Competing discursive constructions of China’s smog in Chinese and Anglo-American English-language newspapers: A corpus-assisted discourse study

Abstract

This article presents a corpus-assisted discourse study of the representations of China’s smog in one Chinese (i.e. China Daily) and three Anglo-American (i.e. The New York Times, The Times and The Guardian) English-language newspapers from 2011 to 2014. The findings suggest that they converge in representing China’s smog as a kind of severe air pollution that has some consequences on residents in China and poses a problem that the government must tackle. However, the Chinese English-language newspaper prefers to represent it as a kind of weather phenomenon without serious impact on public health and to construct a positive and responsible image of the Chinese central government. The Anglo-American English-language newspapers are inclined to dramatize it as a disaster with a huge health impact, and construct a negative image of the Chinese government with a view to pressurizing it to take responsibility in the context of climate change.