Critical Discourse Analysis of American Mainstream Media Reports on China's Aerospace Development

Abstract

Critique discourse analysis of the coverage provided by American mainstream media in The New York Times and The Washington Post on China's aerospace development from 2016 to 2025 is conducted in this paper. Based on Fairclough's three-dimensional analysis system, quantitative corpus analysis and qualitative textual interpretation were conducted on about 28 news reports comprising around 16,200 words. Therefore, these outlets have systematically constructed a discourse of geopolitical competition and strategic risk for China's space program. High-frequency lexical clusters are centred on competition-related nouns, such as "rivalry", "race", and "competitor", and adjectives such as "aggressive", "uncontrolled", and "secretive" give the coverage a security-oriented connotation. Transitivity analysis shows that the material process of "China" presents an active challenge to US space hegemony, and verbal processes favor warnings from US officials over scientific assessments. Citation practices favour American political and security elites, and frame China's achievements, such as the Chang'e lunar sample return and construction of the Tiangong space station, as part of a zero-sum strategic competition rather than as contributions to human space exploration. This construction of discourse shows deep-seated Cold War mentality, the legislative inheritance of the Wolf Amendment, and broader geopolitical anxieties; it serves to ideologically justify continued technological containment and an expansion of military-space construction.