The newsworthiness of “climate change” in China over the last thirty years (1993–2022): a diachronic corpus-based news discourse analysis

Abstract

This article explores the discursive construction of news values by Chinese media to reveal how climate change was packaged and sold to the Chinese public over the last 30 years (1993–2022). Adopting the corpus linguistic method and the Discursive news values analysis (DNVA) framework, this study examines news values through key words and photographs from five Chinese mainstream media websites. The selected timeframe is significant as it comprises domestic news reports published during three different governance phases, from 1993–2002, 2003–2012, and 2013–2022. The results show that the Chinese news reporting in each of the 3 phases has constantly and dominantly construed the news value of Eliteness, albeit in different ways. From 1993 to 2002, climate change was constructed as an an external concept which lacked a concrete China-associated interpretation; from 2003 to 2012, climate change was framed as China’s domestic issue, which saw substantive progress in governance efforts across the board to address the challenge; from 2013 to 2022, climate change was established as China’s diplomatic issue. Overall, through the three phases, climate change has been identified as increasingly concrete and localized in the Chinese context, and China’s initiatives to tackle climate change have been increasingly promoted from domestic to international contexts. The news values and the construction ways the Chinese media selected to report climate change were largely dominated by China’s transition in industrial structure and mode of production during the last 30 years, as well as China’s diplomatic strategy to build a Community with a Shared Future in the recent decade.