Corpus Analysis of the Discursive Features of News Discourse on Sino-Russian Economic Relations (Based on the People’s Daily)

The study focuses on identifying discursive features of news discourse on China–Russia economic relations based on materials from the newspaper People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao). The object of the research is the institutional media discourse of Chinese mass media representing the foreign economic interaction between China and the Russian Federation. The subject of analysis includes linguistic and discursive mechanisms used to construct the image of economic partnership, such as thematic organization of publications, stable nominations, recurring collocational patterns, as well as evaluative and modal markers. The author examines how news texts create interpretive frames of cooperation and consolidate key semantic dominants through repeated language models. Special attention is given to how People’s Daily discursively represents bilateral economic cooperation as stable and strategically significant. The methodology is based on corpus-oriented discourse analysis and includes thematic classification, frequency analysis of key lexemes, identification of collocations, concordance analysis of contextual usage, and qualitative interpretation of discursive strategies and evaluative mechanisms. The scientific novelty of the study lies in its comprehensive description of the discursive organization of People’s Daily news publications on China–Russia economic relations through corpus-oriented discourse analysis combining quantitative observations with discourse interpretation. The findings show that the thematic core of the discourse is concentrated on trade, energy cooperation, and investment interaction, which shape the main directions of the media agenda. The study demonstrates that the representation of partnership relies on stable collocations and dynamic verb patterns that construct a narrative of continuous expansion of cooperation. It is also revealed that evaluative meaning is expressed mainly indirectly through modal constructions of necessity and prospects, epistemic modality, and official-documentary reporting forms. The results refine the understanding of institutional Chinese news discourse and may be applied in media linguistics, discourse studies, and comparative research on Chinese and Russian media texts.