Divided Frames, Rival Others: China, Russia, and the Construction of American Identity in The New York Times, 2020–2024

This thesis examines how The New York Times constructs American national identity through its coverage of China and Russia from 2020 to 2024. Drawing on a corpus of 5,396 China-related and 7,009 Russia-related articles, it employs a multi-method computational design integrating transformer-based sentiment and emotion classification, dependency- parsed adjectival framing, distinctive keyword extraction, identity-lexicon tracking, OLS regression, and longitudinal word embedding analysis. The study makes three contributions. First, it documents a differentiated architec- ture of geopolitical othering. Russia is rendered primarily through a war-centered, leader- personalized, and geographically external frame, whereas China is rendered through a multi- domain framework that links markets, technology, governance, and U.S. domestic politics. Second, within China coverage, it identifies a pattern of functional decoupling between ed- itorial domains. Business-Economic and Political-Foreign coverage produce different evalu- ative grammars and emotional profiles: risk, vulnerability, and fear in the former; ideology, coercion, and anger in the latter. These patterns also project different versions of American identity: a Performative Self of competitive market resilience and a Normative Self of liberal- democratic order. Regression analysis further shows that technology competition, rather than traditional military or territorial conflict, is the strongest affective predictor of hostile evaluation, supporting the thesis's techno-nationalism argument. Third, longitudinal em- bedding analysis identifies 2022 as a structural break in the semantic organization of China coverage. The convergence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Shanghai lockdowns, and the Pelosi visit to Taiwan drew China more closely into a broader authoritarian-threat register. Together, these findings argue that elite foreign-affairs journalism does not operate as a unified narrator. Rather, it functions as an institutionally differentiated site through which national identity is assembled, and in which moments of crisis convergence can reorganize the semantic conditions of geopolitical rivalry.