Abstract

China’s foreign aid implements the concept of a community with a shared future for mankind and promotes the common progress of China and developing countries. News about China’s foreign aid released by foreign media is quite significant for overseas audiences to perceive China’s image. This study adopts Ruth Wodak’s discourse-historical approach and corpus-based method to interpret foreign news reports on China’s foreign aid. The macro-level news themes, meso-level discourse strategies and national images, as well as micro-level discourse features are explained with examples. Research shows that news themes reveal the objects, fields and methods of China’s foreign aid. Foreign media widely adopt discourse strategies of nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivation, intensification and mitigation to shape China as a friendly international donor. A few characteristics of news discourse indicate that several media misunderstand or smear China’s foreign aid, which has a negative impact on China’s international public opinion environment. Therefore, building an effective external voice platform to convey China’s international responsibilities and contributions is necessary, which helps establish a favorable international public opinion environment for China’s development and call on other countries to make efforts to reduce human poverty.

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