Using news articles containing the keyword “COVID” published in China Daily after February 9, 2020 as a corpus, this study adopts attitudinal resources as the analytical framework. By examining the explicit attitudinal expressions in the retrieved texts, it investigates how the image of China is discursively constructed in the selected reports. The findings indicate that frequent use of positive evaluative language contributes to the construction of a responsible, proactive, and dynamic image of China, particularly in relation to its economy, diplomacy, and culture.
Haitian Jiang (Sun,) studied this question.