“China-India Border Clash”: Construction of Event Newsworthiness and Discrepancies in Chinese and Indian News Discourse

This article aims to examine the discrepancies between Chinese and Indian media in portraying “China-India border clash,” by comparing the multimodal discourse construction of news values in Chinese and Indian media in their respective 30 English-language news reports about the latest China-India border clash (the Clash) occurring on June 15, 2020. Based on discursive news values analysis framework, this study adopts corpus linguistic methods to investigate news values through key words, naming strategies, and news photographs in Chinese and Indian mainstream domestic news outlets. The results show that Chinese media highlights the construction of Personalization, by framing the Clash through the personal experience of the soldiers and the ordinary citizens’ sorrow in the aftermath; in contrast, Indian media establishes Eliteness as the dominant indicator of newsworthiness, by framing the Clash through the language of the Indian political authorities and demonstrating the subjects and modalities that mostly affect Indian elites. Consequently, the Clash has been packaged in discrepant ways: as a people-oriented social event by Chinese reporting and as a high-powered political/military event by Indian reporting. Such a discrepancy of Chinese and Indian media in construction of news values further exposes the ideological positioning of the two news media in terms of Civilianism and Elitism.