China's fight against poverty in the US Twitter perspective: A corpus-based analysis of critical discourse

Abstract

Since China launched the war on poverty eradication, the fight against poverty has become an object of international attention. However, what is the image of China's poverty eradication campaign among American people on Twitter? This paper uses crawler technology to obtain data about China's poverty eradication on Twitter, constructs own “corpus”, and explores the American people's attitudes toward China's poverty eradication from an empirical perspective by using indexed rows, matching networks and other corpus analysis tools, and combining the characteristics of Twitter as an interactive and observable location. The study finds that American people's attitudes, interpretations and discourse constructions toward China's poverty eradication are positive attitudes toward China's poverty eradication efforts, considering them to be related to “rural revitalization” and “prosperity and strength”. But most of them also have negative attitudes, linking them to human rights and the China-US competition. In addition, the American people also connects China's poverty eradication efforts to India and Pakistan, reflecting the connection between the common challenges of poverty alleviation in the world.