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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
ZHANG Yumo, SUN Wen, LONG Yanxia
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DOI:10.17265/1539-8080/2026.03.003
Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the construction and dissemination of national image have emerged as a significant research agenda. As a global issue, media coverage of public health events has become a critical arena for the shaping of national image and discursive contention. This study focuses on three major public health crises—SARS, Ebola, and COVID-19—and selects relevant news reports from China Daily (English edition) and The New York Times as its corpus. By analyzing high-frequency words, lexical co-occurrence, and the modal system, this research comparatively examines the discourse construction logics of Chinese and Western media, with a particular emphasis on their divergent pathways and representational effects in shaping China’s national image. By revealing the underlying discursive mechanisms of both media traditions, this study aims to provide empirical support and practical insights for optimizing China’s international communication strategies, challenging Western discursive dominance, and precisely constructing and disseminating a truthful, comprehensive, and multidimensional image of China.
public health events, discourse analysis, national image, China Daily, The New York Times
ZHANG Yumo, SUN Wen, & LONG Yanxia. Research on Narrative Differences of Medical Hotspot Events and the Construction of China’s Image Under the Background of Political Multipolarization in the New Century. US-China Foreign Language, March 2026, Vol. 24, No. 3, 96-111 doi:10.17265/1539-8080/2026.03.003
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