The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which began to spread globally in early 2020, has attracted a great deal of attention from global society on the world's politics, economy, public security and global development. The mass media played an important role in promoting it, making international relations and the construction of national images during COVID-19 pandemic an important and urgent issue of national interest in the international political arena. During this period, China also became the ‘centre of public opinion’. As the most inuential country in the European Union, Germany's foreign policy and the China policy under its presidency has attracted a great deal of global attention. While Sino-German cooperation remained at a ‘high level’ during the pandemic, Germany also sought to position itself between the great powers of China and the US. Therefore, the image of China presented by the German mainstream media in their coverage of China during the COVID-19 pandemic, their positions, the constraints behind them, and their development trends are worthy of attention and study by academics. This study attempts to research the generation of Chinese images in the German mainstream media, including both an analysis of "Germany" and a reection on "China", and to investigate what cognitive models and knowledge structures the German mainstream media use in their discourse construction, how they use their discursive power, and what kind of Chinese national image they construct