This paper investigates how the discourse of human rights is represented in China and US news media before and during the pandemic. It combines the tools and methods of corpus linguistics with the critical approaches to text analysis in discourse studies. Four corpora were built with the articles with at least one mention of “人权” (human rights) from the People’s Daily (a Chinese government-sponsored newspaper) and “human rights” from The Washington Post (a leading daily newspaper in the US) in 2019 and 2020. Topic focus, lexical choice, and stance in the news accounts were examined by comparing the data in 2019 against 2020 within the two newspapers, and comparing the two newspapers against each other. The data show that Chinese human rights discourse remained consistent during the pandemic, in the sense of taking the rights to subsistence and development as priorities, and championing its achievements in its own record. The People’s Daily also made the contrast between China’s path of human rights protection with great achievements and the US’s human rights with disasters and crises more explicit especially during the pandemic. However, The Washington Post played the role of “the international police”, criticising many countries, entities and individuals for violating human rights, including the US itself, both before and during the pandemic. This paper’s conclusions contribute to cross-cultural/-disciplinary research on human rights.

Authors:
Zihuan Zhong, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Ms Zihuan Zhong is a University Doctoral Student at Queen Mary University of London in the United Kingdom

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