Framing the Swedish Huawei Ban : A comparative case study of Chinese English-language and Swedish newspapers’ framing of the Huawei ban in Sweden

Abstract: This thesis examined and compared the framing of Swedish and Chinese English-language newspapers about the Huawei ban in Sweden. Drawing on Robert Entman (1993) definitions of framing and Bodystun et al. (2014) policy frames codebook. The empirical findings of this thesis finds that Swedish newspapers and Chinese English-language newspapers are framing the Huawei ban in Economic, Security and Defense, and Political frames with their own respective issue-specific framing per dimension. In addition, the tones of the Swedish newspapers were more negative than the Chinese English-language newspapers, which were overtly positive towards Huawei. The Chinese English-language newspapers were also found to rely more on selected experts’ framing of the Huawei ban than the Swedish newspapers, which focused more on individuals’ actions. The findings are significant as they partly confirm Yang and Kang (2020) text-mining study of Huawei frames in relation to national security; but also provides new information towards the emerging studies of framing Huawei.