A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis of India Today's Reports on China's Poverty Alleviation

China has made remarkable achievements in poverty alleviation which has attracted the global attention. India, as a developing country with a large population and severe poverty also shows its great concern with China’s achievements. This paper employs the corpus approach and Fairclough’s three-dimensional model for Critical Discourse Analysis to explore the representation of India Today on China’s poverty alleviation. The major findings are as follows: (1) the description dimension shows that India Today pay attention to the processes of China’s poverty alleviation, the difficulties China faces, the measures taken by the Chinese government. Median modal verbs convey the neutral and objective attitude, high-value modal verbs express the responsibilities and obligations of the Chinese government and low-value modal verbs cautiously challenge China’s measures for poverty alleviation; (2) at the interpretive dimension, a large number of western experts and human rights organizations are quoted to show disapproval of the poverty alleviation measures in China’s minority areas; (3) the explanatory dimension is concerned with the institutional and social context. The study shows that the media stance, the Sino-India relation, and the Indian socio-cultural and economic situations play an important role in shaping the reporting