The Construction and Implications of English News Reports on National Image in Major Sporting Events

Major sporting events serve as a crucial window for showcasing a nation's image. This study selects 304 English news reports from major Chinese publications such as China Daily, Xinhua News Agency, and People's Daily, covering the Chengdu Universiade and the Hangzhou Asian Games, to build a specialized corpus on major sporting events. Using KH Coder and AntConc software, the research analyzes the characteristics of the news corpus from perspectives such as themes, word frequency, collocations, and concordances. By integrating Critical Discourse Analysis and Agenda-Setting Theory, the study explores how these reports construct China's national image and draws relevant insights. The findings reveal that these English reports portray China as a major sporting, cultural, and technological power, while also emphasizing China's image of being open, inclusive, confident, and responsible. Given that, the study concludes that for future major sporting events hosted domestically, news media should proactively set agendas to highlight achievements in culture, technology, and other fields. Additionally, it is necessary to increase the coverage of foreign athletes to reflect China's image of being open, inclusive, and confident, and, focus on ordinary people and small things so as to show China's identity as a leading power .