The depoliticization of law in the news: BBC reporting on US use of extraterritorial or ‘long-arm’ law against China

ABSTRACT

In this paper we explore how a public national media outlet, the British BBC, represents an international legal case which has a highly political nature. The case is US versus Huawei/Meng Wanzhou, which took place between 2018 and 2021. Accusations were that the Chinese technology company committed fraud, leading the global HSBC bank to breach US sanctions against Iran. The charges were made by the US using what is called an ‘extraterritorial law’, which, while rejected as law by governments around the world, is policed by US economic powers and control over international finance. Using Critical Discourse Analysis we show that, while the BBC presents much detail of legal process, the actual nature of the law the US uses to bring criminal charges against international companies and banks, is neither considered nor questioned. Our interest is how such a law, which has a huge influence over global trade and politics, is presented to the public in this particular case. We contribute to the position that the nature of laws, how they are used and known, must always be understood within the prevailing discourses of the moment.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• United States
• trade war
• critical discourse analysis
• law
• extraterritorial jurisdiction
• Huawei
• BBC
• news

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Le Cheng

Le Cheng is a Chair Professor of Guanghua Law School and a concurrent professor of School of International Studies at Zhejiang University. He is Executive Vice Dean of Zhejiang University's Academy of International Strategy and Law, and Vice Chairman of Cybersecurity Strategy and Law Committee of China. Additionally, he is Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Legal Discourse and Co-editor of Social Semiotics. Among others, he is the Principal Investigator of the Major Project of National Social Science Foundation (Establishing and Perfecting the Comprehensive System of Cyber Governance). He has published widely in discourse studies, semiotics, law and cyber studies.

Xiaobin Zhu

Xiaobin Zhu is a doctoral Student with an interest in media representations of international law.

David Machin

David Machin is Professor of Linguistics in the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications and Shanghai University of where he teaches courses on Multimodality and Critical Discourse Studies. His books include Doing Visual Analysis (2018) and Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (2020).