A Topic-Modelling-Assisted Discourse Study of DiDi’s Delisting from the New York Stock Exchange in Anglo-American Media Coverage

ABSTRACT

The Chinese giant ride-hailing company DiDi announced its delisting from the New York Stock Exchange in 2021. The event gained widespread attention from the Western media, signalling China’s defense in data security by restricting tech giants’ offshore listings. This study aims to make explicit the discursive construction of this event among 300 news reports through topic modelling and critical discourse analysis. The analyses showed that the event is recontextualised through four prominent topics: Government intervention, Law enforcement, Financial market response and Impacts on Chinese tech giants. DiDi’s delisting is discursively constructed as more than a case of failed overseas financial activity, but as a threat to the existing financial world order dominated mainly by Western world. Growing concern has been raised as to whether cybersecurity may become an emerging battleground, particularly in a climate of heightened tensions between the U.S. and China on the economic and political fronts. The findings are interpreted with regard to the deep-embedded ideological divergence between socialism and capitalism and also the practical socio-political concerns between the two competing powers. This study also demonstrates the feasibility of incorporating the topic-modelling approach into discourse studies.

KEYWORDS:

• DiDi’s delisting
• media portrayal
• corpus-assisted discourse study
• topic modelling
• critical discourse analysis
• ideological stance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The choice of different number of topics is likely to produce different results in topic modeling (Jaworska and Nanda 2018). Three and five topics were considered for a preliminary tryout. However, the former may only provide a coarse overview of the event, while the latter produce more detailed topics that are hard to be labeled.

2 According to Article 6 of the Constitution, “ … In the primary stage of socialism, the state upholds the basic economic system with public ownership remaining dominant and diverse forms of ownership side by side.” In other words, it means besides upholding the state-owned enterprises sectors, private ownership is also encouraged (see Ding 2009).

Additional information

Funding

This study is supported by The National Social Science Fund of China from National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences (Grant Number 20BYY081).