Discoursal Conflicts: Reports on China's Handling of Covid-19 among Chinese and Western Media Representations

This research addresses how western main media and Chinese main media report China's handling of Covid-19 differently. By employing corpus software like Sketch Engine and AntConc, this paper attempts to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze Western and Chinese mainstream news outlets' reports on China's response to Covid-19 through online Coronavirus Corpus and self-designed Western mainstream media and Chinese mainstream media corpora covering NYT, FT, Xinhua News, China Daily, Global Times, etc. from January to December 2020. Results reveal that English language media including mainstream news outlets in US and UK employs strong discriminatory dictions ideologically and frequently and they are different in report focus compared with Chinese media. And Chinese media maintain strong confidence in the path and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Such differences in news reports are highly related to the decisions, measures, and effects of the UK, the US and Chinese governments’ different ways of handling Covid-19.