CPEC in Global Media: A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis across News Cultures

Abstract

The study explores how the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has been reflected in various contexts of national and linguistic media, highlights the lack of a comparative study at a global level, and the lack of critical or negative evaluations. The study analyzes CPEC discourse using a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach to describe the CPEC discourse in Pakistani English and Urdu newspapers, Chinese state media, Indian national media, and International newspapers. Based on the CDA approach developed by Fairclough and the use of corpus linguistic analysis tools including AntConc, the analysis will stay upon such aspects like keywords, collocation patterns, semantic prosodies, and some general ideological structures. The findings provide clear and opposite report, with the Pakistani and Chinese media  describing CPEC as a model of development, co-operation, and regional growth, the Indian media as a geopolitical and security issue, and the Western media as the problem of debt-risks, transparency, and strategic competition. Through combining multilingual and cross-national corpora, the research provides the more balanced and extensive view of global CPEC discourse, which will bring some mass contributions to the CDA, media studies, and geopolitical communication. 

Keywords: CPEC, Media Representation, Cross-National Media Comparison, News Discourses