Human-cattle Relations in Selected Chinese News Discourse: A Corpus-assisted Ecolinguistic Analysis

In the context of modernity, profit-driven and unethical practices, such as artificially increasing beef weight and enhancing its visual freshness to meet consumer expectations, have led some traders to inject water into live cattle. Such practices not only violate animal ethics, undermine animal welfare, and disrupt species ecology but also prompt people to reconsider human–cattle relations in China. This study aims to explore ‘human-cattle relations’ in the Chinese context textually and visually, specifically, to examine the interspecies ethical issues involved in ‘human-cattle relations’ in China. This study draws on a self-compiled corpus of cattle representations in selected Chinese news discourse covering a period of six years (2020–2025) through the lens of the Hallidayan approach, Stibbe’s ecosophy and Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar. A corpus-assisted and qualitative analysis was used to reveal more profound interspecies ethical issues. Qualitative findings further identify discursive patterns associated with industrial fatalism and technocratic optimism, whereby industrialized cattle farming is represented as a normalized pathway to economic development, while technocratic optimism is positively evaluated in relation to productivity and animal welfare. The results show that industrial fatalism and technocratic optimism can simultaneously shape the discursive representation of cattle welfare, with the former normalizing the inevitability of industrial exploitation, and the latter promoting technological solutions that appear to enhance animal well-being while leaving underlying structures of commodification largely unchallenged. The findings suggest that industrial fatalism and technocratic optimism frequently represent cattle as passive objects. The “water-injected live cattle” incident is not merely a cattle welfare issue, but also a problem concerning interspecies’ ecological ethics and the imbalance in human-cattle relations.