A Corpus-Based Comparative Analysis of Newspaper Coverage on China’s Human Rights Issues

This study aims to answer the two questions: What are the major topics regarding China's human rights issues in the US and Chinese media; and how do the US media deploy rhetorical strategies in their coverage of China's human rights issues and how do the Chinese media counter these rhetorical strategies in its response.To explore the interaction between American and Chinese media, this research will collect Chinese human rights-related news articles from The New York Times and the China Daily from 2013, the time when Chinese President Xi Jinping came to power, to the end of 2023, the time when this research started. Additionally, this research will apply the Topic Modeling approach and other digital tools like 4CAT to generate major topics of the media and use visualization tools like Rankflow to do time trend analysis.In addressing these questions, this study argues that The New York Times tends to question the validity of reports coming out of China and to place great emphasis upon conflating its alleged human rights violations with those of North Korea as a geopolitical strategy in undermining China's credibility.Whereas in contrast, this study argues that China Daily counters this narrative as Western propaganda by pointing to its achievements and resituating the nation as a key member of the global family of nations.In summary, this research is expected to enrich the current public discourse on the subject of China's human rights from a more balanced, objective perspective based upon a close examination of news articles, employing a digital methodology for purposes of this research.