A Comparative Study of Competing Discursive Construction of South China Sea Disputes in the Chinese and US English-Language Newspapers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the discursive construction of South China Sea dispute in China Daily and The New York Times from April 2016 to December 2017. Drawing on Van Dijk’s account of critical discourse analysis and the linguistic framework of Appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005), this study investigates how three social actors in the dispute, namely China, United States, Philippines, are differently constructed with the strategic use of attitude resources in the two newspapers. The corpus analyzed consists of 45 newspaper texts from China Daily and 49 newspaper texts from The New York Times. The analysis reveals competing discursive construction of social actors that constitute positive us-representation and negative other-representation in the two newspapers. For example, China Daily constructs China as a peace-loving country, insisting on the peaceful means and the cooperation with ASEAN and other claimant countries to resolve the dispute, whereas The New York Times depicts China as threat, hegemony and provocation. Such competing discursive construction not only reflects the ideological stance of two newspapers, but also functions to legitimize their countries’ policies and decisions in the South China Sea dispute.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".