A Comparative Analysis of Chinese and American Newspaper Reports on China’s Belt and Road Initiative

This study adopts a critical discourse analysis approach in comparing the portrayal of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in two English language newspapers, China Daily (CD) and New York Times (NYT). It focuses on how these two influential newspapers employ various discursive strategies to portray the BRI and its various players to unpack the embedded ideologies underlying the news reports. The data comprises 165 news reports on the BRI published between 2013 and 2019. By examining key news features such as headlines, leads and quotes, three contrastive themes were uncovered: BRI as a unifying agent or disruptive force; bolstering support for or casting aspersions on the BRI; and a rising China versus a fading US. These themes coalesce and converge into two parallel but distinct discourses. While CD unequivocally depicts the BRI as a collaborative project that seeks to unify and bring widespread benefits to member countries, NYT presents a more complex picture that discursively constructs China’s BRI as a geopolitical threat to the waning global influence of the US. These divergent discourses are discussed in light of motivated reasoning theory and in relation to the varying ideological standpoints from which the two newspapers operate.