Framing China’s Rule of Law: A Comparative Corpus-Based Analysis of Legal News in People’s Daily Online and The Guardian

Abstract

This paper compares how China is framed in English-language legal news in two outlets with markedly different institutional positions: People’s Daily Online and The Guardian. The data cover January 2025 to February 2026 and amount to around 945 thousand and 1.4 million words respectively. Building on Goffman’s framing theory and on transitivity analysis from Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study classifies the verbal collocates of China by process type and reads the resulting patterns as outlet-level frame packages, which are then mapped onto Entman’s three framing dimensions. The two packages prove to be structurally inverse. In People’s Daily, China appears as the destination of legal-institutional construction and as an active partner in multilateral reform; in The Guardian, the same actor is positioned as a target of external regulation and as an agent whose initiatives prompt containment by others. The opposition holds across all three of Entman’s dimensions. The study makes two contributions. Theoretically, the paper offers a bottom-up way of operationalizing frame theory: frames are inferred from grammatical choices rather than from preset categories. Methodologically, the study shows that transitivity choices can carry frame divergence independently of evaluative tone, and that grammatical-role analysis can recover such divergence where surface evaluation registers convergence.