<i>China Daily</i> is a mainstream English-language media in China and The 13th Five-Year Plan period is the key period for China to eliminate poverty. In this period, there are many poverty alleviation related reports. This paper took the poverty alleviation news reports in <i>China Daily</i> during this period as the research object and build corpus with them. Through the reporting verb classification method proposed by Geis, this paper studied the frequency and proportion of positive and negative verbs appear in these reports and discussed the reasons. The study found that positive verbs accounted for more than 88% of the poverty alleviation-related reports in <i>China Daily</i>, taking up the majority of all reporting verbs, while negative verbs accounted for less than 12% of all reporting words. The results were also compared with previous related studies to analyze the political stance and self-constructed national image conveyed in politics-related reports in <i>China Daily</i>. The contrast between positive and negative verbs is explained with the help of Fairclough's three-dimensional analysis framework: description, interpretation and explanation. This study related the percentage of positive and negative reporting words with poverty alleviation achievements, China's sense of responsibility for the international community, and national governance capacity. At the end of the article, some shortcomings of this study were also suggested for futher study.