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.
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
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.