A war or merely friction? Examining news reports on the current Sino-U.S. trade dispute in The New York Times and China Daily

ABSTRACT

The ongoing Sino-U.S. trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies has since 2018 attracted much attention from the international media. This study used the approach of corpus-assisted discourse studies to compare how leading English-language newspapers from each side—The New York Times (NYT) and China Daily (CD) — discursively constructed this issue. The findings indicated that while NYT tended to profile the trade conflict as a ‘war’ in line with mainstream hard-line ideologies that emphasize China’s presumed threat to national security of the U.S., CD sought to dial down the rhetoric and showed a preference for defining the matter as a ‘friction’, consistent with the tenet of ‘pragmatic nationalism’ endorsed by the Communist Party of China. Accordingly, the two newspapers framed the causes, moral evaluation/consequences, and treatment of the issue in congruence with their respective dominant metaphors by means of various linguistic patterns. These differences are interpreted with regard to each side’s underlying ideologies and national interests.

KEYWORDS:

• Sino-U.S. trade dispute
• ideology
• critical discourse studies
• The New York Times
• China Daily

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Retrieved on February 4, 2020 from https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3046068/chinas-imports-us-fell-fifth-2019-trade-war-stripped-away.

2 The word war ranked 106th in terms of keyness in the NYT corpus. It was also included here as no other words within the top 100 keywords were related to ‘problem definition’ in this corpus.

3 Retrieved on February 4, 2020 from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china/china-says-wants-calm-resolution-to-u-s-trade-war-idUSKCN1VG03C.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Shanghai Social Science Planning Project (General Project): [Grant Number 2020BYY003]; Major Project of National Social Science Fund of China: [Grant Number 17ZDA318].

Notes on contributors

Fu Chen

Fu Chen, Ph.D., is a lecturer at Foreign Languages College, Shanghai Normal University. His research interests include corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis.

Guofeng Wang

Guofeng Wang is a professor of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Foreign Languages College, Shanghai Normal University, China. She received her Ph.D. in English Language and Linguistics from Shanghai International Studies University and worked as a post-doctorate researcher at the College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University and a visiting scholar at Monterey Institute of International Studies. Her research interests include discourse studies and media studies, specifically the interrelationship between discourse, media and society. She published several related articles in Social Semiotics, Discourse and Society and Critical Discourse Studies.