Abstract
ABSTRACT This study compares the discursive legitimacy strategies of China–US media reports on Alibaba’s acquisition of South China Morning Post. It adopts a corpus-based approach by demonstrating the semantic features associated with senses of legitimation/delegitimation emphasized in the news narratives. Findings show different perspectives between positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation regarding Alibaba’s acquisition. The Chinese media associated with Alibaba’s deal is used to legitimating its media empire dream not only financially positive, but also good to improve China’s image. Whereas, the American media demonstrates China’s political involvement and government intervention so as to delegitimizing Alibaba’s buyout. The study also suggested a useful line of inquiry to the political economy of a Chinese internet company. The findings contribute to legitimation in discourse and the field of corpus linguistics by presenting a new approach to corpus-based studies of discursive legitimacy strategies over cross-border media acquisition.
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