Constructing China’s National Image in China Daily’s “Dual Carbon” News Discourse: An Ecological Discourse Analysis Perspective

Against the backdrop of deepening global climate change governance, the "dual carbon" goals have become an important topic in China’s participation in global ecological governance. Drawing on the perspective of ecological discourse analysis, this study takes news reports on the "dual carbon" theme from China Daily as the corpus source, constructs a specialized corpus, and employs AntConc 3.5.9 to examine the linguistic features of the news discourse from three dimensions: high-frequency content words, lexical co-occurrence patterns, and the collocation patterns of the word "China," so as to explore how these features construct China’s national image. The findings reveal that China Daily constructs a semantic network centered on climate governance by focusing on carbon governance and green development issues; through the typical collocations of "China" in different grammatical structures, it forms a narrative chain linking commitment, action, and planning; the overall discourse exhibits a constructive ecological discourse orientation, highlighting a sense of responsibility, policy execution capability, and an orientation toward international cooperation. These discourse strategies jointly shape a national image of China as responsible, action-oriented, and forward-looking, reflecting China’s active role and discursive aspirations in global climate governance. The results provide empirical evidence from a corpus linguistics perspective for national image construction in the international communication of ecological issues.