How US and Chinese Media Cover the US–China Trade Conﬂict: A Case Study of War and Peace Journalism Practice and the Foreign Policy Equilibrium Hypothesis Louisa Ha , 1 Yang Yang , 1 Rik Ray , 1 Frankline Matanji , 2 Peiqin Chen, 3 Ke Guo 3 and Nan Lyu 3 1 School of Media and Communication, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, U.S.A. 2 University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, U.S.A. 3 Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China Keywords trade conﬂict, United States, China, peace journalism, foreign policy, foreign policy, US-China media comparison, trade war, conﬂict role, press system. Correspondence Louisa Ha, School of Media and Communication, Bowling Green State University, 411 Kuhlin Center, Bowling Green, OH 43403, U.S.A.; e-mail: louisah@bgsu.edu. doi: 10.1111/ncmr.12186 Abstract This article examines the news coverage of a nonmilitary conﬂict: The US–China trade conﬂict by major news media outlets in the USA and China using the war and peace journalism framework. Role in the conﬂict as initiator/responder, medium difference, the press role in each press system, and partisanship of news media were hypothesized to affect the war and peace journalism practice. Moreover, the trade conﬂict was divided into three stages to test the applicability of the “foreign policy market equilibrium hypothesis” by analyzing the changes in the uses of sources and presence of competing frames over time. US news media were found to employ more war journalism and less peace journalism than their Chinese counterpart. They also had much lower coverage of the conﬂict than their Chinese counterpart. Newspapers were more likely to use war journalism than television. US partisan liberal media selec- tively supported and opposed the US government trade policy. Introduction With its economy growing in double ﬁgures and gaining power internationally, China has been being labeled by the Western media as an “enemy” (Stone & Xiao, 2007) and seen as posing a threat to the Uni- ted States’ world superpower status (Casetti, 2003). The 2018 trade conﬂict between the US and China has been characterized as the biggest trade war in economic history (Li, He, & Lin, 2018; The New York Times, 2018). It presents an ideal setting to study the differences in framing an international conﬂict by party/partisan and elite news media in a changing digital media landscape because media can escalate a conﬂict through its representation of the conﬂict occurrences (Bastiansen, Klimke, & Werenskjold, 2019). Proposed by peace studies scholar Johan Galtung to highlight the important role of journalists in pro- moting world peace (Lee & Maslog, 2005), peace journalism stresses a nonpartisan coverage of all sides, exposing the lies and untruths, with a focus on common people and aims at ﬁnding solutions and pro- moting peace initiatives. In contrast, war journalism escalates the conﬂict by focusing on violence, siding with the elites, and serves as government propaganda to achieve a “victory” for the home country (Gal- tung, 2003). This study aimed to explore how war and peace journalism were practiced in a conﬂict Negotiation and Conﬂict Management Research Volume 0, Number 0, Pages xxxx–xxxx © 2020 International Association of Conﬂict Management and Wiley Periodicals LLC. 1