
The Wire China recently celebrated our fourth anniversary, which started a conversation among the editorial team about just how different things were in April of 2020. From Covid to spy balloons to the AI craze, the dynamics surrounding China’s rise have changed considerably. In an effort to take stock and fully capture this wild ride, we decided to take advantage of one of our most loved and unique offerings: our daily roundup of China-related news stories. Every weekday (barring holidays) since we launched, we’ve sent this news roundup to subscribers, thus logging a record of the major news stories in English-language publications, from the New York Times to Caixin to the Economist.
Using screening tools to analyze the thousands of headlines contained in those daily missives, we produced the below graphics, which tell an interesting story of their own.1 The word clouds below were produced after removing mentions of ‘China’, ‘Chinese’, and ‘Beijing’, as well as ‘U.S.’, ‘America’, and ‘Washington’.

There’s a clear winner when it comes to the most common term that has appeared in China-headlines in the last four years: ‘Hong Kong’. ‘COVID’ and ‘coronavirus’ are pretty prominent, but it seems there have been more headlines with ‘Biden’ than ‘Xi Jinping’ — or, for that matter, ‘Trump’. The prominence of ‘company’ over ‘government’, we would argue, is also telling since so much of China’s impact on the world has been economic.

While the major protests of 2019 had died down in Hong Kong by 2020 — in part thanks to COVID — the city was still the biggest story around, while the controversy around whether Western countries should use Huawei’s telecoms kit made it the top corporate story.

The pandemic dragged on as a major news story through 2021. But in the year Beijing’s crackdowns on the property and tech sectors started to bite, leading real estate firm Evergrande — along with tech giants like Alibaba and DiDi — rose up the news agenda.

With Nancy Pelosi’s visit, ‘Taiwan’ started to take over from ‘Hong Kong’ as the main geopolitical story this year, while Xi Jinping secured an historic (and controversial) third term as CCP leader — rising up the headline charts in the process.

A pair of two-letter acronyms started grabbing attention last year: ‘EV’, reflecting the inexorable rise of China’s electric vehicle industry; and ‘AI’, reflecting a new area of technological competition. TikTok also re-emerged as a hot topic…

…but the social media app has shot up the news agenda so far this year, thanks to U.S. efforts to ban it. The year to date has also seen plenty of discussion and concern about where China’s ‘economy’ is headed. ‘Xi Jinping’ has by now completely turned the tables on ‘Biden’ — in the political-leader-headline stakes at least.
When The Wire first released the Daily Roundup in 2020, it was considerably longer than what we send out nowadays. In order to account for this change when analyzing trends over time, we normalized the data2To get to the figures you see below representing the ‘Number of Mentions’, we did the following: First, we divided the number of mentions by the total number of words in a certain time period — for example, the total number of mentions of ‘chips’ in 2021, divided by the total number of words in the Daily Roundups in 2021. Then we multiplied this by the average number of words in the Daily Roundup in 2022 and 2023, as those years best reflect the length of the morning news feed which we are sending out to this day. to present a more accurate picture of upticks and downticks.
Taking a closer look at some of the words that have cropped up most often in the last few years reveals some interesting trends.
To take one example: the future of the tiny chips that power so much of our lives has shot to the forefront of China coverage in the last couple of years as the U.S. and its biggest rival join the fight for a slice of the manufacturing pie.

Some words, like tariffs, have been a steady presence in China news, but the media’s interest in Beijing’s repressive actions in Xinjiang appears to have faded. The word balloon, meanwhile, literally blew up and burst last year following the furor over China’s spying activities in the U.S.

Huawei and Ant Group — Alibaba’s financial arm — were a staple of news coverage in The Wire’s first two years. This year, TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, are sucking up the corporate coverage, amid intense political debate in the U.S. over their future.

No prizes for guessing which places have featured as big China-related geopolitical hotspots in recent years…

… Or the two industries garnering ever more coverage.


A couple of words we are all happy to see fade out of the headlines…
…and two corporate names whose astonishing rise in the online retail industry is drawing ever more scrutiny.


Ella Apostoaie is an editorial associate at The Wire. She is a 2021 graduate of Wellesley College, where she majored in East Asian Studies, with a primary focus on Chinese history and politics. Ella grew up in Norwich, England and is now based in the Boston area.

Chloe Fox is the features editor at The Wire. Previously, she was Executive Editor at Boston Review and an editor at HuffPost and The New Yorker. @ckamarckfox

Andrew Peaple is a UK-based editor at The Wire. Previously, Andrew was a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, including stints in Beijing from 2007 to 2010 and in Hong Kong from 2015 to 2019. Among other roles, Andrew was Asia editor for the Heard on the Street column, and the Asia markets editor. @andypeaps