The article analyzes publications from 2016 to 2025 in the "Renmin Ribao" and the newspaper "Chinese Discipline Inspection and Supervision Service" through a comparative study of the representation of actual corruption cases in the central party newspaper and the departmental publication of the disciplinary supervision system. The research focuses on the dynamics of publication activity on the topic of actual corruption, the specifics of discursive construction, and the means of textual representation of corrupt phenomena. The analysis emphasizes the semantic accents in the description of cases, the relationship between evaluative and procedural components, and which narrative elements are brought to the forefront. These aspects are operationalized through a comparison of the intensity of coverage, high-frequency vocabulary, and text organization. The aim of the study is to reveal the functional distribution of roles between the two official print media in anti-corruption communication and to document the differences in their discursive strategies. The methodological foundation consists of the representation approach and principles from media system theory. The empirical base is a corpus formed in three stages: primary selection based on a specialized dictionary, filtering using machine learning methods, and manual verification. The final sample includes 9,798 relevant texts. The analytical section combines descriptive statistics, corpus analysis of high-frequency vocabulary, and case studies. The scientific novelty of the research lies in identifying functional differentiation within official print communication in China based on a decade's worth of data within a unified comparative framework. It has been established that the publication activity trajectories of the two publications differ: "Renmin Ribao" demonstrates a decline followed by a recovery, while the "Chinese Discipline Inspection and Supervision Service" newspaper shows a gradual decrease. The analysis of high-frequency vocabulary reveals that "Renmin Ribao" more frequently uses qualifying formulations and emphasizes the severity of violations, supporting the macro-political explanation of the anti-corruption agenda and its discursive legitimization. In contrast, the departmental publication focuses more on subjects and procedural dimensions, highlighting supervisory and disciplinary measures and the logic of case consideration, which reflects the institutionalized nature of the anti-corruption mechanism.
Lumeng Zhang (Thu,) studied this question.