BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa are a group of countries between the first world and the third world in impact and economy. Anilesh Kumar and Hao Sun from Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University (BNBU) looked at how BRICS have been represented in the media of China and India.

Following the first summit of the BRICS countries in 2009, they have positioned themselves as advocates of multipolarity and a more equitable global governance. This summit and focus was spurred by the global financial crisis of 2008. BRICS is not a small player – comprising approximately 37,3% of the global GDP in PPP (purchasing power parity) and 40% of the global population. 

So far, BRICS scholarship has been mostly in political science and international relations, and focused on institutional evolution, economic weight, and geopolitical significance (Cooper 2022). Santos and Cazzamatta (2025) did study mediated conversations and news geographies within BRICS, but the studies remain scarce on the communicative dimensions. 

The authors note that the gap is particularly striking when it comes to China and India, the two largest economies in the grouping, and the two most populous countries in the world. They have different media systems: China state-driven and  India commercially driven – with the caveat that the press is not fully autonomous in India either. 

For this study, the authors adopt a distinction between proactive and reactive coverage of the BRICS. This distinction also connects with theories of media-politics relations, such as how media builds agendas (Cobb and Elder 1971) . The authors then operationalized them through four dimensions: temporal orientation, main agency, reporting focus, and sourcing patterns.

In “temporal orientation”, proactive coverage was future-oriented and focused on building, while reactive was event-driven and dealt with responses. When it comes to “main agency”, proactive coverage focused on BRICS members, while reactive dealt with outside powers like the West.

Further, in “reporting focus”, proactive coverage focused on internal affairs and building institutions, and reactive on external events, conflict, and crises. Sourcing patterns revealed that proactive focused on internal sources, reactive on external. However, the authors do stress that all the categories should be understood as a continuum, rather than clearly delineated categories. 

For analysis, the authors selected four newspapers: China Daily, People’s Daily Online, The Hindu, and The Times of India, selected for their prominence, and chose articles mentioning “BRICS” from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2024. This enabled some longitudinal perspective.

The results revealed differences in the Chinese and the Indian coverage. The Chinese coverage was balanced (45.8% proactive, 54.2% reactive)  but showed peaks of proactivity during summit periods. In contrast, the Indian coverage leaned towards reactive (23.7% proactive, 76.3% reactive). BRICS was framed there largely through external issues like the Ukraine war and India’s balancing role. 

While analysing the differences, the authors come up with the realization that not only do China and India report BRICS differently, they appear to also perceive it differently. However, there were also similarities, such as the peak in coverage during summits.

In conclusion, the study makes three contributions: it extends scholarship of BRICS to communicative dimensions; develops the proactive-reactive analysis lens and applies it; and finally, it contributes to debates in international communication by showing how different media systems affect it.

The article “Proactive or reactive? A comparative study of BRICS media narratives in China and India” by Anilesh Kumar and Hao Sun is in the International Communication Gazette. (Free abstract). 

Picture: 18ª BRICS Summit 2026, New Delhi, India. From Wikipedia.