Chung-Yun Hsu

“The most dangerous place on Earth” is how the Economist labelled Taiwan in 2021 (“The most dangerous,” 2021). However, after a firm supporter of independence, Lai Ching-te, was elected as Taiwan’s president in 2024 and the relationships between China and the United States deteriorated further, the situation of Taiwan has, as CNN put it, “only gotten more dangerous” as described by an opinion article in CNN (Zakaria, 2024). Despite all the discourse shown in the media, people in Taiwan still seem to imagine their identities differently within a spectrum with ethnic Taiwanese nationalism at one end and greater Chinese nationalism at the other (Fell, 2018). Newspapers have always played an important role in fostering the “imagined community” as suggested by Anderson (2006). Therefore, to explore how newspapers with different political stances construct “a laboratory of identities” like Taiwan (Corcuff, 2002), this thesis investigates, “How have local (Taiwan) and overseas (China and the United States) newspapers from 2012 to 2024 framed Taiwan’s national identity differently?” The question is expected to be answered by conducting content analysis combined with framing theory.