Framing the Pandemic: Self and Other Representations in China Daily’ s COVID-19 Coverage

Abstract

The present study focuses on China Daily’s COVID-19 pandemic reporting to explore how the Self and Others (US, UK, Japan, and Africa) are constructed by Chinese mainstream media and discusses the possible reasons for those constructions. A corpus of news titles in the column “The global fight against COVID-19” on China Daily’s official website is investigated within the framework of the transitivity system of systemic functional linguistics. The study suggests that, through the linguistic resources of the transitivity system, China Daily builds shared images of Actors and Victims for both the Self and Others, with China being the most typical actor and the US and the UK the most typical victims. It also constructs salient images of Helper, Senser, and Soldier for China, Japan, and Africa respectively. Based on these findings, we argue that positivity is much more salient than negativity in China’s pandemic reporting and that besides national interests, Confucianism, the self-perception of a large country, and the sentimentality rooted in Chinese culture may have influenced China Daily’s portrayal of such international configuration.