Abstract

This study investigates how Chinese and Western media construct discourse around China’s coal transition through a corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) approach. Two specialized sub-corpora were constructed: a China Daily sub-corpus (30 texts) and a Guardian sub-corpus (25 texts), covering the period from September 2020 to September 2025. Keyword, collocation, and semantic prosody analyses were conducted using AntConc 4.3.1, followed by qualitative coding of legitimation strategies based on van Leeuwen’s (2007) framework. The keyword analysis reveals that China Daily’s discourse is characterized by quantitative and technical terms (percent, billion, development, intelligent, hydrogen), while the Guardian foregrounds crisis and evaluative vocabulary (climate, crisis, biggest, world). Collocation analysis shows that coal carries a managerial semantic prosody in China Daily (coal-rich, coal industry, coal consumption) but an eliminative prosody in the Guardian (coal plants, new coal, phase). The legitimation strategy coding identifies Rationalization as the dominant strategy in China Daily (53.8%), constructing coal transition as a data-driven, orderly process, whereas the Guardian employs a more balanced mix in which Moral evaluation (26.8%) plays a significantly larger role, framing China’s coal dependence through negative moral labels such as “addiction” and “crisis”. The study concludes that the two media outlets operate within notably different discursive models—“gradualist legitimation” versus “urgency critique”—and suggests that incorporating human-scale narratives and engaging more directly with moral vocabulary could enhance the international persuasiveness of China’s green transition communication.

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