The news prism of nationalism versus globalism: How does the US, UK and Chinese elite press cover ‘China’s rise’?

Abstract

China has regularly claimed to have been intentionally and systematically misrepresented by Western media. That said, their general characterization of China is said to see improvement with the initial impetus coming from Beijing's hosting of Olympic Games in 2008. China's representation in Western media has now entered what many observers considered to be an 'age of uncertainty', and it differs greatly from China's projected self-image. This study examines US, UK versus Chinese media coverage of 'China's rise' from 2009 to 2017. Our analysis entails a 2.2 million-word corpus of news texts retrieved from six leading national newspapers. A combination of computerassisted corpus linguistics methods with critical discourse analysis was used to identify and compare linguistic elements as well as the structural dimensions that denote the journalistic positioning across large corpora. We argue that the globalist positioning stands in a dialectical relationship to the nationalist positioning. Globalism may be used to frame press narratives when it is viewed as suiting national interest, and this dynamic differs between the United States, the United Kingdom and China.

Comparing across languages in corpus and discourse analysis: some issues and approaches

“…Corpus linguistics provides some tools for accomplishing this level of categorisation with semantic tagging. For instance, Song, Chin-Chuan, et al (2019) use WMatrix (Rayson 2008) to compare US, UK, and Chinese media coverage of "China's rise" from 2009 to 2017. Using a form of keyness analysis, they find that four semantic categories in the Chinese corpus outnumber those in the Anglo-American corpus: abstract terms; relationship and social actions; science, technology and culture; and communication.…”

Boris Johnson in hospital: a Chinese gaze at Western democracies in the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Nowadays, the prosperity of the global economy is increasingly reliant on strong relations between China and major Western democracies (Guo et al, 2019). Yet, existing studies of international politics have largely taken China as a research object and analysed it using theoretical approaches developed upon Western experiences of capitalism, democracy and national identity formation (Chan and Lee, 2017; Song et al, 2019). To date, limited scholarly attention has been paid to how Western democratic politics is perceived and understood in the Chinese context (Lin, 2020; Peng et al, 2020; Zhang, 2020b).…”

Globalism or Nationalism? The Paradox of Chinese Official Discourse in the Context of the COVID-19 Outbreak

“…Due to the media ecology in China, the official media outlets portray China as a cooperative, responsible power in combating the global pandemic relative to some irresponsible, incapable Western powers such as the United States, which has been reflected in both globalist and nationalist discourses in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak. While the simultaneous promotion of globalism and nationalism appears to be paradoxical at first, the discursive constructions of globalism and nationalism go hand in hand with each other [37,43], as both are constructed based on the same logic of the "us" and "them" dichotomization and harmonized in sustaining the legitimacy of the CCP at home and enhancing the international reputation of China under the leadership of the CCP on the world stage [53]. While the existing literature suggests that that audience design influences and determines the choice of concepts and words familiar to the target audience [45], the Chinese English-language media has never intended to address the distinctiveness of international audiences because the discursive content in the English corpus is merely a mirror of the Chinese news texts.…”

“…CDA can be broadly defined as an academic movement or a method of conducting discourse analysis from a critical perspective [5]. CDA has been widely adopted to explore concepts such as power, ideology, and domination [2,5] and is particularly suited for understanding the role of language in the construction of power relations, exclusion, values, and identities in news texts [53]. We are aware of the many CDA approaches with their different research focuses and adopt the discourse-historical approach (DHA)-a major variant of CDA primarily concerned with identifying the themes of a given discourse, adopting detailed analysis of linguistic and discursive strategies, and examining how these discursive practices contribute to shaping particular social relationships and identity constructions [59].…”