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Abstract
Since the Trump administration took office again in 2025, the combined impact of trade imbalances and political factors has escalated China - US trade frictions. Analyzing The New York Times' coverage of the China - US trade dispute offers insights into how US media shapes China's image. Consequently, this study combined quantitative and qualitative research, guided by the transitivity theory in systemic functional linguistics and the international ecological philosophy of "harmony and diversity, mutual benefits and love", it constructed a small-scale corpus from The New York Times' reports on China - US trade issues post Trump's 2025 presidency. Using Word Smith Tools 9.0, it extracted semantic networks of verb collocations in the "China + V" material process structure to summarize China's actor image and explored the ecological representation of this image, revealing the international ecological philosophies of China and the US reflected in the discourse. The study found that in terms of "China + V" material processes, The New York Times portrayed China as a "tariff imposer," "strong retaliator," and "crisis manager." The ecological representation of these images was predominantly destructive, followed by neutral and beneficial discourse. The findings imply that China advocates mutual benefits, independence, and autonomy, while the US is linked to hegemonism. This research enriches the application of transitivity and promotes the development of a more objective, fair, and rational international ecological discourse system.
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Copyright (c) 2025 填静 胡 (Author)