This article seeks to use the proximization approach to discuss the anti-corruption discourse in Chinese and western media. Using anti-corruption news reports of Chinese and western media as linguistic data to build two corpora for the research, the researcher addressed diverging language strategies employed to construe China’s anti-corruption campaign, and their hidden epistemic stance-taking and ideologies of Chinese and western media in a contrastive approach via lexico-grammatical resources. It is found that Chinese media employs more temporal proximization strategies to legitimize the continuity of the long-term anti-corruption policy and more positive axiological proxmization strategies to strengthen the credibility and confidence of the people in the Party and government, while the western media adopts more spatial proximization strategies to enhance magnitude of China’s corruption and more negative axiological proximization strategies to intentionally delegitimize the effectiveness of China’s anti-corruption policy.
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