14. Framing National Security Concerns in Mobile Telecommunication Infrastructure Debates: A Text Mining Study of Huawei

Huawei, a major Chinese player in 5G mobile communication infrastructure and equipment, has caused many national security concerns among the Western countries. Using a computational framing approach, this study aims to examine how global news organizations frame Huawei. This study depends on a media corpus of 1527 articles from Nexis UNI (previously Lexis/Nexis Academic) database after using “Huawei” and “national security” as the keyword pair. Prominent key phrases include “national security,” “security concerns,” “security threat,” and “security fears” among non-Chinese media, while Chinese media focus on “trade war,” “Donald Trump,” and (the arrest) of Huawei’s CFO, “Meng Wanzhou.” Linear regression analyses also confirmed the positive relationship between a country’s animosity against China with how Huawei will be framed by news organizations. Increased animosity perceptions against China are found to be positively associated with more likely to frame Huawei with national security and security fear concerns.