Framing China in Conflict Reporting: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Transitivity in Chinese and Western Media

This study employs a corpus-based critical discourse analysis (CDA) grounded in Halliday’s transitivity framework to investigate how China’s diplomatic stance is discursively constructed within conflict reporting. Focusing on media coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian War and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (2023), the study investigates how Chinese and Western mainstream media depict China’s stance. Based on a self-built corpus of 153 news reports and analyzed via AntConc, the study quantitatively and qualitatively identifies distinct patterns in the use of transitivity processes across the two corpora. The research reveals that Chinese media highlight the outlook for future peace-building initiatives, portraying China as a country that resists war, supports peace, and maintains a dignified stance. In contrast, the image of China depicted by Western media is more complex, often framing China as friendly with Russia and deliberately promoting war escalation. This study provides a new perspective on the ideological dimensions of different media discourses in conflict reporting, helping people understand how language shapes public perception within a broad cultural context. By revealing how grammatical choices encode ideological positions, the findings offer critical insights for media literacy and cross-cultural communication in an era of geopolitical tension.