Mediating China’s political discourse: South–North representations of ‘A Community with a Shared Future for Mankind’

This article examines how the Chinese state-promoted concept ‘A Community with a Shared Future for Mankind’ (CSFM) is represented and communicated across Global South–North media systems. Drawing on a self-built bilingual corpus of Chinese (CNC) and Western news (WNC) texts and the Discourse-Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis, it compares key topics, discursive strategies and their linguistic realisations. Keyword and collocation analyses show that CNC tends to embed CSFM in a developmental multilateral frame centred on ‘cooperation’,’“peace’ and ‘win-win’ outcomes, whereas WNC more often links it to ‘power’, ‘strategy’ and ‘military’ in narratives of geopolitical competition and ideological suspicion. Index-line analysis further reveals contrasting patterns of nomination, predication and perspectivisation: in CNC, CSFM is enacted as a shared ethical horizon and practical blueprint for global governance; in WNC, it is problematised as an instrument of authoritarian ambition and strategic communication. The article argues that more effective cross-cultural communication requires terminological consistency and genuinely dialogic, audience-aware South–North media engagement.