A Comparative Critical Metaphor Analysis of News Reports on the China–US Trade Conflict

Abstract

The renewed escalation of the China-US trade conflict in 2025 has sparked widespread global discussion. To explore this phenomenon, this study examines 90 reports published between February and December 2025 from each of two highly representative newspapers in China and the United States: People’s Daily and The New York Times. Drawing on Charteris-Black’s Critical Metaphor Analysis framework, it compares their conceptual metaphor usage and the underlying motivations. Findings reveal that both media extensively utilize nine major metaphor types (war, threat, motion, building, body, natural force, tool, business, and game), with war metaphors dominating both corpora. Nevertheless, People’s Daily emphasizes body, building, threat, and defensive war metaphors to construct China as a rule defender and order restorer, thereby legitimizing its countermeasures and multilateralist stance. Conversely, The New York Times highlights competitive war, motion, business, and tool metaphors, framing the conflict as strategic rivalry and commercial competition to legitimize U.S. tariff policies and the logic of great-power competition. We argue that media metaphors do not merely reflect the trade conflict; rather, they actively attribute responsibility and shape audiences’ understanding and affective evaluations across different institutional roles, audience presuppositions, and ideological frames.