Henan, situated in the core of China’s Central Plains, occupies a historically and strategically significant position within China’s territorial and cultural landscape. As the cradle of Chinese civilization and one of the country’s most populous provinces, Henan has long played a central role in political, cultural, and economic development. In the contemporary era, it functions as a major transportation hub and a key node in the Belt and Road Initiative. Given this combination of historical depth and strategic relevance, enhancing Henan’s international visibility has become increasingly important in the context of globalization. In this broader process of international engagement, understanding how Henan’s image is constructed is particularly crucial. Regional images consist of both self-constructed narratives shaped by domestic actors and other-constructed representations produced by external observers (Sun, 2002). As Morgenthau (1985) notes, how others perceive a region can be just as important as what it “really” is. Although other-constructed images may be selective or distorted, they often exert significant influence over a region’s global standing and identity.

To systematically examine how the other-constructed image of Henan has taken shape over time, this study focuses on the period from 2006 to 2025, a span that captures critical shifts in both Henan’s development policy and international positioning. The two-decade period aligns with the four successive Five-Year Plans (from the 11th to the 14th), which reflect staged transformations in the province’s economic and social priorities. Within this broader developmental trajectory, a significant turning point occurred in March 2015, when Henan was designated as an inland hub in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, substantially elevating its national strategic role. This shift was reinforced in March 2016, when the provincial government recognized the 12th Five-Year period as a milestone of scientific planning, innovation, and image enhancement. In light of these developments, the study divides the corpus into two comparative phases, with 2006–2015 period characterized by Henan’s traditional development, and 2016–2025 period characterized by its modern transformation.

Despite this developmental trajectory, Henan continues to face persistent challenges in shaping its international image, which has long been constrained by regional prejudice and an enduring image crisis abroad (Liu and Hai, 2022). To capture how Western mainstream media have represented Henan over time and how these representations have changed, the present study adopts a dual analytical framework integrating text mining with transitivity analysis. Text mining is employed to identify diachronic shifts in semantic themes, while the transitivity system enables a systematic examination of discursive patterns of “Henan does what to X” and “X does what to Henan,” thereby revealing the social roles and agency configurations assigned to the province. By applying this integrated approach to a 20-year corpus (2006–2025), the study links thematic developments with their grammatical realizations, thereby offering a deeper and more nuanced account of the evolving international image of Henan. In line with this research design, the study is guided by the following two research questions:

The concept of the “city image” was first introduced by Lynch (1960), who emphasized that it is shaped through a bilateral process involving both the physical environment and human perception. While Lynch’s framework highlights the interaction between external spatial conditions and individual cognitive mapping, personal impressions alone do not constitute a stable or widely accepted regional image. Media discourse therefore plays a crucial role in mediating between physical reality and collective cognition, constructing more coherent and socially recognizable representations of regions (Jiang and Kuang, 2023). Through such representational practices, the media organize information, foreground particular attributes, and shape public perceptions of regions, making discourse analysis essential for examining how regional images are formed and circulated. Existing research on regional images in media discourse adopts diverse analytical approaches, which can broadly be conceptualized in terms of what media discourse represents about regions and how it discursively constructs regional meanings.

As for what media represent about regions, scholars typically employ content analysis or corpus-based quantitative methods to examine thematic distributions, reporting frequencies, sentiment orientations, and distributional patterns of coverage. Content analysis has been widely used to map the thematic and evaluative tendencies of regional reporting, as illustrated by studies of Brussels (Wiard and Pereira, 2018), Suzhou (Jiang and Kuang, 2023), and Henan in British media (Qin, 2019). Corpus-driven investigations, including studies on Jiangxi (Lian et al., 2024), Yiwu (Lu et al., 2022), and Shaoxing (Lou, 2022), examine regional portrayals by analyzing lexical frequency distributions, collocational patterns and other quantitative features of news discourse. While these studies illuminate the informational structure and overall tendencies of regional coverage, they primarily identify recurrent patterns of representation and offer limited insight into the linguistic mechanisms through which evaluative meanings and social representations are realized.

As for how regional images are discursively constructed in media discourse, prior studies typically draw on corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to examine discourse bias and ideological positioning, as seen in research on Hong Kong (Zhou, 2025), Harbin (Yan, 2024), and Henan (Wei and Wu, 2024). While informative, this line of work remains largely interpretive and offers limited insight into the linguistic realization of experiential meanings. To address this limitation, some scholars have turned to Systemic Functional Linguistics, particularly the transitivity system, which provides a systematic framework for analyzing how actions, participants, and experiential meanings are encoded in news discourse. Studies on Qingdao (Feng and Liu, 2023) and Harbin (Lü and Duan, 2024) demonstrate how the transitivity framework can illuminate the ideational patterns through which city images are constructed. However, such work typically relies on small or manually compiled corpora and focuses mainly on descriptive classifications of process types, with limited exploration of participant role configurations and agency patterns.

Existing studies on regional image have largely relied on corpus-based techniques such as keyword, frequency and collocation analysis to investigate media representations of regions. While these approaches provide systematic quantitative evidence and have generated valuable insights, corpus-based discourse analysis on its own may not fully capture deeper lexical associations and latent semantic relations within large textual datasets, as noted by Mautner (2009). In this regard, text mining, as a computational technique for extracting meaningful patterns from unstructured text, offers a useful complementary perspective. It enables the identification of semantic clusters and deeper collocational relationships that go beyond surface-level quantitative regularities. Text mining has been increasingly applied in domestic studies of tourism image, including analyses of Yellow River cultural attractions (Jin, 2025) and the Mountain Yuntai scenic area (Zhou et al., 2023), yet it remains largely underutilized in research on regional image in international media discourse.

Building on these methodological considerations, the present study integrates text mining with a transitivity-based linguistic analysis to provide a more comprehensive account of Henan’s representation in Western mainstream media. Text mining is employed to trace diachronic shifts in semantic themes, while the transitivity system enables a systematic examination of discursive patterns such as “Henan does what to X” and “X does what to Henan,” thereby revealing the social roles and agency configurations assigned to the province. By applying this dual framework to a 20-year corpus spanning 2006 to 2025, the study links macro-level thematic trajectories with micro-level grammatical realizations, offering a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how Henan’s international image has taken shape within western media discourse.

This study combined text mining with a transitivity-based social actor analysis to provide a comprehensive account of how Henan has been discursively constructed in Western mainstream media over the past two decades.

The text-mining results demonstrate a marked continuity in Western media framings of Henan across the two decades. Although governance initiatives at the macro level and social transformations at the micro level appear recurrently in both periods, the most persistent and salient pattern is the sustained prominence of crisis-oriented reporting. Western media repeatedly construct the province as an “emergency-prone” region, a framing that remains remarkably stable despite broader shifts in its development trajectory. This discursive persistence aligns with Wei and Wu’s (2024) observation that French media similarly prioritize public emergencies when reporting on Henan, and it corroborates Deng’s (2017) finding that accidents and crises constitute a dominant thematic cluster in Western representations of the province. From a news-values perspective, the media’s focus on crises reflects the inherent newsworthiness of events characterized by immediacy, negativity, and human-interest appeal (Harcup and O'Neill, 2017). The endurance of this framing, however, suggests more than editorial preference, it also reflects recurring ideological orientations in Western media that foreground risk, vulnerability, and instability when depicting Chinese localities (Chen, 2023).

Beyond this continuity, the semantic themes of media coverage exhibit several notable diachronic shifts. Reporting that had previously foregrounded rural settings and agrarian concerns increasingly shifted toward urban development, infrastructure, and modernization; meanwhile, economic discourse expanded substantially as Henan’s industrial restructuring gained prominence, whereas cultural coverage experienced a relative decline. These thematic adjustments broadly mirror Henan’s developmental trajectory, particularly the province’s accelerated urbanization and economic transformation over the past decade. However, the diminishing visibility of cultural themes contrasts sharply with Henan’s exceptionally rich cultural heritage, which includes five UNESCO World Heritage Sites such as the Yinxu ruins and the Longmen Grottoes, as well as internationally recognized intangible traditions such as Shaolin Kung Fu and Tai Chi. As Chen and Sun (2023) observe, Henan’s cultural image suffers from a persistent “cultural discount” in external communication, a phenomenon that undermines the province’s soft power and international visibility, underscoring the need for more strategic cultural communication to more effectively project Henan’s cultural assets in the global arena.

The analysis of Henan’s social roles in material transitivity patterns reveals a clear diachronic shift from being primarily represented as a Goal in 2006–2015 to more frequently assuming the role of an Actor in 2016–2025. This transformation is reflected both in the transition of its dominant Actor subtype from Destructor to Doer and in the marked decline of the Helped role, jointly indicating a broader discursive reorientation away from dependency toward greater autonomy and initiative. According to van Leeuwen’s (1995) social actor theory, the Actor role indexes social power, as Actors possess the capacity to affect other participants within a social action. Henan’s transition from being primarily Goal-positioned to predominantly Actor-positioned thus represents more than a lexical redistribution, but a substantive reconfiguration of agency, foregrounding the province’s increasing capacity to initiate actions in Western reporting. This finding resonates with Lin and Miao’s (2023) analysis of American media, which similarly identifies an expansion of China’s agency over the past four decades. Taken together, these shifts indicate that Henan’s evolving representation is situated within a broader discursive trajectory in which both China and its localities are increasingly constructed as proactive social actors, reflecting their rising visibility and influence in international discourse.

Within this overall reconfiguration of agency, the Helped role undergoes a particularly noteworthy shift across the two periods. Tang’s (2021) analysis of U.S. mainstream newspapers between 2008 and 2010 found that China was frequently positioned as the Helped in transitivity patterns, ranking third among seven Goal roles in “who does what to China.” The alignment between Tang’s findings and the first-stage results of this study indicates that Henan’s construction as the Helped during 2006–2015 was not an isolated case but rather reflected a wider tendency in Western media to portray China and its sub-national entities as dependent recipients of support or intervention. Against this backdrop, Henan’s marked decline in the Helped role in 2016–2025 represents a meaningful discursive shift. Instead of being routinely cast as reliant on higher-level institutional assistance, Henan is increasingly represented as an entity capable of initiating action, reinforcing the broader upward trajectory of its discursive agency within Western media discourse.

Drawing on a diachronic corpus of Henan-related reports in Western mainstream media from 2006 to 2025, this study integrates text mining with the material transitivity framework to examine the evolution of semantic themes and social roles of Henan over two decades. The analysis identified both persistent frames and notable transformations, showing that while Henan continued to be recurrently associated with emergency theme, its social representation evolved from being primarily a Goal to an Actor, signaling an expansion of its perceived agency in international discourse.

Building on these findings, the study contributes on multiple levels. Empirically, the study provides a diachronic account of how Western media have represented Henan in discourse, revealing the dynamics of regional image construction over time. Theoretically, the study demonstrates that integrating text-mining with material transitivity analysis provides a systematic approach for examining how semantic patterns interact with the grammatical encoding of social roles in large-scale media corpora. Practically, the findings highlight the need for regions to enhance the global visibility of their cultural heritage, cultivate sustained narratives of modernization and governance capacity, and strengthen their international communication efforts in order to foster more balanced and multidimensional representations in global media.

While these contributions underscore the analytical and practical value of the study, several limitations merit acknowledgment. First, the dataset is restricted to six major English-language newspapers accessible through LexisNexis. While these outlets are influential agenda setters, they do not encompass the full diversity of Western media environments, thereby limiting the generalizability of the findings. Second, the transitivity analysis focuses exclusively on material processes. Although this focus is theoretically motivated by the study’s interest in social action and agency, it does not account for other process types such as relational, mental, or verbal processes, that may also shape Henan’s mediated representation. Future research could broaden the corpus to additional media genres and incorporate a wider range of transitivity processes to build a more comprehensive picture of regional image construction.