Abstract

New energy vehicle enterprises have developed rapidly and their buildings of CSR images are in the spotlight. Tesla Incorporation (Tesla) in the United States and BYD Company Limited (BYD) in China are the top two worldwide electric car sellers, and their image constructions have attracted much attention. This paper adopts the corpus-based critical discourse analysis research method to analyse these two giant enterprises’ Corporate Social Responsibility Reports (CSR Reports) from 2018 to 2021 to examine how they construct their CSR images through the use of different linguistic features. It also discusses the influencing factors underlying them. This study finds that due to the differences in culture, tradition, and economy. BYD has created a pragmatic, innovative, management-oriented, law-abiding, people-centred, environmentally friendly and national-belonging CSR image, while Tesla has created an international CSR image that is confident, strong, powerful, product-oriented and highly skilled. It is hoped that this study may deepen the understanding of new energy vehicles' CSR images and offer some CSR image-building advice for other companies.

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