Social Stances: Comparing Engagement of Chinese and American Mental Health News Discourse

Abstract

This study investigates mental health news discourse in Chinese (China Daily) and American (The New York Times) mental health news discourse with an engagement framework (Martin & White, 2005), examining how news writers utilize engagement resources to convey value positions on mental health issues. The results show that both corpora prefer heterogloss to monogloss, indicating a common practice in acknowledging multiple voices. In dialogic strategies, American media use monogloss significantly more than Chinese media do, indicating a more categorical and assertive baseline. Within heterogloss, Chinese media is expansion-dominant, with typical endorsement and entertaining resources; the American counterpart favors contraction, especially with deny and acknowledgement utterances. These dialogic patterns indicate that the Chinese media foreground mediated, evidential, and collective guidance on mental health issues, while the American news discourse emphasizes assertive, contestatory authority and experiential advocacy. These findings suggest that Chinese reporting would treat mental health as a collective public project, and American news frames it as an individual issue requiring social advocacy.