Abstract
The political and economic developments in China and the United States are closely followed and reported on by news magazines and newspapers around the world, including The Economist, a reputable weekly newspaper with wide circulation globally. However, while The Economist now has editorial offices in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, is regarded as having little reporting bias, and exercises rigorous fact-checking, it is evident that the way The Economist reports on China often differs to the way it reports on the United States. In order to examine these differences in more detail and examine whether they are informed by certain underlying ideological beliefs, this study developed and analysed two corpora based on The Economist’s news reports in 2019; one containing The Economist’s reports on China and another containing The Economist reports on the United States. It involved a corpus-based critical discourse analysis carried out using the online corpus analytical tool Sketch Engine. The results show that The Economist's attitudes towards China still, in part, reproduce the Western oppositional thinking about, and rejection of communist governments that emerged during the Cold War.
