Reporting news in China: Evaluation as an indicator of change in the China Daily

This article applies the techniques of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to an examination of the Chinese government-owned English-language newspaper the China Daily. The aim is to see whether there is evidence that over the last decade the newspaper, which describes itself as the overseas ‘Voice of China’, has attempted to adapt its style of reporting in response to China’s raised international profile, as well as to the increasing diversity and commercialization of its media industry. The study adopts a quantitative and qualitative approach to the analysis of two corpora of texts from the newspaper: one from 1998 and the other from 2010. The focus is on what Labov calls evaluation: an aspect of the narrative structure of a text that has to do with the way the narrator embellishes a narrative to make it more interesting. The results suggest that the China Daily has made its reporting more diverse and interesting, probably in response to the commercialization of China’s media industry and to China’s growing international profile.