Divergent news representations of Lien Chan’s visit to China: A corpus-based lexical comparison between the China Post and the China Daily

By combining the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach with the corpus linguistic method, this study compares the lexical choices employed by two English newspapers, i.e. the China Daily (CD) and the China Post (CP), in their coverage of Taiwan’s KMT (Kuomintang) Chairman Lien Chan’s visit to China in April 2005. The comparative analysis of the two corpora of news reports is conducted at three levels: word frequencies, part-of-speech (POS) frequencies and semantic category frequencies. The paper argues that the differences in the news representation of Lien’s visit are attributed to the different socio-political functions performed by these two newspapers: while the CD depicts the event as a momentous one that has received nation-wide plaudits in order to echo faithfully China’s policy of peaceful reunification, the CP presents a more comprehensive picture of the event in that it also reports in detail some incidents, including violent protests, triggered by Lien’s visit that has great impact on the domestic social life of Taiwan.