Corpus data of Chinese news articles related to COVID-19 from 2020 t0 2022 on Xinhua Daily Telegraph

The highly contagious Covid-19 pandemic can bring panic and anxiety to the public, producing negative impact on the existing sociopolitical order as a national crisis. In order to maintain and restore national solidarity and cohesiveness in the troubled times, it is common for Chinese official media to mitigate and transform people’s traumatized feelings to emotions of attachment and belongingness to their nation-state. In this paper, corpus-based critical discourse analysis is adopted to analyze the how Chinese national identities are discursively constructed in official newspaper articles in two different stages during Covid-19. Focusing on how nationalism and national identity can be evoked from the portrayal of the US as a dichotomous counterparty of China, and the representation of major social actors in each stage, the paper finds that Chinese national identities are mainly constructed and perpetuated based on intra-national assimilation and inter-national dissimilation.