This is part of Global Research Workshop Series: Developing an Interdisciplinary Research Platform Toward ‘Next Asia’ co-sponsored by Stanford Global Studies.

Who drives elite discourse on U.S.-China relations – Congress, the executive branch, or the media? Although prior research suggests that each actor may hold distinct agenda-setting capacities, their relative influence – and the directionality of influence among elites in foreign policy discourse – remains insufficiently theorized and empirically underexamined. This study investigates issue attention (what topics are discussed) and framing dynamics (how topics are discussed) surrounding China by analyzing communications from the legislative and executive branches alongside coverage from major U.S. media outlets. Drawing on unsupervised topic modeling and vector autoregression (VAR) models, we examine the evolution of issue attention and framing across two periods: the 116th Congress (January 3, 2019 – January 3, 2021) and the 118th Congress (January 3, 2023 – January 3, 2025). Our analysis disentangles the mechanisms of issue attention and framing and illustrates how partisan and individual-level differences structure elite-media interactions in the context of rising great power rivalry.

Presenter:

Xinru Ma is an inaugural research scholar at the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab housed in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where she leads the research track on U.S.-Asia relations. Her work primarily examines nationalism, great power politics, and East Asian security, with a methodological focus on formal and computational methods. Empirically, a common theme of her research challenges prevailing assumptions that inflate the perceived risk of militarized conflicts in East Asia, offering original data and analysis grounded in local knowledge and regional perspectives. Her work is published in the Journal of East Asian Studies, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, and edited volumes by Palgrave. Her co-authored book, Beyond Power Transition, is published by Columbia University Press.

Discussants:

Pablo Barberá is a Research Scientist in the Computational Social Science team at Meta, as well as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. His research combines computational methods and the use of social media data to examine the impact of digital technologies on political behavior and public opinion.

Matthew Dolbow is a Visiting Scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.  Before coming to APARC, Mr. Dolbow led U.S. diplomatic outreach to Japan's southernmost islands near Taiwan as U.S. Consul General in Okinawa.  Over nearly 10 years as a diplomat in China, Mr. Dolbow led teams that assessed the impact of China's security goals on its trade policy, trained colleagues across the Department of State on China's economic statecraft, and created social media programs that attracted hundreds of thousands of subscribers.  As Chief of Staff in the U.S. National Security Council’s international economics office during the first Trump administration, Mr. Dolbow also contributed to the 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy, which solidified a new bipartisan U.S. consensus on China economic policy.