Abstract

This article examines the discursive strategies of news reports on China's human rights in The New York Times and People's Daily. After an analysis of local semantics, I argue that the discursive representations in the two newspapers reflect the struggle over articulation of human rights. The New York Times attempts to project the notion of natural rights as universal truth, whereas People's Daily defines human rights as a process of development to counter Western condemnation as well as to justify rights abuses in China. The struggle over articulation is also a manifestation of the hierarchy of discourse. The powerful try to fix the preferred meaning while the powerless strive to negate the dominant meaning.