  China has experienced a spectacular economic growth in recent decades. Its
economy grew more than 48 times from 1980 to 2013. How are the other countries
reacting to China's rise? Do they see it as an economic opportunity or a
security threat? In this paper, we answer this question by analyzing online
news reports about China published in Australia, France, Germany, Japan,
Russia, South Korea, the UK and the US. More specifically, we first analyze the
frequency with which China has appeared in news headlines, which is a measure
of China's influence in the world. Second, we build a Naive Bayes classifier to
study the evolving nature of the news reports, i.e., whether they are economic
or political. We then evaluate the friendliness of the news coverage based on
sentiment analysis. Empirical results indicate that there has been increasing
news coverage of China in all the countries under study. We also find that the
emphasis of the reports is generally shifting towards China's economy. Here
Japan and South Korea are exceptions: they are reporting more on Chinese
politics. In terms of global sentiment, the picture is quite gloomy. With the
exception of Australia and, to some extent, France, all the other countries
under examination are becoming less positive towards China.
