The picture of China put forth by the Slovak media is very different from the Czech discourse. Unlike in Slovakia, neutral articles do not constitute a majority in the Czech media. Based on the analysis of Czech media, the share of neutral and negative articles in the Czech discourse on China is almost identical – 41 percent show China negatively a nd 45 percent of articles are neutral. It is quite interesting that despite the higher share of negative articles, the overall percentage of positive articles is higher than in Slovakia – 14 percents of articles f rame China positively (compared to only 6 percent in Slovakia). It can be assumed that Czech discourse of China is rather polarized (having more negative but also more positive articles than in Slovakia), while Slovak discourse is mostly neutral.

The Slovak media discourse predominantly focus on topics relating to the Chinese economy and economic policy. They not only dominate the discussion but in case of essential events influencing the Chinese economy they also drive the growth in media coverage volume. P olitical topics, including the bilateral Sino-Slovak relations, receive comparatively less attention by Slovak media.

A domination of a single topic cluster in the media discourse contributes to the skewing of the public debate, which in turn lacks key questions on Slovakia’s bilateral relations with China. To illustrate, over the course of seven years, bilateral Slovak-Chinese ties received less attention in Slovak media than Chinese banking sector.

It can be seen positively that the Slovak media discourse (unlike the Czech one) is not overly polarized. Even though the share of negative articles is higher than that of the positive articles, the discourse is clearly dominated by neutral pieces. Only the tabloids differ in this regard , but their share on the overall volume of all articles discussing either Chinese economy or Chinese politics is less than 2.5 percent of the total volume.

The role of political and economic elites is dissected in the section on the analysis of actors.