Over the last two decades, since the Korean government’s implementing the autonomy of the local governments, they have been making significant efforts to improve their images to establish beneficial brandings. At a time of global economic crisis and illiberal world order, establishing favorable global images and brandings seems to be a vital task for enhancing the local governments’ competitiveness. Busan Metropolitan City, one of the largest local governments in Korea, has received both positive and negative feedback from inside and outside of Korea. For instance, the positive evaluation came from considering this city as a tourist destination, and the negative one received from the city’s life quality, possibility as an international financial center, and global urban competitiveness. Consequently, this paper seeks to probe how the perceptions of Busan Metropolitan City was established in South Korea’s major newspapers. For guaranteeing objective comparative analysis, this paper also collected and reviewed the news coverage of Busan’s major sister city-Shanghai, China. This research had three prominent findings. First, the representations of both cities could not properly establish their urban brandings, but establish the images of their host countries. Second, such representations instead built negative images. Finally, the negative evaluation and decline of city branding might have been caused by the media representation since the media’s coverage was inclined to focus on a conflict situation. To explore the root cause of such obstacle, this study finally suggests a more thorough analysis on domestic and local public awareness and media representations.
