Abstract

In recent years, as China’s largest smartphone company, Huawei’s position in the international market has gradually increased and received widespread attention from foreign media. The rapid development of China’s impact on the hegemony of the US has also changed the direction of US media’s reporting on Chinese companies. At this stage, it is meaningful to study the image of Huawei in both Chinese and US media reports. Therefore, based on the corpus approach and critical discourse analysis, this paper builds two corpora of China Daily (576 reports with 438,261 words) and The New York Times (429 reports with 347,025 words). It is found that (1) both sides acknowledge that Huawei ranks top in world telecommunication technology, particularly in the 5G network; (2) two newspapers focus on different aspects in their reports. For the Chinese media, Huawei’s technological prowess, innovation capacity in the global market, cooperation with many other European and African countries are given more attention, while for the American media, more focus is shifted to Huawei’s threat to national security; (3) two newspapers hold different attitudes towards the rise of Huawei. China Daily’s positive construction of Huawei’s image is obvious. While for the American media, the Trump administration is more likely to project a threatening image of Huawei; (4) the reporting frameworks and the styles of materials selected differ in two newspapers. China Daily’s framework concentrates on “Huawei” itself, while The New York Times tends to construct a reporting framework from multiple perspectives from the third-party.

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