A narrative analysis of a data journalism article: From local to global, from villagers to states

The case of Frontier magazine and its investigation into the powerful Chinese economic influence on Myanmar

“Power play. How Chinese money damned Myanmar’s economic transition” is an investigation published by a journalistic team in Frontier magazine in September 2019 that details the difficulties facing Myanmar as a result of the strong Chinese economic influence in the country.

Myanmar is a politically unstable, low-income state in Southeast Asia, severely lacking in infrastructure, but rich in natural resources. In the last 15 years, China has intensified its investments in Myanmar, mainly in infrastructure and other industries such as energy, garment, tourism and agriculture. As a consequence, the country has increased its dependence on the Asian giant, from where, in addition, the vast majority of its imports come from.

The genre of this article is journalistic investigation. Frontier is a Myanmar news and business magazine that deals primarily with national business and politics. It was founded in 2015, shortly after the decades-long censorship of the media eased somewhat. From the topics it works with, it can be deduced that Frontier’s audience is made up of highly educated people interested in business and politics, and critics of the military government that came to power since February after a coup. It is a publication in English language which indicates its strong commitment to an international audience.

The authors divided the story into four parts, to explain the different facets of the problem, and used both visual and written modes. Although mostly text, the article is accompanied by numerous visual resources such as photographs, maps and graphics, which complement the story. Several of them are interactive and encourage the users to participate, which causes a greater identification with the story.

Characters, setting and time: a camera that travels from micro to macro

The characters are presented in different levels.

In the first level there are people identified by name and surname, who represent ordinary citizens directly affected by the economic situation. At a second level there are political actors, such as the Burmese government and armed ethnic groups fighting for control of the territory. At a third level there are economic actors: the most important are Chinese companies that, directly or through companies from other countries, invest in Myanmar. At a fourth level, the protagonists are states: the main actors here are Myanmar and China, but the story is projected globally, given the role that China plays in the world market and the extension of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a ambitious investment plan in countries of the global south with the aim of developing trade. Finally, from a lateral perspective, which vertically crosses all these levels, there are international specialists in economics and development, who provide a qualified perspective on the topic.

The setting follows the same logic of the characters, that is, of increasingly wide concentric circles that go from small to large, from local to global. From a Burmese village, to the region, the country, and finally the global south.

What drives the narrative forward — and upward — is a permanent zoom-out movement. The story begins with the focus on Dawng Hkawng, a village administrator in the mountains of northern Myanmar from which he was displaced to allow the construction of a Chinese-funded hydroelectric plant that has been never completed. The camera then begins to move away and focuses first on the village, then on the region, where the energy infrastructure is non-existent, and finally on the country as a whole and its dependency from China.

When the lens is on ordinary citizens — something similar happens later with U Sein Kyaw, a pineapple farmer who was forced to let his harvest rot because China had restricted the import of pineapple — the text is accompanied by photographs of them, to give a feeling of closeness. But as the story progresses towards higher levels of abstraction and the hard data appears — number of dams to be built, volume of investments, etc. — the text is complemented with graphics and other visual resources.

The logic that guides the narrative zoom out movement is always conflict. A conflict that is repeated both at the individual level — the men left homeless by the dams or without resources by customs barriers — and at the global level, between the powerful China and the less wealthy states that are under its sphere of influence. The ideas are always the same all along the article: dependency, powerlessness, the unequal struggle of dwarfs against giants.

Temporality also shifts, although in a more discontinuous way. The authors narrate events from the present, but repeatedly use the strategy of going back to the past. For example, to explain when Chinese investment began or what the different political regimes that governed the country were like. The objective is to contextualize what happens and give the story greater argumentative density.

A short critical review on Frontier’s piece

The work published in Frontier is very interesting and successfully combines visual and written languages. These resources, together with the movement of zooming out from local to global, help to explain the story and insert it in a more general context. This article is a good example of how to make a investigation based on data much more interesting and attractive for the audience.

While acknowledging these achievements, it is also worth highlighting some aspects that, in my opinion, could be improved.

First, the article is preceded by a three-paragraph introduction that anticipates what the problem is about and takes a strong position on it. I think it would have been better, instead, to let each reader draw their own conclusions throughout the reading. In terms of storytelling, it is much more interesting to let the story — and the characters — speak for themselves.

Secondly, more voices of ordinary citizens, such as Dawng Hkawng and U Sein Kyaw, are needed to humanize the narrative with their personal stories. These characters appear very briefly, almost as an excuse — in fact, we only know that they lost their home or their job — and having dedicated more space to their life stories would have enriched the piece and involved readers more.

Remarkably, there is no official voice of the Myanmar government in the entire text. This absence can be justified perhaps by the difficult conditions for journalists in the country and the strong control over the media -although the article was published during a democratic stage-, but it weakens the investigation a bit. There are also no testimonies from specialists from Myanmar itself, as most of the ones who gave their opinion belong to Western think tanks and organizations. That opens a possible flank for criticism from anti-colonial positions.

Finally, a small comment about how the article ends.

At its end, the text makes a double narrative movement: it turns the focus back to the local and, for the first time, it also looks into the future. Dawng Hkawng reappears, so that the reader does not forget that behind the states and the companies and the hydroelectric plants, it is the people who suffer. There is also a reference to the uncertainty of the future: “… [he] has no say in the BRI negotiations, and he can only wait for his fate to be determined. For him, the deals Myanmar strikes with China could mean a better future, or they could mean losing everything.”

This is a type of structure widely used in journalism to conclude a story. The problem is not only that it can be considered a cliché, a commonplace, a lazy way to finish a piece, but it also weakens the text precisely at the end, at the moment when it should be most solid.