This writing is about studying political motivations for and against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) through interpretive work based on analyses of Chinese state media articles. My criteria for article selection centers on the use of Google index search for such articles drawn from three newspapers: China Daily, People’s Daily, and Global Times. From receiving the call for paper by this journal on 6 January 2016 to the submission deadline for the call for paper on 15 April 2016, a period of about three months, I downloaded articles from these three dailies for analysis. The motivation for the selection of these three dailies is the following. First, they represented the major media outlets in China that are internationally circulated and available online. Second, as state-owned media operating at a national level, they are often perceived to represent the Voices of the state, its leaders, or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This has the added advantage for scholarly work to understand and analyze the official narratives behind the pronouncements and ideological inclinations of the Party. It provides an additional layer of cognitive and emotive understanding beyond just bland un-contextualized official statements released by the government, especially when these official contents are editorialized or grafted onto major arguments put forward by the authorities. This study is not meant to be comprehensive in surveying all TPP articles but provides a selective glance at media news reporting on TPP in the official media platforms in China.
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