China was long filed under “too foreign, too dangerous, too different” in many Western newsrooms. Not anymore. Beijing is now impossible to ignore, and only now are many Western media outlets starting to realise it.

A phenomenon noted by Beijing-based current affairs commentator Jianlu Bi in March this year in the South China Morning Post, the annual spectacle of China’s “two sessions”, was treated in Western newsrooms as a political theatre piece of sorts - performed on a stage of secrecy and state control.

Foreign correspondents would often - and still do for the most part - file dispatches heavy with scepticism, searching for cracks behind the slogans. Yet this year, a quiet shift was evident. This came not in the form of a softening of the smirks behind the copy, but a recalibration in recognition of Beijing’s progress.

China’s economic machine is still watched with hawk-like intensity, but the tone in major Western outlets is no longer uniformly acid, Bi says. In research he conducted with colleagues monitoring keyword trends across 10 leading UK and US media outlets a pattern was noticed. In 2019, around 70% of stories on the Chinese economy, tech sector or environmental policy came across with a negative tone. Six years later, however, that number had dropped to around 40%.

According to Bi, the number of neutral reports are rising across all areas with positive-toned economic coverage also edging up.

Commenting on the same issue, albeit slightly more directly, a former resident of China and Bne partner, Arnaud Bertrand, posting on X recently said “Even The Economist, the poster child of “China bad” coverage who hilariously have predicted China’s collapse almost every year for the past 3 decades, entitled their latest issue “Why China is winning the trade war,” before adding, somewhat sardonically “Quite the incredible reversal of narrative to anyone familiar with their editorial line.”

The shift is not, as Bi suggests, a sudden bout of media admiration. Rather, Western newsrooms covering China, Japan and South Korea - long dominated by a revolving cast of veteran correspondents shuttling between ‘Far East’ postings and Western capitals - are being dragged, somewhat reluctantly, into the present.

That they are being forced to come face-to-face with a more layered understanding of China’s economic and technological heft does not always go down well.

Media seen as de-facto representatives of their nations by governments across Asia are no longer able to dismiss China’s performance as scripted or superficial. The numbers tell their own story, and they are becoming harder and harder to wave away.

In 2024, consumption drove nearly half of China’s GDP expansion - outpacing both investment and exports. Electric vehicle (EV) uptake soared by roughly 40% year-on-year, powered by an aggressive state strategy to boost domestic demand. This sector in particular shows no sign of abating any time soon and is booming across much of East and Southeast Asia. Special sovereign bonds and “trade-in” drives are being deployed not as throwaway gimmicks, Bi adds, but as pillars in a coordinated push to keep households spending and businesses moving.

Meanwhile, in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley and the corridors of Brussels, another reality is setting in: China’s technology ecosystem is no longer merely “catching up”. It is competing, and, in some sectors, leading.

The startling rise of domestic AI models like DeepSeek, alongside the continued surge of Huawei are two key examples cited. Both have forced Western capitals to acknowledge that the global innovation race is no longer a one-horse sprint to the finish. There will never be a finish and a nation like China, used to playing the long-game, knows this and plans accordingly. To this end, with in excess of four million 5G base stations now operational around the country, China’s digital infrastructure is expanding at a clip Western telecom planners can only dream of. That it may – or may not – be used for purposes such as monitoring populations in some areas, while a valid story in itself, needs to be tempered when covering the bigger picture.

Then there is the climate front. China today produces a reported 80% or so of the world’s solar panels. This is a phenomenal industrial dominance that gives Beijing what many in the West looking for the negative angle deem unfair leverage over the global energy transition. The country’s EV and hybrid vehicle market is also booming and as a result is rewriting the international auto market.

Added to this, for Western policymakers scrambling to meet emissions targets, China is no longer simply a polluter to criticise through media friends. Instead, Beijing must be seen as a competitor, a supplier and, increasingly, a benchmark – and this is happening - slowly.

Western critics by way of their domestic media outlets with international reach do, quite rightly, still point to coal use as a problem in China. Yet while China’s fossil fuel dependence remains a gaping contradiction in its green narrative, to pretend its renewable push is cosmetic is to ignore the largest expansion of clean-energy capacity anywhere on Earth.

Crucially, China’s model contrasts sharply with the policy spasms seen in Washington, where tariff whiplash and election-cycle politics create whirling uncertainty. Beijing’s long-range planning - rigid to a fault, critics argue - nevertheless offers a stability increasingly valued by investors weary of ideological left-right lurches in the West and associated supply-chain tantrums.

For Western media, the challenge is therefore less ideological and more existential: how to report China with rigour without defaulting to reflexive derision. As Bertrand says “Multipolarity makes understanding mandatory: the West can no longer afford the luxury of misunderstanding China. The cost has become too high.”

One individual of note with an apparent understanding to this end is US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth. Posting on X on November 2, Hegseth wrote “I just spoke to President Trump, and we agree - the relationship between the United States and China has never been better” continuing “Following President Trump’s historic meeting with Chairman Xi in South Korea, I had an equally positive meeting with my counterpart, China’s Minister of National Defense Admiral Dong Jun in Malaysia. And we spoke again last night. The Admiral and I agree that peace, stability, and good relations are the best path for our two great and strong countries.”

That two of the most powerful men in the Western hemisphere - Trump and Hegseth - are waking up to China as an equal is groundbreaking, and must be treated as such. No longer can the US or wider Western world or its media, look down on Beijing.

Whether Hegseth’s next claim that “As President Trump said, his historic “G2 meeting” set the tone for everlasting peace and success for the US and China. The Department of War will do the same - peace through strength, mutual respect, and positive relations” proves true in the long-run will be for future generations and journalists to comment upon.

When Hegseth then closed “The Department of War will do the same - peace through strength, mutual respect, and positive relations. Admiral Dong and I also agreed that we should set up military-to-military channels to deconflict and de-escalate any problems that arise. We have more meetings on that coming soon” it is at least an indicator that the man with the US' nuclear launch codes is viewing China as on a par with the US.

How this ends up being reported by CNN, Fox, and the New York Times stateside vis-a-vis Jianlu Bi’s positive VS negative China-reporting breakdown though, will only be apparent as the week unfolds.

For now, as long-time China watchers in Asia are well aware, the country is not collapsing, and will not collapse in the future. Nor is it conquering the world. And as any long-time journalist covering the region worth his or her salt will explain - perhaps in hushed tones if on an all-expenses paid Western media posting - China is evolving. So too must the global conversation around it, both in government circles and through the media.