Country images are increasingly popular but controversial policy concepts. The Western news media image of China is consequently a well-explored academic subject. This study contributes to the discussion by considering the news stream of an international news agency to contrast prior studies that analyze small-scale data sets. An automated dictionary method is proposed to analyze two Reuters data corpora RCV1 (1996–1998) and TRC2 (2008–2009) (N = 1,386,000). The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve is employed and its development over time is statistically analyzed. China’s media image was found to be relatively positive in comparison with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The results also suggest that economy provides a greater positive impact on the China’s image in Western media than culture, while politics has a negative impact. The results of the automated method are similar to those of a previous study in which a moderately sized data set was manually examined. This suggests that automated sentiment analysis can provide equally reliable observations as manual analysis but with smaller labor costs.
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