Established Pluralism: US elite media discourse about China policy

In the post-Tiananmen and post-Cold War era, China has not only lost its strategic alliance with the US against the Soviet Union, but has stepped in to be seen as the US's imagined enemy. The New York Times's discourse about China policy from 1990 to 2000 consisted of three "ideological packages": containment, engagement, and globalization, which represented different strategic variations on the same ideological theme of peaceful evolution. The elite media discourse is characterized as "established pluralism". First, it represents a plurality of viewpoints within the established policy contour and the official circle. Second, it tends to domesticate foreign realities in the course of constructing Orientalist discourses. Third, this diversity-within-unity is routinized in the institutionalized structure and practice of the elite press.