Author(s)

YongQi An, XinMing Cai, Fei Deng^*

Affiliation(s)

School of Foreign Studies, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, Guangdong, China. 

Corresponding Author

Fei Deng

ABSTRACT

In the contemporary context characterized by the in-depth advancement of globalization and the accelerated iteration of urbanization, urban image serves as a concrete carrier of national cultural confidence. Its construction logic and communication efficiency have become one of the core indicators for measuring a country’s cultural soft power. As a core engine city in China’s Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, a millennium-old commercial capital, and an international gateway hub linking domestic and foreign markets, the strategic shaping and systematic communication of Guangzhou’s urban image are not only related to the city’s own global competitiveness, but also of irreplaceable value for demonstrating China’s concept of open development and enhancing the country’s cultural discourse power. This study adopts Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as its theoretical framework, integrates the quantitative analysis method of corpus linguistics, and constructs a corpus by selecting news texts mentioning “Guangzhou” (from 2019 to 2024) from representative platforms of domestic mainstream media: People’s Daily (print edition and official website) and the overseas website of China Daily (the English news section targeting international audiences). It analyzes the international urban image of Guangzhou shaped and communicated from the perspective of “self-construction” by Chinese mainstream media, focusing on high-frequency words, keywords and their collocations. By using corpus tools such as AntConc for word frequency statistics, keyword clustering, and collocation co-occurrence analysis, this study systematically deconstructs the construction path and communication focus of mainstream media on Guangzhou’s international urban image from the “self-construction” perspective. The results show that the image of Guangzhou presented by Chinese mainstream media exhibits distinct characteristics: in the economic dimension, it focuses on being a “commercial and trade hub” and an “innovation highland”; in the cultural dimension, it emphasizes “openness and inclusiveness” and “integration of the ancient and the modern”; and in the livelihood dimension, it highlights “livable city construction” and “people’s well-being”. Relevant research further puts forward specific suggestions for improving the communication effect of Guangzhou’s international image, aiming to further enhance the city’s global influence. This study can provide a theoretical reference and practical paradigm for the image construction of similar domestic international gateway cities, and contribute to promoting the upgrading of urban image communication from “self-construction” to “benign interaction between self-construction and other-construction”.

KEYWORDS

Critical discourse analysis; City image; Corpus; People’s daily; China daily

CITE THIS PAPER

YongQi An, XinMing Cai, Fei Deng. The shaping and communication of Guangzhou city image: a corpus-based study of Chinese main media. World Journal of Sociology and Law. 2025, 3(2): 24-31. DOI: https://doi.org/10.61784/wjsl3028.

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