Media Agenda Diversity and Intermedia Agenda Setting in a Controlled Media Environment: A Computational Analysis of China’s Online News

China's online news environment is complex and rapidly changing. The paper explores the diversity of China's online news landscape and questions whether it remains dominated by the official news sources. Based on two agenda-setting concepts-media agenda diversity and intermedia agenda setting, the study examined how China's official and commercial news websites covered the Two Sessions, China's biggest annual political event, and how they influenced each other's agenda. Both supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods were employed to analyze 33,875 articles from 291 online news sources in March 2017. Results showed that commercial news websites demonstrated a higher level of media agenda diversity in covering the political event than their official counterparts. It also appeared that news websites of different types had a significant reciprocal relationship in their reporting, suggesting that the controlled media environment may not be completely dominated by the official discourse.