Dependency or empowerment? A Critical Discourse analysis of rural left‑behind elders’ identity construction in Chinese news reports

Population aging, rural-to-urban migration, and the erosion of family-based eldercare have made rural left-behind elders a salient social group in contemporary China. Yet little is known about how mainstream Chinese English-language media construct their identities for international audiences. This study examines 457 China Daily reports published between 2014 and 2024. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis and a mixed-method design combining topic modeling with predication analysis, it investigates the discursive representation of rural left-behind elders. The findings reveal a dominant dependency-empowerment binary. Within this framework, rural left-behind elders are represented as institutional dependents, familial sentinels, crisis-protected subjects, technologically empowered recipients, and potential economic contributors. These identity positions place older adults along a continuum from welfare dependence and emotional attachment to developmental participation and productive incorporation. At the micro-linguistic level, reporting verbs and related predicational strategies allocate discursive authority, delimit agency, and legitimize particular subject positions. These representational patterns are closely tied to broader state agendas, including social security reform, Rural Revitalization, and Digital China, while also engaging global aging discourses. The study argues that China Daily does not merely describe the condition of rural left-behind elders; it participates in a state-centered governance narrative that mediates the tension between welfare responsibility and developmentalism.