ABSTRACT
Since its creation in 1981 and online launch in 1995, China Daily has continued to expand and is currently China’s most comprehensive English-language news outlet, and arguably, anchors China’s 21st-century external communication to the anglophone world. This chapter examines ideological clusters in China Daily cartoons across the years 2019–20 for a comparative analysis of cartoon themes pre and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study is significant as it contributes to the growing literature on political cartoons under the overarching umbrella of (critical) multimodal discourse analysis. Since cartoons emerging from China and designed for anglophone foreign publics are an understudied area, the present study offers a key contribution to this emerging area.
