Cover not available

Article published In: Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 23:4 (2024) ► pp.520–543

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

The use of metaphors to construct crisis discourses in describing COVID-19 vaccines in the Chinese and the American news media

A corpus-assisted critical approach

ORCiD logo with link | City University of Hong Kong
ORCiD logo with link | University of Macau
Published online: 30 November 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.22153.lu
Abstract
There have been limited studies comparing Chinese and American news media in their descriptions of vaccines, especially their use of metaphors in the context of COVID-19. Hence, this paper employs a corpus-assisted critical approach to examine the metaphors used in constructing crisis discourses relating to vaccines in Chinese and American newspapers. The study reveals four conceptual metaphors: WEAPON, MACHINE, TRAVELLER, and CONTEST. The usage of these metaphors is intertwined with wider discursive contexts, which are shaped by the two countries’ distinct journalistic and geopolitical/sociocultural contexts. These have resulted in the adoption of different strategies for handling the COVID-19 crisis, reflecting the ideologies of collectivism in China and capitalism in America. The study highlights the significance of metaphors in shaping the ideologies of governments and/or the public towards vaccines through news media. Additionally, this paper provides a useful framework for comparing metaphor usage in two large corpora using Wmatrix.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Analytical framework and procedures
  • 5.Comparison of word-semantic collocations related to “COVID-19” vaccines
  • 6.Comparison of metaphors in word-semantic collocations related to “COVID-19” vaccines
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Disclosure statement
  • Notes
  • References
References (65)
References
Abbas, Ali Haif. 2022. “Politicizing COVID-19 Vaccines in the Press: A Critical Discourse Analysis.” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law – Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique 35 (3): 1167–85. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Altindis, Emrah. 2022. “Inequitable COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution and the Intellectual Property Rights Prolong the Pandemic.” Expert Review of Vaccines 21 (4): 427–30. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anthony, Laurence. 2005. “AntConc: Design and Development of a Freeware Corpus Analysis Toolkit for the Technical Writing Classroom.” In IPCC 2005. Proceedings. International Professional Communication Conference, 2005, 729–37. IEEE. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Atanasova, Dimitrinka, and Nelya Koteyko. 2017. “Metaphors in Guardian Online and Mail Online Opinion-Page Content on Climate Change: War, Religion, and Politics.” Environmental Communication 11 (4): 452–69. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baker, Paul. 2012. “Acceptable Bias? Using Corpus Linguistics Methods with Critical Discourse Analysis.” Critical Discourse Studies 9 (3): 247–56. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, Majid KhosraviNik, Michał Krzyżanowski, Tony McEnery, and Ruth Wodak. 2008. “A Useful Methodological Synergy? Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to Examine Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press.” Discourse & Society 19 (3): 273–306. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bollyky, Thomas J., and Chad P. Bown. 2020. “The Tragedy of Vaccine Nationalism: Only Cooperation Can End the Pandemic.” Foreign Aff. 991: 96.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Breeze, Ruth, Kayo Kondo, Andreas Musolff, and Sara Vilar-Lluch, eds. 2022. Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chan, Tayden Fung, and Yating Yu. 2023. “Building a Global Community of Health for All: A Positive Discourse Analysis of COVID-19 Discourse.” Discourse and Communication 17 (3): 1–16. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chen, Yi-Tui. 2021. “The Effect of Vaccination Rates on the Infection of COVID-19 under the Vaccination Rate below the Herd Immunity Threshold.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18 (14): 7491. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chotpitayasunondh, Tawee, Thea Kølsen Fischer, Jean-Michel Heraud, Aeron C. Hurt, Arnold S. Monto, Albert Osterhaus, Yuelong Shu, and John S. Tam. 2021. “Influenza and COVID-19: What Does Co-existence Mean?” Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses 15 (3): 407–12. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cohen, Jon. 2020. “China’s Vaccine Gambit.” Science 370 (6522): 1263–67. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dijk, Teun A. van. 2001. “Principles of Critical Discourse.” In Discourse Theory and Practice:A Reader, edited by Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor, and Simeon J. Yates, 300–317. London: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dou, Eva, Lyric Li, Chico Harlan, and Rick Noack. 2021. “The Search for Coronavirus Patient Zero, from Wuhan to Paris to Milan.” The Washington Post. 2021.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Du, Fanxing, Tracey Chantler, Mark R. Francis, Fiona Yueqian Sun, Xuan Zhang, Kaiyi Han, Lance Rodewald, et al. 2020. “The Determinants of Vaccine Hesitancy in China: A Cross-Sectional Study Following the Changchun Changsheng Vaccine Incident.” Vaccine 38 (47): 7464–71. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Editorial Board. 2020. “Stop the Coronavirus Stigma Now.” Nature 580 (7802): 165-165. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. “Language and Power.” Language in Social Life Series, 2591.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman, and Ruth Wodak. 1997. “Critical Discourse Analysis” in T. A. van Dijk (Ed.) Discourse as Social Interaction. 1st ed. London: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Flusberg, Stephen J., Teenie Matlock, and Paul H. Thibodeau. 2018. “War Metaphors in Public Discourse.” Metaphor and Symbol 33 (1): 1–18. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fuchs, Christian. 2021. Communicating COVID-19: Everyday Life, Digital Capitalism, and Conspiracy Theories in Pandemic Times. Emerald Group Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hardie, Andrew, Veronika Koller, Paul Rayson, and Elena Semino. 2007. “Exploiting a Semantic Annotation Tool for Metaphor Analysis.” In Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL2007).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Josephi, Beate. 2013. “How Much Democracy Does Journalism Need?” Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism 14 (4): 474–89. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Katz, Ingrid T., Rebecca Weintraub, Linda-Gail Bekker, and Allan M. Brandt. 2021. “From Vaccine Nationalism to Vaccine Equity – Finding a Path Forward.” New England Journal of Medicine 384 (14): 1281–83. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krzyżanowski, Michał. 2016. “Recontextualisation of Neoliberalism and the Increasingly Conceptual Nature of Discourse: Challenges for Critical Discourse Studies.” Discourse and Society 27 (3): 308–21. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krzyżanowski, Michał, and Natalia Krzyżanowska. 2022. “Narrating the ‘New Normal’ or Pre-Legitimising Media Control? COVID-19 and the Discursive Shifts in the Far-Right Imaginary of ‘Crisis’ as a Normalisation Strategy.” Discourse & Society 33 (6): 805–18. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krzyżanowski, Michał, Anna Triandafyllidou, and Ruth Wodak. 2018. “The Mediatization and the Politicization of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Europe.” Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 16 (1–2): 1–14. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krzyżanowski, Michał, and Ruth Wodak. 2011. “Political Strategies and Language Policies: The European Union Lisbon Strategy and Its Implications for the EU’s Language and Multilingualism Policy.” Language Policy 101: 115–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kyriakidis, Nikolaos C., Andrés López-Cortés, Eduardo Vásconez González, Alejandra Barreto Grimaldos, and Esteban Ortiz Prado. 2021. “SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines Strategies: A Comprehensive Review of Phase 3 Candidates.” Npj Vaccines 6 (1): 28. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey. 2013. “Virginia Woolf Meets Wmatrix.” Etudes de Stylistique Anglaise, no. 4 (March): 15–26. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mallapaty, Smriti. 2021. “China’s COVID Vaccines Are Going Global – But Questions Remain.” Nature 593 (7858): 178–79. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mardell, Jacob. 2020. “China’s Vaccine Diplomacy Assumes Geopolitical Importance.” Merics. 2020. [URL]
Offit, Paul A., and Jew K. Rita. 2003. “Addressing Parents’ Concerns: Do Vaccines Contain Harmful Preservatives, Adjuvants, Additives, or Residuals?” Pediatrics 112 (6): 1394–97. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ophir, Yotam. 2018. “Coverage of Epidemics in American Newspapers through the Lens of the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication Framework.” Health Security 16 (3): 147–57. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Paiva, Ely L., and Priscila L. S. Miguel. 2022. “Overcoming Enduring Inequalities in Global Value Chains? Interpreting the Case of Brazil’s Covid-19 Vaccine Supply through a Chess Metaphor.” Organisation 29 (3): 414–25. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pardi, Norbert, Michael J. Hogan, Frederick W. Porter, and Drew Weissman. 2018. “MRNA Vaccines – a New Era in Vaccinology.” Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 17 (4): 261–79. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Partington, Alan. 2010. “Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS) on UK Newspapers: An Overview of the Project.” Corpora 5 (2): 83–108. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rayson, P. 2008. “From Key Words to Key Semantic Domains.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13 (4): 519–49. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rayson, Paul, and Roger Garside. 2000. “Comparing Corpora Using Frequency Profiling.” In The Workshop on Comparing Corpora, 1–6.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Robbins, Rebecca. 2021. “Moderna, Racing for Profits, Keeps Covid Vaccine out of Reach of Poor.” The New York Times, 2021. [URL]
Schmidt, Charles. 2020. “Genetic Engineering Could Make a COVID-19 Vaccine in Months Rather than Years.” Scientific American 322 (6): 40–43.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Semino, Elena. 2017. “Corpus Linguistics and Metaphor.” The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge University Press Cambridge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2021. “‘Not Soldiers but Fire-Fighters’ – Metaphors and Covid-19.” Health Communication 36 (1): 50–58. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Semino, Elena, Zsófia Demjén, Andrew Hardie, Sheila Payne, and Paul Rayson. 2017. Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life. Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, Nicholas Ross, and Tracey Fallon. 2020. “An Epochal Moment? The COVID-19 Pandemic and China’s International Order Building.” World Affairs 183 (3): 235–55. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Szabó, Lilla Petronella, and Gabriella Szabó. 2022. “Attack of the Critics: Metaphorical Delegitimisation in Viktor Orbán’s Discourse during the Covid-19 Pandemic.” Journal of Language and Politics 21 (2): 255–76. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tan, Huileng. 2022. “2 Reasons Why China Is Still in Lockdowns, More than 2 Years after the Pandemic Started – and What It’ll Take for Life to Go Back to Normal.” Business Insider, 2022. [URL]
Vaage, Nora S. 2020. “Living Machines: Metaphors We Live By.” NanoEthics 14 (1): 57–70. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wang, Huili, Tamara Runtsova, and Hongjun Chen. 2013. “Economy Is an Organism–a Comparative Study of Metaphor in English and Russian Economic Discourse.” Text & Talk 33 (2): 259–88. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wawrzuta, Dominik, Justyna Klejdysz, Mariusz Jaworski, Joanna Gotlib, and Mariusz Panczyk. 2022. “Attitudes toward COVID-19 Vaccination on Social Media: A Cross-Platform Analysis.” Vaccines 10 (8): 1190. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth. 2021. “Crisis Communication and Crisis Management during COVID-19.” Global Discourse 11 (3): 329–53. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
World Health Organization. 2020. “Naming the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) and the Virus That Causes It.” World Health Organization. 2020. [URL]
Xi, Jinping. 2021. “Working Together to Build a Global Community of Health for All.” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China. May 21, 2021. [URL]
Yu, Yating. 2022a. “Legitimising a Global Fight for a Shared Future: A Critical Metaphor Analysis of the Reportage of COVID-19 in China Daily.” In Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating COVID-19, edited by Ruth Breeze, Kayo Kondo, Andreas Musolff, and Sara Vilar-Lluch, 241–54. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2022b. “Resisting Foreign Hostility in China’s English-Language News Media during the COVID-19 Crisis.” Asian Studies Review 46 (2): 254–71. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yu, Yating, and Dennis Tay. 2022. “Formulating a Discourse of Solidarity amid COVID-19: A Positive Discourse Analysis of Remarks given by China’s Foreign Ministry Spokespersons.” In Covid, Culture and Communication, edited by Fiona Rossette-Crake and Elvis Buckwalter, 76–94. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yu, Yating, Dennis Tay, and Qian Yue. 2023. “Media Representations of China amid COVID-19: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis.” Media International Australia, March, 1329878X2311599. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zhang, Dechun, and Ahmed Bux Jamali. 2022. “China’s ‘Weaponised’ Vaccine: Intertwining between International and Domestic Politics.” East Asia 39 (3): 279–96. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (6)

Cited by six other publications

Iqbal, Sidra & Ammara Farukh
2025. Framing narratives: media representation of metaphors and ideologies in Israel-Palestine conflict. Cogent Arts & Humanities 12:1 DOI logo
Liu, Yufeng, Dechao Li & Jieyun Feng
2025. Incorporating cross-linguistic and time-based dimensions to Critical Metaphor Analysis: a specialised hands-on analytical approach. Critical Discourse Studies 22:6 ► pp. 664 ff. DOI logo
Sun, Lei & Rafael Galvão de Almeida
2025. On China’s image constructed from western news coverage of China’s humanitarian aid. PLOS One 20:6 ► pp. e0326214 ff. DOI logo
Trimithiotis, Dimitris & Theodosia Demetriou
2025. When pro-vaccine media discourses meet vaccine hesitancy. Journal of Language and Politics DOI logo
Zhu, Yafei & Jidong Zhang
2025. Beyond the law. Journal of Language and Politics DOI logo
Lu, Yazhi & Tianli Zhou
2024. A critical discourse analysis of Chinese diplomatic speeches on China-US relations. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11:1 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue