It proposes a conceptual framework based on the social construction of reality theory and refines the framework through a combination of five studies. Study 1 might be the first investigation on mass-disseminating suicide information’s effect on suicide occurrences in Mainland China, using the Foxconn suicides as a case study. It finds that the Foxconn suicides were temporally clustered and influenced by inter-person contagion within the company, as well as the newspapers’ reporting about the topic in Beijing, the nation’s capital. Study2 examines the prominence and representation patterns of reporting the Foxconn suicides in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in 2010 calendar year. It demonstrates that the media coverage of the Foxconn suicides in the three societies generally experienced a three-phase evolving process in 2010. Meanwhile, within every phase, the media in different societies showed differences in their representations. Furthermore, the study investigates how the representation can be influenced by news sources and social contexts and explores possible explanations why the Beijing media’s reporting influenced the occurrences of the Foxconn suicides. Study3 compares representation of suicides in case-control psychological autopsy studies with representation of the same suicides in Hong Kong media. Considering the psychological autopsy as relatively more rigorous and validated, the comparison examines the suicide news representation’s accuracy and stereotyping tendencies. It finds a strong homogenisation of the Hong Kong newspapers in accurately reporting suicide methods but inaccurately reporting suicide risk factors, and that their reporting was problematic in stereotyping of gender-and method-specific suicides. Study 4 is a qualitative study of 33newspaper journalists’ experiences with producing suicide news from representative daily newspapers in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Utilising the grounded theory method, it extracts how the journalists construct media reality of suicide within a social context. The study summarises criteria of suicide news values, identifies three types of key agents which are often engaged by the journalists in constructing suicide news, and also generates a comparative framework of suicide news production in the Chinese contexts. Study 5 examines what suicide-related information is easily accessible online in Mainland China and Hong Kong and compares it with its counterparts in English. It explores how the comparative framework proposed by Study 4 can also be applied to understand the nature of the online suicide information and serves as a bridge connecting the thesis with future studies on suicide and the new media. The five studies collectively contribute to understanding the nature and mechanism of constructing media reality of suicide in the Chinese contexts. By applying the research findings, suicide prevention professionals would be able to develop context-sensitive strategies to cooperate with the media and prevent suicide. / published_or_final_version / Social Work and Social Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy