"China's peaceful rise": Competing discourses in newspaper articles from "China Daily" and "The Times"."

"In recent times, the "rise of China", "peaceful rise of China" etc. have become recurrent phrases appearing in newspaper articles both in China and in the western press referring to the growing economic and political influence of China on the global stage seen by some as a threat and by others as an opportunity. This comparative study focused on "China's peaceful rise" as reported in English language newspapers both from China Daily in China and The Times in Britain. 45 texts from the China Daily website and 20 texts from The Times online resources have been selected as the database and these texts cover the period from 2003 to 2008. Texts from these two newspapers were analysed with the aid of software packages Wmatrix (Rayson, 2008) and WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2001) from a corpus analysis perspective to adopt a quantitative angle and try to make findings more objective and provide hints for the second stage qualitative study by applying Critical Stylistics (Jeffries, 2010) framework. In this research, questions addressed are: o In what ways is "China's peaceful rise" linguistically constructed in the two newspaper sources? o What positions are suggested for readers to take up from these newspaper articles? It is argued that the China Daily database prefers to present this concept "China's peaceful rise" via its reports from a favourable perspective to welcome the peaceful rise of China as a boon both to China and the world; however, The Times database is likely to report the principle of "China's peaceful rise" from a less favourable stance and treat it as a threat to the West and to the international system from language practised in its articles.