A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis of Chinese and American News Coverage on Climate Change

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Introduction
Given the significance of the environment to every aspect of human life, previous studies have been concerned with the role of media coverage on climate change.The news discourse is considered as the expression of the relation between discourse and ideology (Kuo & Nakamura, 2005).Therefore, news reports on climate change are not completely value-free, especially in state media, which play an important role in enhancing national ideologies (Li, 2009).National ideology refers to the sum of ideas that spread national value, shape national image display national strength, and provide a legitimate explanation for the country as a political subject (Yang & Li, 2019).
Previous studies have found that the news discourses on climate change reflect national ideologies through the choice of topic, speakers, and content in reporting (Song et al., 2021c;K. Chen et al., 2022b), but few apply the corpus-based critical discourse to analyze the comparison between China and the United States, which help to further understand the ecological concerns in the two countries, and how news discourses consolidate national ecological image and political stance.Therefore, this paper seeks to identify similarities and differences in linguistic features of press coverage of climate change in the China Daily and Los Angeles Times after COP27 and explore the ways China and the United States adopted in climate change reporting to enhance their national ideologies.
The comparison of news discourse in two countries based on the combination of corpus linguistics(CL) and critical discourse analysis(CDA) is conducive to proving Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Model of Discourse.This paper society through symbolic forms (Wodak, 1988).Many studies have compared the climate news discourse in different countries and found that news discourse can convey ecological concepts through certain discourse strategies, shape the national ecological image, and enhance national identity (Grundmann & Krishnamurthy, 2010c;Gunster et al., 2018;K. Chen et al., 2022).As the world's two largest economies and the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, China and the United States shoulder important responsibilities in addressing climate change, and climate news reports from both countries reflect their different ideologies.The mainstream ideology of contemporary Chinese society is the socialist core value system, including national, social, and individual values of harmony, equality, integrity, and so on, emphasizing the improvement of ideological work by gathering public consensus and spreading the voice of China (Jinping, 2018;Liang & Wang, 2024).Political, social, and economic beliefs such as freedom, democracy, human rights, liberalism, and conservatism are the inherent attributes of the United States and form its unique ideology, which is strengthened by maintaining universal values and building a democratic image (Ellis & Stimson, 2012;Fan, 2023).Some studies have centered on climate news discourse in China and the United States to understand the similarities and differences in the ecological concepts of the two countries and how news discourse shapes national ecological images and political stances.Liu and Huang (2023) conduct a corpus-assisted discourse study on the climate change responsibility frameworks of China Daily (CD) and the New York Times(NYT), finding that CD focuses on developed countries' historical causal responsibilities for climate change, whereas NYT underlines the current causal responsibilities of developing countries.Yang et al. (2020) explore the discourse positions of China and the United States based on a database of 30 Chinese news reports and 30 US news reports and found that Chinese news is mainly dominated by the government's official and political stance, while US news is often influenced by professional and public stances.Song et al. (2021c) compare the climate change news coverage from a vertical perspective and suggest that the Chinese media tended to take climate change as a global issue while newspapers in the United States and the United Kingdom treated it as a domestic one.The above studies help to understand the manifestations of national ideology in discourse, but few studies have sought to investigate news discourse of a single event, and the methodological combination of CDA and CL can continue to be improved.
This study uses corpus-based critical discourse analysis to explore the national news discourse related to the COP27.CDA is the research of the relations between discourse and power that explores the position of the discourse analyst in such social relationships and it focuses on social and political conundrums and puts an end to the issue of inequality (Van Dijk, 1993b;Van Dijk, 1998).CDA incorporates M. A. K. Halliday's view of systemic functional grammar in linguistic theory, genre analysis of inter-level, and historical background discourse analysis which concern different aspects and complement one another.This enables CDA to be the foremost complement to traditional social and cultural analysis.After almost four decades of development, the theory of CDA has evolved more systematically and contributed to people's critical thinking about discourse.
CL is the study of language based on examples of language used in everyday vernacular (McEnery & Wilson, 1996).With the development of computer technology, the method of using machines to process corpus and language research has demonstrated great superiority (Pan, 2001).In the CL, there are differences between corpusbased and corpus-driven approaches.The corpus-based research uses corpus to explore existing theories or hypotheses to verify or revise the existing theories, while the corpus-driven research paradigm takes corpora as the starting point and the only observation object to completely define and describe various phenomena in the language (Tognini, 2001, p. 99).Corpus analysis involves several techniques, such as wordlist analysis, N-gram analysis, keyness analysis, concordance analysis, and collocation analysis (Baker, 2006).The CL has been greatly developed in the past decades and contributed to much research about discourse.
The combination of CL and CDA can be traced back to the 1990s (Subtirelu & Baker, 2018).Stubbs (1996) takes the lead in introducing CL into CDA.In 2006, Baker established the basic analytical framework of corpus critical discourse analysis, a milestone academic breakthrough.In this method, CL adds reliability to CDA (Subtirelu & Baker, 2018) and CDA makes CL hold meaning behind the discourse (Baker et al., 2008).This study combines CL and CDA to further research Chinese and American news discourse on climate change and hidden national ideologies.
In conclusion, the overall situation can be described as follows: climate change has been a topic of great concern, and research on news discourse on this topic have used various methods.Some of them further focus on the national ideologies behind it, but few have used the corpus-based CDA to do comparison analysis, which is a gap that remains to be filled.Previous studies on news discourse of climate change and national ideologies have involved different research methods and themes, but the research gap still exists in the area as follows: Firstly, the discourse study of climate change lacks a connection between discourse and national ideologies; Secondly, few critical analyses on news discourse comparing China and America focus on the reports of single event; Thirdly, the combination of CL and CDA is rarely seen in discourse analysis on national ideologies.

Analytical Framework
Figure 1.Three-Dimensional Model of Discourse (Fairclough, 1995, p. 98) This research applies Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Model of Discourse as an analytical framework.The most distinguished part of this model is that the connection between social practice and text is constructed by discourse practice (Fairclough, 1995a).The illustration of the Three-Dimensional Model of Discourse is shown in Figure 1.First comes the description stage which contains text analysis about further linguistic features, ranging from vocabulary, grammar, cohesion to structure.Then, the interpretation stage analyzes the relationship between the discursive process and the text, which helps to comprehend the ideology behind the discourse.Lastly, the explanation stage explores the social origins of the linguistics features (Fairclough, 1995).Since text cannot define things on its own, it needs to be considered under particular social contexts.

Data Source
The data comes from 128 reports on the China Daily and Los Angeles Times from November 18, 2022, to January 4, 2023, about a month and a half after the COP27.The reason for picking COP27 as the time node derives from its significance.As the world's largest and most important climate-related conference, it has been held annually since 1995 to negotiate an extension of the Convention to establish legally binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions limits and enforcement mechanisms.This time, the COP27 was held on November 6, 2022, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and ended on November 18.A series of plans had been discussed and raised worldwide attention.The reaction of China and America in their press coverage of climate change after COP27 deserves attention.China Daily is by far the most influential and authoritative English-language newspaper in China and Los Angeles Times is the largest broadsheet daily newspaper in the West of the United States, the influence and status of which is only second to the New York Times and the Washington Post, making it known as the third largest newspaper in the United States (Wang & Li, 2018).
Taking climate change as a keyword to search the two news websites, this paper selects 64 reports from China Daily and 64 reports from Los Angeles Times.The irrelevant advertisement words and pictures in the reports were removed to form two corpora, namely Corpus C for China Daily and Corpus L for Los Angeles Times.The Corpus C has 60566 words and the Corpus L has 68093 words.

Research Methods
This study applies corpus-based critical discourse analysis to explore the keyword and modality of the text, then focuses on the discursive processes of the text, and finally studies the social factors for the similarities and differences of the linguistics features between the China Daily and Los Angeles Times.This provides quantitative and qualitative views for measuring the computational frequency and statistical significance and presenting the data in such a way that enables researchers to assess individual occurrences of search terms and qualitatively examine their collocations (Mautner, 2009).The research software employed is AntConc 3.5.7.

Figure 2. Research Process
The research procedures consist of description, interpretation, and explanation (See Figure 2).In the description, key analysis and modality are discussed.On interpretation, the processing analysis focuses on textual content, participants, relations, and the language role.In explanation, the situational context, institutional context, and societal context are studied.

Research Questions
This study is going to discuss two questions.
1) What similarities and differences of linguistic features in climate change news reports are reflected in the China Daily and Los Angeles Times after COP27?
2) How do the language features of climate change news reports reinforce China's and the US's national ideologies?

Keyword Analysis
To clarify the similarities and differences between Corpus C and Corpus L, this paper compares two corpora with Brown Corpus, deleting some words (the, s, los…) that are irrelevant to the research and focusing on the first 15 keywords and their keyness.Keyness refers to the key degree of high-frequency words extracted after comparing the observed corpus with the reference corpus, and can be used to measure the frequency of keywords in different corpus (Scott, 1999).The higher the keyness of a word, the more unique it is in the text, which helps to understand the topic of the corpus.The study first analyzes the same 4 keywords and then explains 3 different keywords in each corpus.From Table 1 the same keywords can be ascertained as climate, global, energy, and emissions.The fourth keyword is emissions.The collocations are invariably greenhouse gas emissions (9.09), reduce emissions (8.03), and zero emissions (7.32), which cover the harm generated by carbon emissions has elicited widespread concern.Under the trend of global warming, the mainstream media helps to disseminate its relevance.
With the pursuit of national image and environmental protection, the two countries have set goals to reduce carbon emissions, trying to play a role in climate governance.They both want to reach zero emissions, intending to develop a new economic model and build favorable national images.
Next, three different keywords in each corpus are discussed.According to the keyness, the top 3 keywords in Corpus C are China, biodiversity, and carbon; the other 3 words in Corpus L are water, California, said.Their loglikelihood ratios are analyzed to find the discrepancies between the two corpora.In Table 2, the words with log-likelihood higher than 50 are marked with three asterisks ("*"), which means the degree of difference between two corpora.Regarding the rating scale of one to three asterisks, having more "*" indicates a greater degree of difference.All the words achieved three "*", signifying that the discrepancy between the two corpora is rather high.The word China has 636 frequencies in Corpus C but only 9 in Corpus L. Besides, all the frequency gap numbers between the two corpora for the same word exceed 100.Thus, the different concerns on the same issue of the two corpora need to be discussed in depth.

Modality
Modality is a useful tool for examining news reports' attitudes and the certainty of the events.Halliday (2004) proposes that the value of modal verbs can be divided into "low", "medium" and "high" according to their contribution to certainty.Has to, must, ought to, and need to belong to a modal of high value.Will, would, should, etc. belong to the modal of value median; Can, may, could, and might are models of low values.The value of modal conveys the speaker's moral commitment.The higher the modal value, the stronger the discourse obligation and willingness expressed by the discourse, the narrower the dialogue space with readers, while the modal with lower value conveys less obligation and willingness, and the larger the communication space with readers (Thompson, 2014).Table 3 shows two corpora's distribution of modal verbs.Generally, Corpus L (821) enjoys a higher frequency of modal verbs than Corpus C (658).In Corpus C, compared to low-value modal verbs (217) and high-value modal verbs (88), medium-value modal verbs (353) are preferred.In Corpus L, medium-value modal verbs (402) occupy the largest of the total, followed by low-value modal verbs (350) and high-value modal verbs (69).

1) Modal verbs of low value
As shown in Table 3, the use of low-value modal verbs is more frequent in Corpus L(350) than in Corpus C(217).Both corpora are characterized by the overwhelming use of can, which reveals the uncertainty of discourse as it uncovers the equivocal stands of the speaker.
(1) China's National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy 2035 provides a tangible national blueprint that can help guide other countries looking to prepare climate change action plans.(China Daily) (2) Both the UAE and China understand our immense duties in nurturing and conserving our natural landscapes so that future generations can continue to enjoy their wonders.(China Daily) (3) And such concentrations of birds can lead to outbreaks of avian botulism or other deadly illnesses.(Los Angeles Times) (4)But pressure on agriculture is increasing as climate change unleashes more intense and longer-lasting droughts, as well as heat waves that can harm crop yields.(Los Angeles Times) As can be seen from the above examples, both Chinese and American discourse use can convey the objectivity of news, which makes it easier for readers to accept.For example, China Daily highlights the beneficial results that can be brought about by China's contribution to other countries and the environment in ( 1) and ( 2), while Los Angeles Times uses can to describe the environmental damage that could be caused.

2) Modal verbs of median value
Modal verbs of median value are found to be most prevalent in two newspapers, and the word will is more frequent in Corpus C (249) than in Corpus L(221).This indicates that both China Daily and Los Angeles Times try to avoid extreme tones of voice and prefer the more neutral discourse, while China Daily appears to be more objective, as in the following: (5) It is convinced that the holistic strategy will enable it to become a sustainable, social Will is often used to predict the development of green industry and environmental policies.Sometimes news reports can not directly tell their opinions so they apply such predictions to show their expectation for future trends.,For instance, China is constructed as a main supporter of the new energy industry in discourse and the newspaper of the United States presents encouragement for regulations and concern for animals.The use of will allows journalists to take less responsibility when giving judgements, and increase the authority for the report.

3) Modal verbs of high value
The frequency of modal verbs of high value is less than the first two modal verbs, but there is still a certain gap between the two corpora.Must, a modal with a strong subjective and imperative connotation, appears more in Corpus C(43) than in Corpus L( 16), which indicates that China Daily is more certain about the report than Los Angeles Times, as in the following: (9) The Glasgow decision to "at least double" climate finance for adaptation must be urgently fulfilled.(12) So our entire service area must take measures to protect our limited Colorado River supplies.
The modal must reinforces the commitment to discourse.China Daily demonstrates the determination of China to enhance the measures towards climate change, and the Los Angeles Times presents the same attitude by conveying the urgency of adjusting to environmental change and taking relevant protection.

Interpretation
Interpretation includes the text structure and points.Fairclough (1989) thinks the point of the text is the general topic.To fully understand the discourse and keep it in long-term memory, the interpreter must challenge four questions.
First, concerning the question of what is going on in the text, this can be divided into activity, topic, and purpose.The analysis of activity refers to identifying a situation from a series of types.Both China and America's news discourse embody climate change reporting activities.They contain the current environmental problems, related industrial situations, and hopes and worries for the climate future.On this topic, both media discuss the issue of climate change, and the common purpose is to adapt to the change and get involved in climate governance to consolidate national ideologies.Specifically, China hopes to unify more countries to tackle problems with more concerted efforts, and America focuses more on enhancing its leadership in governance.
Second, regarding the question of who is involved in the activity, journalists transmit the messages to the readers via news reports.The reports are not value-free because the writers not only record the latest events but also give implied opinions through interviewees or the report itself.In the news, officers, scientists, businessmen, and other people influenced by climate change are mentioned.They convey the imperativeness of the protecting environment to the readers, building a common national recognition.
Third, concerning the relations of the people involved in the action, the reports in both countries refer more to power, society, and ideology.The journalists are from different countries and work for the China Daily or Los Angeles Times.Their social position cannot be judged as low or high, but their voices represent the mainstream opinion of the countries and influence readers from various ranks and groups.
Fourth, regarding the role of language, here it serves the purpose of message transmission.It helps to spread the latest narrative and the nation's opinion to readers.In this sense, the genre is news and the channel is the written text.

Explanation
At the explanation stage, discourse is regarded as a social practice.The text has a close relation with social background.Three levels of context are studied in this part: the situational context, the institutional context, and the societal context.

Situational Context
According to Fairclough (1989), the situational context is treated as the immediate social environment in which the news discourse is generated.The discourses in this study are the latest environmental events reported after COP27.Climate change in recent years is taken as the situational context of discourse.
The United States is suffering from severe climate change, which brings more intense and dangerous wildfires, dried-up farmland, and insufficient vegetation to support livestock and wildlife.It is not only the government but also the public who is requiring actions on climate governance.The measures to protect the environment like financial support and desalination projects have been carried out.American mainstream media take both a positive and negative stance during reporting.On the positive side, the situational context can be easily seen from the headlines of the news, like "Cleaner air, arriving soon by U.S. mail", "An experimental green suburb rises in Riverside County.Is it the future of single-family housing", where the journalists report proactive measures to tackle climate change, giving the public confidence and belief in the government.On the negative side, reports like "'It's a disaster.'Drought dramatically shrinking California farmland, costing $1.7 billion", and "Europe's carbon tariff is the right general idea, but doomed by details" give readers the impression that environmental problems are very serious, and the methods used by other countries are less than ideal.These discourses lead people to recognize the deficiency of the present climate governance, providing justification for the American strategy and welcoming the leadership of the United States.
China also encounters many environmental problems like energy transition and wetland protection.Toward the goal of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality, the Chinese government supports the new energy industry and builds nature reserves.From headlines like "Lyuliang leads charge in forging a cluster for the hydrogen industry", and "Nation ups efforts for hydrogen", China's concern for green energy development is obvious.These discourses enhance people's confidence in the nation's environmental outlook.China also pays close attention to the international society's attitude toward climate change and actively calls on cooperation to prevent catastrophic damage.In the headlines "Experts see China and Australia spurring low-carbon economy", and "Meeting global climate ambitions through regional collaboration", the China Daily uses declarative sentences to indicate the countries' efforts on environment protection, expressing proactiveness and hope for cooperation.China actively carries out bilateral and multilateral climate diplomacy to promote reform of the global climate governance mechanism, which is conducive to shaping the image of an active participant in global environmental governance and enhancing public recognition of China's ecological philosophy.

Institutional Context
Institutional context is the social institution that constructs a broader matrix for the text (Fairclough, 1989).This research discusses the background of the China Daily and Los Angeles Times as the institutional context of the reporting.
The China Daily is China's national English daily newspaper, founded in 1981.It is also the only Chinese newspaper that has entered mainstream Western society, being an important part of the Chinese government's outbound propaganda (Duan & Zhou, 2007).As a state media, it conveys the countries' opinions and attitudes to the world.Rather than focusing on reporting a single event, it conveys China's position and solution.The China Daily harbors the mission of allowing China to better communicate with the world.The active ecological actions towards climate change give readers a good impression of China's ecological image.China's hope for cooperation in the news discourses helps the country to attain more international rights of speech, enhancing the people's pride in the nation.
The Los Angeles Times was founded in 1881, belonging to "Mirror Group Newspapers".It is the largest metropolitan daily newspaper in America, with a Sunday print readership of 1.6 million and a combined print and online local weekly audience of 4.4 million (LOS ANGELES TIMES, N.D).Zhang (2014) believes the medium is an economic concept in the U.S. The newspaper desires more attention and readers, therefore it chooses to report the most concerning environmental problems, discussing the worrying crisis and realizing the climate-related political interests.Zhang (2014) also points out that the intense competition in the media has reduced risk-taking in news reporting.The news sometimes reports the positive side of climate change, such as the headline "They're knee deep in the climate trenches.Here's what gives them hope", which matches the official ideologies of the United States to build ecological leadership in the world.

Societal Context
The societal context of news discourse heavily affects the production of news reports (Fairclough,1989).China still faces developing challenges from some Western countries which propagate the "China threat theory" and harbor strong suspicion towards China's rise.According to Tai and Ma (2024), for a long time, the "discourse hegemony" of the Western medium represented by BBC, CNN, and AP gave Western countries a more favorable balance of power in international cultural communication.Under this international environment, China has to apply national media to spread its voice.China exerts much effort on national broadcasting to enhance people's sense of national belonging, therefore deepening their national identity.The Chinese media are trying to introduce China's experience to countries in need and build a respectable image.
America has long faced trouble brought by climate change.The United States government has gone from neglecting climate change to giving it strategic attention.According to Li (2009), the number of Congress members who want to curb climate change is growing; public awareness of climate change is also deepening.Therefore, America has given more attention to the climate crisis, making it the center of U.S. foreign policy and national security (Yu, Zhang, & Wang, 2021).The discourses about the policy such as innovating science and technology, boosting demand, and investing in infrastructure convey a positive message to the readers, which builds the strong leadership of government in the mind of the public and enhances the citizens' sense of national expectation.The construction of a responsible national image is in line with the core value of American ideologies, which needs to prove that "democracy can still deliver" (THE WHITE HOUSE, 2021).

Discussion & Conclusions
Based on Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Model of Discourse, this paper combines the relevant research results of CDA and CL, exploring the similarities and differences in the discourse characteristics of climate news reports in China and the United States after COP27, and how news discourse strengthens national ideologies.Regarding to RQ1, the findings suggest that the similarities between Chinese and American news are that both focus on climate issues and energy industry development around keywords such as climate, global, energy, and emissions and call for countries around the world to participate in environmental protection.Modal verbs of median value are often used to reflect the objectivity of the report.In the process of producing, distributing, and consuming texts, both countries convey the urgency of addressing climate change by showing the opinions of different people, which is consistent with the national ideological requirements for creating a good ecological image.
The differences between Chinese and American climate news are mainly reflected in the social origins of the linguistics features.The mission of China Daily is to promote communication between China and the world, therefore, it often chooses to emphasize China's environmental actions and international cooperation when facing communication difficulties.The Los Angeles Times hopes to bring economic benefits to the newspaper through controversial topics and demonstrates American leadership in this context.The results echoed findings from prior studies in that Chinese news supports the government's official and political stance, while US news is often influenced by public stances, mostly presenting environmental issues faced by the public (Yang et al., 2020).
News media always report news events from a specific ideological standpoint and promote and consolidate the reproduction of ideology (Fowler, 2013).Concerning RQ2, this study finds that the discourse strategies to consolidate national ideologies in the climate news discourse of both countries are mainly through the concentrated reporting on climate issues like industrial development, emission issues, and government actions, to clarify climate responsibility, and shape a responsible national image that actively solves climate problems.The news media in China and the United States attach great importance to reflecting objective attitudes in reporting and use modal verbs of median value to reduce reporters' responsibilities.However, there is no complete objectivity and neutrality in news reporting.(Fowler, 2013).Chinese media hope to promote public recognition of China's climate policies and national pride by showing the country's willingness to cooperate with other countries.This is in line with the previous finding of Chinese reporting, which tends to highlight positive developments and requires global support to tackle climate change (Song et al., 2021c).The American media applies a similar strategy by stressing shaping the leadership of American climate governance through discourse, conveying the universal value of democracy, and strengthening the national identity of the American people.
This study combines CL and CDA methods to explore how climate change news discourse in China and the United States consolidates national ideology.It not only broadens the field of critical discourse analysis but also helps to improve readers' critical awareness and critically evaluate news discourse in reports of a single event.It should be noted that this study selects Chinese and American news from one and a half months after COP27 as the corpus, where the generalizability of the results may be limited by the number of reports.Moreover, this paper only compares the news discourse of China and the United States.Further research should extend into a broader comparison between the climate news discourse of different countries, based on the wider corpus with more mainstream media discourse besides China Daily and Los Angeles Times.This paper hopes that the combination of CDA and CL can stimulate a deeper engagement with the study of news discourse on climate change.

Figure 5 .
Figure 5. Concordance of China in Corpus C

Figure 6 .
Figure 6.Concordance of biodiversity in Corpus C

Figure 7 .
Figure 7. Concordance of water in Corpus L

Figure 8 .
Figure 8. Concordance of said in Corpus L , and technological leader by 2030.(China Daily) (6) The number of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will reach about 50,000.(China Daily) (7) Such heavy reliance on wells will face new limitations in the coming years.(Los Angeles Times) (8) With many fields now bone dry, Bransford and other farmers say they're concerned about how the birds and other species will fare.(Los Angeles Times) (China Daily) (10) China must continue to promote the construction of national parks.(China Daily) (11) The region must be prepared for the river to permanently yield less water because of climate change.(Los Angeles Times)

Table 1 .
Keyword analysis of two corpora on climate change news discourse

Table 2 .
The log-likelihood analysis of two corpora

Table 3 .
The number and distribution of modal verbs in two corpora