Public Interest and Trust. Chinese Official Media Discourse in an Epidemic Context

This contribution examines a selected corpus of commentaries published by the Xinhua News Agency on the COVID-19 pandemic in three different languages (Chinese, French and English) in 2020. Drawing on the Discourse Historical Approach, the analysis of strategies - such as nomination and predication - concurring to build the representation of Chinese institutional actors, aims to highlight the goals characterising each language-specific set of texts. Further attention is also devoted to intertextual patterns and polyphony, testifying to the complexity of meaning construction processes for different audiences. The findings are finally discussed against the background of the Chinese media context, considering both the predominant position held by the Xinhua News Agency in China and its effort to consolidate its prestige worldwide and to win the international public interest and trust.