The Arrival of the Three-child Policy: Content Analysis of Chinese and Western Media Attitudes of the Policy’s Impact on Chinese women

Abstract

This study focuses on the media attitudes towards the impact of China’s three-child policy on Chinese female group from 2020 to 2022. The author selected 103 news reports about the three-child policy from Chinese and western media. To survey their media attitudes, content analysis was used to examine these news reports. This study also developed a new integrated framework to extract women's rights-related topics and determine the degree of positive or negative media attitude to these topics. It turns out that there is an enormous difference between Chinese media and western media in their attitudes towards the three-child polic t5      y. Chinese media showed the most positive attitude towards the topic of "providing government incentives for women", while western media showed the most negative attitude towards the topic of "reducing the cost of childbirth for women". Compared with other aspects, western media hold a relatively more cheerful outlook on "providing government incentives for women". The objective of this paper is to help policy makers better monitor the direction of public opinion and improve this policy by comparing Chinese and western media attitudes on related topics.