Global Financial Media and China's Greater Bay Area

Examining the complex dynamics of China-U.S. relations through the lens of media discourse, this book explores how political, business, and media elites shape narratives around China’s Greater Bay Area (GBA) against a backdrop of economic interdependence and geopolitical tensions.

This book explores how global media and policy elites make sense of China’s digital rise at a time of intensifying geopolitical tension and technological competition. Focusing on the GBA (China’s ambitious attempt to build a world-class digital innovation hub), the book examines how American, British, and Chinese financial media frame China’s role in the global digital economy. Rather than treating the China-U.S. relationship as a simple confrontation, the book shows how elite discourses reveal a series of unresolved tensions. Governments and markets remain deeply interconnected even as political rhetoric hardens. Drawing on large-scale analysis of financial news coverage, interviews, and computational text analysis, the book maps how political, business, and media elites navigate competing pressures of cooperation and rivalry, opportunity and risk, and openness and control. Instead of asking who will dominate the digital future, this book explains why contemporary digital politics is shaped by enduring contradictions that cannot be easily resolved.

By bringing together elite studies, international communication, and financial journalism, the book offers a timely and accessible account of how global digital power is debated, negotiated, and contested in a rapidly changing world. Its central contribution lies in its use of “digital dilemmas” as an analytical lens. This insightful study will interest scholars and students of journalism, global media, international relations, political science, and diplomacy.