Social Sciences & Humanities Open 7 (2023) 100435

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Social Sciences & Humanities Open

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Regular Article

Contrasting semantic and sentimental features between Chinese and

American economic news discourse in the epidemic era: A corpus-based
critical discourse analysis
Luanying Li a, *, Fei Gao b, c
a
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China
b
Institute of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China
c
Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: The COVID -19 pandemic, as a global health emergency, has attracted a great deal of attention from the in­
Critical discourse analysis ternational community. In this context, China attaches great importance to economic development and news
COVID-19 coverage because the economy concerns people’s interests, while media coverage of the economy plays a crucial
Economic news
role in influencing citizens’ attitudes and even social stability. While researchers from different disciplines are
Three-dimensional model
News coverage
studying the epidemic, such as education, mental health, and vaccines, existing research into the media discourse
of COVID-19 is limited, especially regarding its semantic and sentimental features, and it remains unclear
whether the coverage of media news in different countries would draw on varying lenses. To this end, this study
constructed a corpus of Chinese and American news reports from January 2020 to August 2021 and analyzed the
meaning, lexicality, affective polarity, and theme extraction. Our results suggested that the mainstream media in
China and the United States show opposite attitudes toward the same economic situation in China. Further, we
interpreted this discrepancy in light of the "explanation" component of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model.
Such inconsistencies could relate to the differences in cultural backgrounds, modes of operation, and news
philosophies between the two countries. Thus, by using a corpus-based approach combined with critical
discourse analysis (CDA), our study not only broadens the scope of news discourse analysis, but also advances our
understandings of the semantic and sentimental features of news coverage during COVID-19 and the possible
reasons behind the differences between countries from a more macro perspective.

1. Introduction
The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 in 2019 sent the death toll and
infection rate skyrocketing, and the World Health Organization (WHO)
quickly responded by declaring a global emergency. This virus exploded
in a short period of time, covering China and almost every other world
region (Secon, Woodward, & Mosher, 2020). In the context of the
ongoing outbreak of COVID-19, the mainstream media in China and
other countries have widely reported on the virus, which constituted a
critical window for the public to learn about the relevant information.
As one of the information dissemination channels, mainstream media
news needs to release policies to the public to maintain the regular
operation of society. Yet, it remains unsolved how to properly identify
ideologies in a large number of news reports (Li, 2020). To address this
issue, this study focuses on China’s economic news from the research
mentioned above, since economic development is closely related to
people’s lives, and the coverage of economic news can better reflect the
country’s position and ideology (Liu, 2017). In particular, COVID-19 not
only brought about a global public health crisis that threatened human
lives and survival, but also resulted in the world free trade disorder, the
global economic downturn, and employment problems. In China, many
small companies were closed during the epidemic, while the cost of
trading, storage, and logistics increased for large companies, which
made them reduce their labor demand, thus affecting the employment
situation in China. As a response, China issued a series of policies to
stabilize the economy and used the mainstream media to inform citizens
of the overall state of the economy. At the same time, some mainstream
media in other countries were also reporting China’s situation from

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: yc17322@umac.mo (L. Li).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2023.100435
Received 23 June 2022; Received in revised form 18 January 2023; Accepted 2 February 2023
Available online 7 February 2023
2590-2911/© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/4.0/).
L. Li and F. Gao
various aspects. However, it remains unclear whether views, attitudes,
and opinions from different countries that reported on the Chinese
economy during the epidemic would resemble or differ from that of
China’s media. Although the principle of news reporting is to present
events objectively, it consciously emphasizes certain facts that represent
the special interests of individuals or groups, and the meaning behind
the discourse can be understood by analyzing news discourse through
critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Zhang, Akhtar, Farooq, Yuan, & Khan,
2022). Therefore, this study uses a combination of corpus linguistics
(CL) and CDA to investigate the differences in news coverage in the
official news media in China and the American and the reasons behind
them. The quantitative nature of the texts used in CL (Sinclair & Sinclair,
1991) is seen as highly objective compared to the subjective in­
terpretations applied when conducting CDA (Fowler, 2013). As thus, the
fusion of CL and CDA allows for a more extensive database, which could
further minimize the potential researcher bias and subjectivity arising
from applying CDA alone.
2. Literature review
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, scholars of linguistics and
communication from different countries have been examining the rela­
tionship between COVID-19 and discourse (Debnath & Bardhan, 2020).
The research on media and discourse related to COVID -19 concentrated
on two main areas. The first line of research is concerned with the
impact of social media discourse on people during the epidemic (e.g.,
He, Deng, Yang, & Li, 2022; Li, Hua, & Gao, 2023). In the current
COVID-19 pandemic, social media has the potential to provide a fast and
effective way to spread the news if used responsibly and appropriately,
and social media is critical to the way the public experiences news and
shares medical information. However, the positive side of social media
comes with a negative impact, as some scholars have found that
misinformation spreads much more quickly, calling on society to rely on
educated scientists and physicians to be leaders in providing fact-based
information to the public (Shu, Sliva, Wang, Tang, & Liu, 2017).
Therefore, in times of crisis, it is important that social media directs
correct and valuable information and knowledge to the public in the
search of answers (Chan, Nickson, Rudolph, Lee, & Joynt, 2020; Ven­
egas-Vera, Colbert, & Lerma, 2020). Apart from this, some studies
looked at a particular country to explore the impact of social media on
the local people. Obi-Ani, Anikwenze, and Isiani (2020) looked at the
pros and cons of the role of social media in misleading the public about
pandemics such as COVID-19 from the perspective of Nigerians. Ahmad
and Murad (2020) examined how social media affects self-reported
mental health and the spread of panic about COVID-19 in the Kurdi­
stan Region of Iraq.
The second aspect is to analyze mainstream media discourse from the
perspective of CDA, which is commonly used to analyze media language
due to its origins in the U.K. and its rapid development in Europe
(Al-Hejin, 2007; Baker et al., 2008). Dezhkameh (2021) sampled 56
representative news articles from one Iranian and one American news­
paper, The Tehran Times and The New York Times (from January 2020 to
the end of January 2021), respectively. This study’s most significant
implication is to raise readers’ and scholars’ awareness of the need to
look critically at news articles to avoid the harmful effects of ideological
propaganda (Dezhkameh, Layegh, & Hadidi, 2021). Joharry and Turi­
man (2020) examined letters submitted to Star Online (Malaysia’s
leading English language online news portal) during the Movement
Control Order to explore how Malaysian citizens responded to
COVID-19. Ängsal (2021) identified news media coverage of COVID-19
in four mainstream Swedish media outlets and analyzed the structure
and role of experts. Their findings effectively suggested who has trusted
experts on COVID-19. Yu (2022) used CDA to study how Chinese official
media resisted the issue of COVID-19’s communication. The findings
showed that Chinese official media constructed a discourse of resistance
in response to COVID-19 in order to shape China’s national image and
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Social Sciences & Humanities Open 7 (2023) 100435
convey geopolitical messages to the world. Importantly, extant research
on COVID-19 discourse has focused on discourse on social media, while
research on mainstream media from the CDA approach has been limited
to an analysis of coverage of COVID-19 in Western countries. There is a
lack of comparative studies between the mainstream media in different
countries during the epidemic. This study thus presents a comparative
analysis of Chinese and American news, which could reflect the ideo­
logical differences and pave the way for further exploration of the
discursive characteristics of news coverage in different countries (Yu,
Lu, & Hu, 2021). Meanwhile, this study combines quantitative and
qualitative methods to have a more extensive database and minimize
researcher bias. We raise the following two questions to fill this research
gap.
1. What are the different perspectives and focuses of Chinese and
American media coverage of China’s employment, manufacturing
development, and economic structure rationalization during the
epidemic?
2. What factors led to the difference in news reports between China and
the America during the epidemic?
3. Theoretical background
CDA emerged in the late 1980s, and since then became one of the
most influential and visible branches of discourse analysis (Blommaert &
Bulcaen, 2000). Van Dijk (2013) pointed out that the meaning of a text
comes from the ideology of its social actors because language is not a
neutral tool of communication but a powerful tool that reflects the
ideology of social actors through lexical, syntactic, and discursive
choices. At the same time, it views language as a social practice, arguing
that language reflects social reality and acts back on society, con­
structing reality, social relations, and people’s perceptions. In short, the
central idea of CDA is to explore the relationship between a text and the
context in which it is embedded. CDA sets out to unravel the hidden
ideology of discourse by exposing the tools manipulated by social actors
to achieve this goal (Van Dijk, 2013). In the late 1970s, the CDA method
was used to analyze the mass media, through which news could be
analyzed to explore the meaning behind the news discourse.
In the development of CDA, Fairclough and Wodak (1995)’s
socio-cultural analysis not only provided a new perspective on discourse
analysis, but also a new approach to analyzing language use in news
reporting (Zhou & Qin, 2020). Specifically, Fairclough introduced that
CDA emphasizes the links between social practice and language and the
systematic investigation of the links between the nature of social pro­
cesses and the properties of language texts (Fairclough, 1995). Its
three-dimensional model of CDA mainly includes three conceptions: 1) a
language text, spoken or written; 2) discourse practice (text production
and text interpretation); 3) socio-cultural practice. First, discourse starts
from a written or spoken text, which results from the textual output, not
the process that is valued first. Moreover, because of the ideological
properties behind speech, discourse is seen more as a sociocultural
practice, with power struggles behind it. The bridge between discourse
as a linguistic text and sociocultural practice is discursive practice,
which is one of the qualities that distinguishes Fairclough’s CDA from
other modes of discourse analysis. Based on this, Fairclough further
proposes a "three-dimensional view of discourse analysis", which in­
cludes "description, interpretation and explanation" (Fairclough, 2013).
The analysis of the formal features of the text was mainly in the stage of
description. The discussion of the relationship between text and inter­
action gained more attention in the interpretation stage, and the
explanation of the relationship between interaction and society was
mainly in the stage of explanation. This study focuses on the explana­
tion, the theory’s last stage, which mainly explains the production and
interpretation of discourse from the macro level. Since discourse was the
product of society, the generation of discourse was bound to be affected
by the social-cultural environment. Therefore, in the context of the
L. Li and F. Gao
information age, the application of CDA to news analysis can be used to
reveal misinformation and discrimination in various modes of public
discourse and to further understand the meaning of discourse (Zhang
et al., 2022).
4. Methodology
4.1. Theoretical framework
In this study, CDA and CL are combined to explore the differences
between Chinese and American media coverage and the reasons for the
differences. A corpus is usually a collection of linguistic material
collected for language research and stored electronically, which is
gathered from natural samples of written or spoken language. A corpus
of appropriate size can describe the use of language and discover the
rules of language use (Kennedy, 2014). In the development of CDA, the
objectivity and credibility of the analysis have been questioned due to
the small size of texts studied, the arbitrary selection of the corpus, and
the lack of systematic linguistic evidence for the interpretation of the
discourse. To remedy the methodological deficiencies, this study com­
bined CDA with CL based on a combination of quantitative and quali­
tative research, following an ordered, systematic, and transparent
approach to CDA. In particular, CL can contribute significantly to the
development of CDA due to the quantitative nature of collecting and
analyzing texts used in CL (Sinclair & Sinclair, 1991), which allows
analysts to use more extensive databases of texts in which textual fea­
tures can be extracted to construct reliable generalizations about the
vocabulary under study (Stubbs, 2002). In addition, it is considered
highly objective compared to the subjective interpretations applied to
semantic and pragmatic content analysis when conducting CDA (Fowler,
2013). Then, this study concentrated on the third step of Fairclough’s
three-dimensional model (i.e., the explanation stage), in which
discourse is seen as a social practice. This stage of discourse analysis is
closely related to the social context in which the discourse is produced.
Applying our data to this framework, we aim to reveal the reasons for
the differences in news coverage between the America and China.
Therefore, this study specifically examines the causes of the differences
in news reporting between China and the United States from the per­
spectives of culture, modes of operation, and news philosophy.
4.2. Data collection and procedure
In this study, we selected mainstream media in the United States (the
Wall Street Journal and The New York Times) and mainstream media in
China (China Daily and People’s Daily) and automatically extracted 100
news reports from China’s media news (hereafter "Chinese news") and
100 from American media news (hereafter "English news"), which were
used as the base corpus for quantitative research. These are the official
mainstream media, authoritative and broad readership, and influence.
First, the keywords "China", "economy", "COVID" and "coronavirus" were
used on the official websites of major media, and the time range was
between January 2020 and August 2021. Secondly, duplicate texts,
invalid reports in the corpus, and details including news page, word
length, reporter, language, and publication type were removed, while
the headline, date, and body were kept. Then, a script program was
written in Python with a text editor to clean up the text of the corpus,
remove redundant hyperlinks, and separate multiple news reports by
special symbols for easy recognition by the program. This study also
used text analysis tool software and Python’s programming language to
do quantitative text analysis of this news. By using Python, the corpus
can be analyzed automatically. Firstly, for the Chinese corpus, the Chi­
nese data was word-sorted using the word-sorting tool, and 73,792
Chinese words were obtained. Second, the words just obtained were
lexically annotated. The results showed that the corpus contained
37,065 nouns, 22,331 verbs, and 1873 adjectives and adverbs, and the
text keywords were analyzed using the ranking method. Then, the
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Social Sciences & Humanities Open 7 (2023) 100435
sentiment dictionary was used to extract sentiment keywords from the
corpus, and the sentiment classification was done based on the "plain
Bayesian" text classification model to determine the sentiment tendency
of each news article. For the English corpus, 54,064 words were
extracted by keyword extraction, including 26,214 nouns, 9843 verbs,
and 11,848 adjectives and adverbs. Subsequently, the sentiment analysis
dictionary and sentiment analysis tools extracted sentiment words and
classified sentiment analysis for the English corpus. The tools used in the
above workflow were shown in Table 1.
5. Analysis and discussion
Although many journalists hold that news should merely give facts
without expressing opinions, real-world press releases are characterized
by the expression of opinions. Semantic analysis of notional words could
accommodate what the word itself means and what it implies in the
story, which could thus help us understand the discursive attitudinal
tendencies behind the story. The analysis of index lines of sentence
subjects can be contextualized to explore the discourse characteristics of
those sentence subjects with special status and criticality in the corpus
and their index lines. Furthermore, by analyzing the attitudinal ten­
dencies of news semantics and emotions, the influence and changes of
power relations in different dominant social ideologies can be discussed
by comparing the similarities and differences in the descriptions and
views of the same events in differing authoritative media.
5.1. Semantic analysis of notional words
The seven categories of notional words in Chinese include nouns,
verbs, adjectives, numerals, quantifiers, pronouns, and onomatopoeic
words (Qian & Tian, 2011). The notional words analyzed in this study
include nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The analysis of notional
words was carried out in terms of high-frequency notional words, verbs,
and adjectives, and the comparative semantic analysis of the Chinese
and English corpus was carried out to investigate the discourse char­
acteristics of the words in terms of their meanings in the report.
5.1.1. Word category statistics
As can be seen from Table 2, the number of nouns accounted for a
comparable proportion of Chinese and English news, 46.2% and 47.9%
respectively, while the verbs accounted for 29.8% for Chinese news and
18.2% for American news. The difference in adjectives and adverbs was
even more obvious, with Chinese news having only 4.1% of adjectives
and adverbs, yet American news reaching 25.1%.
5.1.2. High-frequency notional words
Repetitive words were removed through the word frequency analysis
program. Then, the notional words with the highest frequency in the top
30 were chosen, and the Chinese words were counted as follows.
Table 3 and 4. demonstrated that the tokens "economy", "growth",
and "global" were frequently mentioned in both Chinese and American
news. Words related to economic concepts such as "employment", "en­
terprise", "policy", and "market" appear more frequently in Chinese news
reports. Chinese coverage focused on specific industries, specific con­
tent, physical concepts, and the global political environment, such as
"live streaming" and "e-commerce". In general, Chinese news used more
abstract notional words and focused more on the overall concept of
Table 1
Summary of text analysis tools.
Analysis Tool Chinese English
Cut Jieba Python Lib NLTK (tokenize)
POS Jieba Python Lib NLTK (pos_tag)
Keyword extraction TextRank NLTK (TF-IDF)
Emotional Analysis HOWNET NLTK (VADER)
L. Li and F. Gao Social Sciences & Humanities Open 7 (2023) 100435

Table 2 analyzed the causes of the problem, it is more specific in its wording and
Word category statistics of Chinese and America news. more detailed in its descriptions than the Chinese news, mentioning
Language Nouns Verbs Adj/Adv Num Others elements such as time and place. The Chinese news mentioned the
names of leaders and added modifying elements to emphasize them. In
Chinese 0.462 0.298 0.041 0.060 0.139
English 0.479 0.182 0.251 0.049 0.039 the first sentence, the word "employment" was used as the subject,
implying a passive semantic meaning. In the second sentence, the word
"employment" was used as an object, emphasizing the importance that
the Chinese places on employment. The high-frequency words in Chi­
Table 3
Chinese notional word statistics results.
nese news was more formal, and the news structure was more systematic
and abstract, with a big-picture view that tends to emphasize the di­
Notional Words Count Notional Words Count
rection of the economy and employment and what measures should be
经济Economy 1431 政策Policy 277 taken.
中国China 1226 复苏Revive 266
疫情Epidemic 918 数据Data 250
就业Employment 787 持续Sustain 244
5.1.3. High-frequency verbs
发展Develop 733 投资Investment 226 The word frequency statistics of the core verbs in the corpus after the
增长Growth 672 防控Prevention 218 deactivation words were removed are as follows (see Table 5).
企业Enterprise 435 直播Live streaming 205 This study measured the word frequency of Chinese and English
全球Global 426 创新Innovate 202
verbs and listed the top 20 verbs with the highest word frequency,
国家State 338 建设Construction 201
电商E-commerce 330 稳定Stabilization 199 respectively. It can be seen that the verbs in Chinese news are highly
市场Market 324 提升Promote 197 specialized and are all positive words, such as "support", "growth", and
"promote". In American news, verbs can be broadly classified into three
categories. The first category was the neutral verbs such as "set", "make",
Table 4 and "taken". The second category was the positive verbs, such as "grew",
English notional word statistics results. "added" and "rising". The third category was the negative verbs, such as
"fell" and "fear".
Notional Words Count Notional Words Count
People’s Daily in the "China’s non-manufacturing sector is developing
China 720 Coronavirus 70 steadily and with a better trend, and the Chinese economy continues to
Global 223 Country 67
recover steadily without change" mentioned that "to promote the high-
Economy 211 America 66
Beijing 154 Work 66 end, intelligent, green transformation and upgrading of traditional in­
Economic 140 Covid-19 65 dustries, accelerate the new generation of information technology and
Growth 139 Government 63 manufacturing industry deep integration, focus on industrial strengths in the
New 126 Business 58
field of deep plowing, and in the central and western regions to expand the
People 123 New York 52
Hong Kong 109 President 51 industrial chain supply chain swing space and security space. At the same
time, for the weak links in the industry, the implementation of good key core
technology research project, the implementation of good industrial base
society. In contrast, American news referred more often to cities or rebuilding project". This news article mentioned "promote", "accelerate",
geographic names such as, "Beijing", "Hong Kong", and "New York". "focus", and "implement". By analyzing the use of verbs, this study
These notional words were more concrete than those in the Chinese showed that Chinese news is good at using more positive verbs. The
news. content of the report used words such as "promote high-end", "intelli­
The China Daily mentioned in the article "Employment priority is the gent", "green transformation", and "upgrading", which makes the news
biggest livelihood": "Under the strong leadership of the Communist Party of progressive and elaborates specific aspects of the direction of economic
China, the scale of employment in China has expanded significantly, the development, highlighting that the Chinese government and Chinese
employment structure has been optimized, and the level of public employment people are working hard in the national development plan. The Wash­
services has been significantly improved. Especially since the 18th Party ington Post, in its " Mekong" article, said that Chinese government and
Congress, in the face of the complex international situation, the Party Central Chinese people are working hard to advance the national development
Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core has insisted on making plan. The Washington Post mentioned in "Meet the New Chinese Econ­
employment the biggest livelihood, putting employment at the top of the six omy, Same as the Old Chinese Economy" that "Industrial production is
stable work and six secure tasks, and made positive progress in improving the up 13.6% for the first five months of the year on the same basis, retail
quality of employment, which has become a solid foundation for improving sales have risen by 9.3%, fixed-asset investment by 8.5%, and real-estate
people’s livelihood, basic support for economic development and ballast for investment by 17.9%". The American media was more accustomed to
social stability". This news paragraph was dominated by declarative using data and objective facts to describe the current state of
sentences, with the subjects "employment in China" and "the Party
Central Committee" emphasizing the importance of employment to
people’s livelihood. The news used a lot of prose, such as "expand" for Table 5
"scale", "optimize" for "structure", and "improve" for "service level" Core verb frequency statistics of Chinese and America news.
emphasizing that people’s livelihood and employment during the Chinese Verbs Count English Verbs Count
epidemic were huge challenges for all countries.
就业Employment 787 Compared 39
In "China is winning the global economic recovery", the Wall Street 增长Grow 672 Expected 28
Journal mentioned that "American President Joe Biden speaks during an 复苏Revive 266 Set 23
event with governors of western states and members of his cabinet June 30, 创新Innovate 202 Taken 23
2021, in Washington, DC. Biden addressed the combination of drought, heat, 提升Promote 197 Added 20
194 Fell 19
and wildfires currently impacting the western portion of the America during 需求Demand
提供Provide 189 Make 19
his remarks". The news article emphasized China’s economic develop­ 推动Drive 188 Set 18
ment, while the development of the western United States has been 增速Speed up 170 Rising 17
hampered. The analysis revealed that differences in the way Chinese 支持Support 154 Fear 17
news and American news is reported. While the American news mainly 恢复Recover 141 Grew 17

4
L. Li and F. Gao Social Sciences & Humanities Open 7 (2023) 100435

development or to state an opinion, as compared to Chinese news. This epidemic this year was like a catalyst to further amplify the advantages of live
article used neutral or positive verbs, such as "compared", "risen by", and streaming with goods". For a time, live e-commerce became one of the
"fixed asset". The semantics of the story itself was more objective, as it most popular areas, generating a large demand for professional anchors.
used figures and percentages to describe the development of China’s The Wall Street Journal in "China Exports Resurgent a Year on from
economy. COVID-19 Doldrums" mentioned that "Elsewhere in the economic plan,
Beijing is tightening the limit on local-government borrowing for public works-
5.1.4. Sentence subject and index line analysis barely from 3.75 trillion-yuan last year-a a decline to about 3.4% of GDP
In this study, two subject word extraction methods were used for from 3.7%". China’s news coverage focused on specific industries, spe­
Chinese news and English news, respectively (See Table 6 for details). cific issues, and the impact on livelihoods and employment. Keywords,
This study calculated the importance score of each word in Chinese news such as "Internet marketer", "total size of the live e-commerce industry",
using Rank Text, in which Rank Text constructs a graph consisting of and "demand for professional anchors", were emphasized to convey the
word nodes and co-occurrence edge relations for the corpus by using rise of this new industry in China during the epidemic. This reflects the
words as nodes of a graph and co-occurrence relations for words within a country’s concern about the changing employment patterns, industries,
fixed window size as edge relations. In this graph, the weights of the and occupational demands in the Chinese market. In contrast, American
nodes were calculated using the same way as the Google search engine’s news used more specific expressions and listed more economic in­
online search page ranking algorithm PageRank by the following for­ dicators to present a more objective picture of China’s economic situa­
mula to obtain the importance score of each word node. A higher score tion. Moreover, by using the words of "economic plan", "Beijing", "local
would indicate a greater importance. The top three ranked words in government" and "bond issuance" as well as "quota", "GDP", "decline" and
Chinese news were "economy", "policy", and "epidemic", with the rank other related indicators to prove and illustrate the point, stating the
text score of 1, 0.8555, and 0.6089 respectively. In addition, the TF-IDF factual basis. In the American news, proper nouns were more political
was used for the importance score of each word in the American news. and economic in nature. They talked about how politics and economics
The TF-IDF is a statistical method for assessing the importance of a word worked together and how policies and market changed work together.
to a collection of documents or to one of the documents in a corpus. The
importance of a word increases proportionally with the number of times 5.2. Sentiment tendency analysis
it appears in a document, with a higher TF-IDF score indicating that a
word appears more often in an article and less often in all documents, Emotional tendencies can reflect the tone and attitude of the writer
the more representative it is of that article. In American news, the top (Thompson, 1991). Although the discourse of the news genre is sup­
three words were "Country", "Million" and "Trade", with the TF-IDF posed to be neutral and free of emotion, most of the news has a relatively
scores of 0.0044, 0.0039, and 0.0039 respectively. In particular, all clearer point of view and emotional tendency. In this study, the Chinese
the reported topic words were "live stream", "policy", "work", and and English corpora were extracted separately and analyzed for senti­
"country". This indicated that the economic and political factors in the ment polarity using HOWNET (a Chinese sentiment dictionary) and
epidemic were closely related and that during the epidemic, China and NLTK’s Vader tool, respectively. 3730 Chinese positive evaluation
American media recognized the role of live-streaming and e-commerce words, 3116 Chinese negative evaluation words, 836 Chinese positive
trade in helping the Chinese economy. In addition to the theme, the sentiment words, and 1254 Chinese negative sentiment words were
words "epidemic", "economy", and "employment" were also frequently included in the HOWNET dictionary. Furthermore, the Vader sentiment
mentioned, which shows that the China’s media has a strong focus on dictionary contains more than 7500 English sentiment words, including
economic development and people’s employment in the wake of the common English words and a small number of emoticons.
epidemic. It can be seen that the China’s media paid more attention to Besides, the current study analyzed the sentiment tendency of the
people’s livelihoods under the epidemic and focused on the actual corpus to determine the overall attitude of the mainstream media of both
problems of people’s lives. In contrast, in the American news, the names China and America, toward the Chinese economy under the epidemic.
of leaders such as "Xi", "Biden" as well as the geographical names "Cal­ Quantitative results that show more negative words indicate that the
ifornia" and quantity-related words were frequently mentioned. "Cali­ articles have an overall negative attitude toward the content of the
fornia", "quota", and "million" were among the many words related to analysis and are more critical. Conversely, a higher frequency of positive
quantity. At the same time, it focused more on basic elements such as words indicates that the news has a positive attitude toward the content
people, events, and opinions and analyzed issues from the perspective of of the analysis as a whole. If positive and negative words are used with
specific facts, opinions, and leaders’ speeches. equal frequency, and many neutral words are used, in this case, the
Specifically, China’s central media mentioned that "it is understood critical attitude presents an objective and dialectical state.
that online marketers were born in the context of China’s live e-commerce In this study, the most frequent adjectives in China and America
boom, and that the epidemic at the beginning of the year accelerated its economic news were extracted. Their sentiment polarity was analyzed to
professionalization. Data shows that in 2019, the total size of China’s live e- identify the overall sentiment tendency of mainstream media news, in
commerce industry reached 433.8 billion yuan, and the occurrence of the which "1" denotes a positive sentiment word, while "-1" represents a
negative sentiment word. Table 7 showed that "stable" was the most
Table 6 frequently mentioned adjective in Chinese news coverage, four times
Sentence subject of keywords in Chinese and American news. more frequent than the second most frequent adjective. This showed
Chinese Rank Text Score English TF-IDF Score that stability is very important to the economic environment during the
epidemic. Among the top 10 most frequent Chinese adjectives (e.g.,
经济Economy 1 Country 0.0044
政策Policy 0.8555 Million 0.0039
"strong", "healthy", and "stable") all showed positive results. The Chinese
疫情Epidemic 0.6089 Trade 0.0039 mainstream media were optimistic about the economic situation during
发展Develop 0.5274 Xi 0.0030 the epidemic and observed some unreasonable economic structures, and
就业Employment 0.5201 Work 0.0028 a few adjectives showed a negative trend. The adjectives in the Amer­
0.3341 Biden 0.0028
企业Enterprise
ican news was mixed. Among the top 10 English adjectives with the
全球Global 0.3117 Live stream 0.0028
直播Live stream 0.2434 Economy 0.0027 highest word frequency, there were five positive emotion words and five
国际International 0.2351 Policy 0.0027 negative emotion words, suggesting that positive and negative ten­
国家Country 0.2346 Quota 0.0027 dencies tend to be balanced.
工作Work 0.2303 Online 0.0027 For example, in "China’s Economy Flashes Hints of Weakness", the
市场Market 0.2274 California 0.0026
Wall Street Journal mentioned "Equally worrying, China’s services sector, a

5
L. Li and F. Gao
Table 7
Emotional analysis in both Chinese and English.
Chinese
Adj Emotional Score Emotional Polarity Count
稳定Stable 0.9738 1 199
强劲 Powerful 0.9700 1 49
健康 Healthy 2.1039 1 43
灵活 Flexible 2.1107 1 37
努力 Hard 1.2356 1 33
强大 Strong 2.6405 1 33
严峻 Severe − 1.2655 − 1 29
平均 Average 0.1414 1 28
效率 Effective 2.9122 1 24
完备 Perfect 0.8248 1 20
persistent laggard in the country’s post-pandemic rebound that Beijing poli­
cymakers are eager to see the hints of weakness on both fronts come as in
recent weeks, Morgan Stanley and Barclays, among others, have downgraded
their expectations for growth in the world’s second-largest economy. In recent
weeks, Morgan Stanley and Barclays, among others, have downgraded their
forecasts for China’s full-year gross product to below 9%, citing the impact of
higher raw material". This report used a number of emotive words in
succession, such as the adjective "weaker-than-expected" the adverb
"equally worrying" the verb "downgrade" the preposition "believe" and
used the contrast to express a very negative sentiment by comparing the
reality that China’s economic recovery indicators are less than expected.
Similarly, in another article, "China Exports Resurgent a Year on from
COVID-19 Doldrum", it is mentioned that "Beijing knows the magnitude of
the challenge it faces. Total debt has risen to some 270% of GDP from 250%
before the pandemic. Too much of that credit has gone to government
boondoggles, state-owned enterprises, and real estate; Too much of that credit
has gone to government boondoggles, state-owned enterprises, and real estate;
too little has gone to productive private enterprises". He warned this week
about a "bubble" in Chinese property prices. The news used strong ad­
verbs such as "too much" and "too little" as well as antonyms to describe
the fact that China’s debt and credit are divided between the govern­
ment state-owned enterprises and real estate, with very little going to
the real private sector. To be more convincing, Guo Shuqing was also
quoted to prove that China’s economic development is not healthy. This
part of the assertion discusses China’s debt problem through specific
figures of debt ratios, Guo Shuqing’s remarks, and the economic struc­
ture of debt assumptions (Liu, 2006). The semantics showed a strong
emotional tendency with enough evidence, even though fewer
emotional words were used.
6. Exploring the reasons for the differences in news coverage
between the America and China
According to Fairclough’s three-dimensional analysis of discourse,
explanation is the final and macro-level stage of the analysis of this news
report. The main purpose of explanation is to analyze some specific
assumptions of culture and society, and to explain discourse in a certain
social context (Fairclough, 1989). This analysis is based on the opinion
that the social context that exists outside the media actually influences
the way discourse is presented in the media, such that a critical analysis
of discourse cannot be separated from an exploration of the social
dimension. Therefore, by analyzing the data collected under Fair­
clough’s three-dimensional framework, the study gauged three factors
influencing the differences between Chinese and American coverage of
news: the cultural background, operational model, and journalistic
philosophy.
6.1. Differences in cultural background
In the news coverage of China COVID-19, Chinese news focused
mainly on the efforts of the country as a whole in upgrading the
6
Social Sciences & Humanities Open 7 (2023) 100435
English
Adj Emotional Score Emotional Polarity Count
Strong 2.3 1 22
Great 3.1 1 20
Tough − 0.5 − 1 14
Negative − 2.7 − 1 13
Hard − 0.4 − 1 13
Weak − 1.9 − 1 12
Huge 1.3 1 11
Low − 1.1 − 1 11
Top 0.8 1 10
Important 0.8 1 9
economy and the effectiveness of preventive and control measures,
usually using positive comments and highly praising the actions and
measures of the Chinese government in restoring employment and
promoting the economy. For example, under the leadership of the
Communist Party, the scale of employment in China has expanded
significantly, the employment structure has been optimized and the
level of public employment has improved significantly. By contrast, in
the New York Times news, there was a greater focus on the rights of in­
dividuals. For instance, in the early stages of the epidemic, in response to
the requirement for the public and corporate employees to wear masks,
the American news stated that this was a human right violation and
unreasonable behavior. The reason of the difference in the focus of news
reports is influenced by the cultural background of different countries,
because the generation of political news discourse depends on the social
and cultural background (Zhang, 2014). Specifically, cultural back­
ground refers to the styles, principles, thoughts, and actions of people in
a particular cultural environment. Cultural context influences not only
people’s concepts, preferences, and behaviors, but also the formation of
their basic beliefs and values (Kotler & Armstrong, 2014). In China with
a history of more than five thousand years, Confucianism is the foun­
dation of the excellent Chinese traditional culture. The idea of ’Unity of
Man and Nature’, benevolence government, harmonious consciousness
and people-oriented all give a positive significance in modern society
and even guide people’s thinking and expression. In general, these
traditional cultural beliefs mainly stress the importance of human being
and community. People living in a collective culture see themselves as
inextricably linked to the group, where people maintain harmony and
emphasize the achievement of a common standard (Triandis, 1989). In
contrast, the cultural background of the United States comes primarily
from European cultural ideas and religious beliefs, such as the humanist
Enlightenment and the influence of Christianity (Bellah, Madsen, Sulli­
van, Swidler, & Tipton, 1996; Zha, Walczyk, Griffith-Ross, Tobacyk, &
Walczyk, 2006). These ideas focus primarily on the importance of the
individual, with individualism asserting that any form of collaboration,
cooperation or peaceful coexistence between liberal human beings is
based on respect for individual rights. This type of culture reflects in­
dependence and freedom and equality in people’s daily lives and
thinking. Thus, the focus of news coverage is different based on the two
cultural background of China and the United States.
6.2. Differences in operational model
According to our data, the American news mainly adopts a negative
perspective on China’s economy, digging into the issues behind the
epidemic and government management to provoke discussion among
readers. In terms of content, the focus on economic issues and social
impacts also involves more specific vocabulary to drive readers’ interest
in reading. For example, China’s economy was affected during the
epidemic, with GDP declining. By contrast, Chinese news reports tend to
be biased toward government policies and decisions. This is because the
Chinese media has a strict organizational discipline, accepting and
L. Li and F. Gao
obeying the leadership of the Communist Party of China and creating a
good atmosphere for the government to carry out public administration.
The reason for this difference is the operation mode, which leads to the
different reporting tendencies of Chinese and American media. Specif­
ically, Chinese media take social benefits as the first pursuit, while
American media take economic benefits as the first pursuit. The Amer­
ican media emerged and evolved as the country modernized, and almost
all of them are private companies in the United States. As commercial
media, they are driven by the market economy and their highest goal is
to maximize profits. This economic model and operating philosophy
have shaped the way the American media report on major breaking
news. For this reason, news coverage in the America needs to take into
account the needs of their audience, and sometimes they cater to their
readers in order to increase their ratings and circulation, and to increase
their financial position (Zhang et al., 2022). The difference is that the
Chinese media always puts social benefits first in the triple space of
administrative control, market pressure, and audience demand. The
choice of news sources in the Chinese media is diverse, with experts,
relevant institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and the general public
coming together to form a channel of information in addition to that
released by the government. However, the government remains the most
important player, focusing more on the new policies it proposes for so­
ciety and on social impact rather than economic benefits.
6.3. Differences in journalistic philosophy
Each country has its own set of philosophies and regulations about
news reporting, and these characteristics can influence its reporting
style over time. As the content of the discourse, the social relations
within the discourse, and the social identities that enact these relations
are systematically prescribed, the discourse may be influenced over time
(Fairclough, 2001). That is to say, news philosophy is reflected in the
news coverage. According to our data, Chinese news focuses on a more
macro level of social impact, economic consequences, and employment,
yet less on negative portrayals and questioning. This is because the
philosophy of Chinese media coverage is to dispel the fear and anxiety
caused by the spread of the epidemic and to stabilize people’s minds and
increase their confidence in the fight against the epidemic. Therefore,
news coverage during the epidemic tends to take a cautious approach,
focusing more on the favorable measures proposed by the government
during the epidemic and the decisions made by the leading cadres, with
the aim of raising optimism that the people of China are united in the
fight against the epidemic. In contrast, the American media embodies a
different philosophy of journalism, with conflict being an essential
element of American news values. The idea of American news reporting
is to look for problems in the work of government in terms of life events
and social conflicts, and to dig into, analysis and evaluate the conflicting
circumstances of events. As a result, the American news has focused on
the negative impact of the epidemic on people’s lives, both in terms of
the length of coverage and the approach and intensity of coverage and
has focused on the negative impact of the epidemic on people’s
employment and the country’s economic development. In short, in the
American news reports, they try to identify problems and provoke dis­
cussions to promote the adjustment and improvement of relevant pol­
icies and the improvement of society by digging into the contradictions
of events, stating opinions through commentaries, expressing doubts
and describing events in a more negative way.
7. Conclusion
This study analyzed economic news reports in Chinese and American
mainstream media, by comparing the frequency of notional words
including verbs and adjectives in corpora, the linguistic and cultural
phenomena in the news, as well as emotional tendencies. At the same
time, several clips of Chinese and English news were listed, and CDA was
used to analyze and argue the wording and opinions of the news reports
7
Social Sciences & Humanities Open 7 (2023) 100435
and the values they disseminate. It can be seen that the Chinese media
reports on the domestic economic situation are biased towards the
positive and inspiring side. This has a more positive impact on consol­
idating social stability and building the government’s image. However,
by analyzing various aspects of China’s trade, manufacturing, and eco­
nomic structure, the American media expressed their concerns about
China’s economic outlook, raising the issue of China’s credit sector and
fiscal deficit. Having identified differences in the coverage of news in
China and the United States, this study aims to further explore the
reasons for the differences in coverage. We attributed the different fo­
cuses of news coverage in China and America to cultural backgrounds,
modes of operation, and journalistic philosophies. Specifically, the most
important source of information for the Chinese media is government,
and collectivist thinking guides people’s thinking and expression.
Therefore, news coverage during an epidemic in China tends to take a
cautious approach, focusing more on the favorable measures proposed
by the government during the epidemic and the decisions made by
leading cadres, with the aim of raising optimism that the nation is united
against the epidemic. In contrast, the American ideology of individu­
alism and the commercial operation mechanism of the media dictate
that the American media needs to focus on the needs of the audience in
the aftermath of major emergencies and to dig into the issues behind the
epidemic and the government’s management to provoke discussion
among readers. Both the length and the angle of the stories show that the
American media are trying to identify problems and provoke discussion
to improve the relevant policies.
The findings contribute to both theoretical and practical implica­
tions. The main theoretical contribution is to extend the applicability of
the theory to news from the COVID-19 period, which further expands
the scope of CDA. In addition, by using a corpus-based approach in
conjunction with CDA, this study also provides a more objective
discourse analysis. In terms of practical implications, this study helps
readers to understand the reasons for differences in reporting across
countries, to establish an objective attitude towards news reporting, and
contributing to the understanding of the discourse of news coverage
during COVID-19.
It is undeniable that this study also has some limitations. Firstly, a
vast corpus can contribute to a more comprehensive study. Although the
data selected is from mainstream media in China and the United States,
the corpus is limited and cannot fully represent the position of China and
the United States. Secondly, the corpus of this study is from January
2020 to August 2021, while the epidemic has not yet ended and pro­
duced new changes that will have a new impact on the economy. This
ongoing development needs more research to fill the gaps and provide
answers to the many questions that still surround COVID-19.
Funding
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding
agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Luanying Li: Resources, Conceptualization, Methodology, Data
curation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft. Fei Gao: Investiga­
tion, Writing – review & editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
L. Li and F. Gao Social Sciences & Humanities Open 7 (2023) 100435

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