





































Education, Language and Sociology Research 

ISSN 2690-3644 (Print) ISSN 2690-3652 (Online) 

Vol. 4, No. 4, 2023 

www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/elsr 

19 
 

Original Paper 

Discursive Construction of Delivery Workers in China Daily 

Lei Shu1 

1 School of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, P. R. China 

 

Received: August 5, 2023     Accepted: August 24, 2023      Online Published: September 8, 2023 

doi:10.22158/elsr.v4n4p19         URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/elsr.v4n4p19 

 

Abstract 

This article introduces a corpus-based critical discourse analysis to explore how this linguistically-

oriented approach can be a helpful complement to the studies of news discourse and beyond. It 

demonstrates how to use this approach to examine how China Daily constructs the image of delivery 

workers between pre-2020 and post-2020. It is achieved by analysis of keywords and collocational 

network of delivery as well as some of its concordances. Findings show that the image of delivery workers 

in China Daily has a shift during the two periods, mainly turning the negative into the positive, which 

helps the public have a better understanding of this occupation and promote their social integration. 

Keywords 

Discourse analysis, delivery workers, corpus, China Daily 

 

1. Introduction 

Spearheaded by Alibaba, the annual November 11 event, a 24-hour extravaganza enables consumers in 

China and beyond to access discounted products on Alibaba’s portfolio of online sales platforms, 

including its Taobao marketplace and Tmall platform. Logistics is one of the essential factors in the 

development of online shopping, whose rapid advance has also driven the speed of the express industry. 

Therefore, the ever-evolving development of China’s express industry not only continues to promote the 

prosperity of e-commerce and logistics, but also plays an indispensable role in improving residents’ 

consumption demand and increasing social employment. 

Delivery workers are a new type of employment group emerging in this platform economy, who are 

engaged in the parcel collection and parcel delivery, customer relationship maintenance, and business 

promotion of express delivery. There are data released by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social 

Security of the People’s Republic of China on the National Recruitment Ranking of 100 Occupations 

Larger than Job Seeking, showing that delivery worker has been in the top 10 of the most lacking jobs 

for three consecutive years. To help the public have a better understanding of delivery workers, this article 



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does a corpus-based critical discourse analysis (CDA) to explore how the image of delivery workers is 

discursively represented in a Chinese mainstream newspaper published between 2006 and 2022.  

 

2. Literature Review 

CDA originated from critical linguistics, aiming at analyzing the relationship between discourse and 

social context, and revealing the hidden ideology in language use, especially in news discourse, which 

has established itself as an interdisciplinary paradigm characterized by problem-oriented principle 

(Wodak, 2001). Compared with traditional discourse analysis methods, CDA not only focuses on 

describing and analyzing the linguistic features of discourse, but also more on combining the linguistic 

dimension with the socio-cultural dimension, which inevitably can be easily combined with other 

humanities and social disciplines, such as sociology, communication and political science, and thus has 

an interdisciplinary nature, which means that the diversity of its research factions (Baker et al., 2008). 

News is a reflection of social reality, and language is the medium of communication in social contexts. 

The introduction of CDA in the 1990s deepened the study of modern news discourse. Some scholars have 

outlined seven linguistic strategies for news discourse analysis, among which the combination of critical 

discourse analysis and corpus analysis makes it easier to find out the correlation between the linguistic 

forms of news texts and their functions and meanings from a qualitative and quantitative point of view 

(Bell, 2006). Previous studies related to delivery workers mainly focus on the two topics—how to 

optimize the last-mile delivery and the difficulties (Ali et al., 2021; Dai et al., 2023) of delivery workers’ 

survivals and development (Liang & Liu, 2020; Wang & Shao, 2018). 

It has been found that many scholars at home and abroad have made great contributions to the 

development of CDA, both practically and theoretically. However, the research material selected for 

CDA is partial and incomplete, so there are still some criticisms of CDA, and much less is known about 

the discursive characteristics and construction of delivery workers in news discourse. Although there are 

many studies related to CDA, relatively few studies have been conducted using corpus methods, 

especially on the discourse of delivery workers in news discourse. Therefore, combined with the corpus-

based CDA, this study is aimed at exploring the discursive characteristics of the reports on delivery 

workers from the perspective of corpus linguistics more systematically and more scientifically. 

 

3. Method 

This study collects all the articles containing delivery worker in China Daily from 1 January 2006 to 31 

December 2022, with a total of 2,192 articles, aiming to investigate how the media discourse constructs 

the image of delivery worker over two periods and the reasons behind it.  



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Figure 1. Number of News Reports on Delivery Workers 

 

Figure 1 shows the number of news reports on delivery workers from 2006 and 2022. Clearly, it can be 

seen that the coverage of delivery workers was sporadic before 2010, and started to trend upwards in 

2010 until the first peak in 2020, and although it has since slowed down and trended upwards again, the 

number of reports for the whole year in 2021 and 2022 is still higher than it was before 2020.  

There is a strong link between this trend and the events taking place. At the beginning of 2020, a sudden 

outbreak of novel coronavirus ravaged China. This epidemic is a major public health emergency that 

China has encountered since the establishment of New China, with the fastest transmission speed, the 

widest range of infections, and the greatest difficulty in prevention and control and it is the most serious 

infectious disease pandemic to occur worldwide in a century. The group of delivery workers played an 

irreplaceable and significant role during and after the epidemic, which can account for the further 

attention by media and the public. Therefore, this study divides these reports into two sub-corpora: the 

Corpus of Delivery Workers before 2020 (2006-2019) and the Corpus of Delivery Workers after 2020 

(2020-2022). The following table presents the general information about the two corpora. 

 

Table 1. General Information of the Two Corpora 

Data source The corpus before 2020 The corpus after 2020 

Number of texts 1,194 1,002 

Number of tokens 935,490 892,764 

Number of types 37,313 33,225 

 

 



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As shown in the above Table, 1,194 and 1,002 pieces of news reports on delivery workers from China 

Daily are collected respectively, and thus two corpora about delivery workers are built. And data of tokens 

and types in both corpora are close to each other, which adds credibility to this comparative study. The 

corpus data is crucial, providing an entry point for the interpretation of CDA, and CDA theory is used to 

explain these ideologically significant linguistic phenomena reflected in the corpus (Baker, 2006). 

Therefore, this study borrows two corpus tools—WordSmith Tool 6.0 (Scott, 2014) and LancsBox 

(Brezina et al., 2015)—to further explore and compare the discursive construction of delivery workers 

from both quantitative view and qualitative view. 

 

4. Keywords Analysis 

In order to observe the thematicity of China Daily’s reports on delivery workers, we used CROWN (Xu 

& Liang, 2011) as the reference corpus, and obtained keywords from both corpora through WordSmith 

Tools 6 (Scott, 2014) (see Table 2 and Table 3). Keywords are not high-frequency words in the corpus, 

but words with a relatively high frequency of reproduction compared to the reference corpus, and the 

higher their thematic nature, the more helpful it is to reflect the focus information of the corpus content 

(Scott, 2010). By conducting corpus analysis on keywords and words related to them, some discourse 

information of the text can be revealed, such as macroscopic semantic structure, topic, and theme. In 

other words, these particular words identified in the corpus are of great significance in revealing people’s 

perceptions of things (Qian & Tian, 2011). Taking this as a starting point, by using Wordsmith 6.0, Crown 

Corpus serves as the reference corpus and the following table is about the top 30 lexical keywords in the 

Corpus of Delivery Workers before 2020 (2006-2019). 

 

Table 2. Top 30 Lexical Keywords before 2020 

Rank Keywords Keyness Rank Keywords Keyness 

1 China 9781.44 16 growth 1075.01 

2 delivery 7190.52 17 sales 1071.59 

3 Chinese 4404.28 18 cities 1063.05 

4 said 4323.19 19 rural 1050.83 

5 online 2594.73 20 people 1036.17 

6 express 2304.89 21 Alibaba 968.33 

7 workers 2236.53 22 products 817.81 

8 logistics 1884.30 23 goods 805.10 

9 commerce 1763.86 24 rights 786.94 

10 market 1738.32 25 sector 774.60 

11 companies 1633.57 26 shopping 764.73 

12 billion 1419.27 27 parcels 762.77 



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13 services 1401.93 28 migrant 705.40 

14 industry 1193.98 29 customers 677.76 

15 development 1168.18 30 international 642.60 

 

As is demonstrated in Table 2, the statistics clearly shows that the words China, delivery, Chinese, online, 

express, workers have higher keyness, and the words logistics, commerce, market, companies, services, 

industry, development have a relatively higher keyness, which present the background and the media 

focus before 2020. In addition, there are some words with a comparatively low keyness, containing 

Alibaba, products, goods, rights, sector, shopping, parcels, customers and so on. In the first 20 years of 

the 21st century, due to the rapid development of the Internet and e-commerce enterprises, online 

shopping became one of the important consumption methods for the general public, and delivery workers, 

who are responsible for the timely and accurate delivery of express mail, parcel, products and other items 

entrusted by customers to their destinations, also became one of the occupational groups that people 

frequently contact in their daily lives. Thanks to the development opportunity, micro and small businesses 

and express service industries have seized the opportunity of the new trend to keep pace with the 21st 

century. The following samples are extracted from the reports of delivery workers before 2020.  

Sample 1: Online shopping, a sector with sales of 513.1 billion yuan or 3 percent of the total retail 

sales in China last year, has created half of the demand of express services and made China the 

world’s third-largest express delivery market, trailing the United States and Japan. (November 

23, 2011) 

Sample 2: The market value of China’s express delivery market - the fastest-growing segment of 

the postal sector - is expected to reach 400 billion yuan by 2020. December 31, 2013)  

Sample 3: Every day in China, about 16,500 new enterprises are established, and 40,000 people find 

new jobs in towns and cities. China now has the world’s largest express delivery service market, 

employing more than 3 million people, who send everything from meals to fridges around the 

country. (October 2, 2019) 

It can be implied from the above examples that it has taken China less than a decade to make the great 

leap from third place to first place in the global express delivery market. All of those numbers displayed 

that logistics industry was at the high-speed development of economy period. A closer look across the 

three examples indicates that in the second decades of 21st century, China’s e-commerce industry has 

greatly contributed to the development of the courier service industry, which has contributed to the rapid 

and high-quality development of the economy. The booming express industry has not only brought 

convenience and efficiency, but also created a large number of employment opportunities for the society, 

especially the occupation of deliver workers, and thus benefited the public’s livelihood. In addition to 

concentrating on their own work, delivery workers began to play other parts in the society since 2020. 

Table 4.2 is about the top 30 lexical keywords in the Corpus of Delivery Workers after 2020 (2020-2022). 

 



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Table 3. Top 30 Lexical Keywords after 2020 

Rank Keywords Keyness Rank Keywords Keyness 

1 delivery 6517.83 16 residents 1434.91 

2 China 6142.09 17 measures 1405.95 

3 said 4454.74 18 development 1319.29 

4 covid 3920.37 19 people 1202.25 

5 Chinese 3429.04 20 commerce 1153.34 

6 province 3376.63 21 medical 1141.57 

7 workers 3271.62 22 express 1082.18 

8 online 2252.66 23 market 1077.51 

9 epidemic 2188.53 24 companies 952.11 

10 pandemic 2101.67 25 orders 939.90 

11 outbreak 2093.25 26 city 934.74 

12 Wuhan  2044.27 27 supply 917.16 

13 coronavirus 1637.67 28 industry 885.82 

14 services 1527.77 29 enterprise 884.36 

15 logistics 1480.22 30 production 834.47 

 

It can be found that the words deliver, China, Chinese, workers, online still have higher keyness. Except 

those same words, attention also needs paying to other words carrying higher keyness, including covid, 

province, epidemic, pandemic, outbreak, Wuhan, coronavirus, services and logistics, which are closely 

related to the background of that time and accordingly the context in which couriers work has changed.  

Sample 4: For days, the streets of Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, and epicenter of the novel 

coronavirus outbreak, have been deserted… While the majority of residents have opted to remain 

at home, people such as Yuan Shuang are doing their bit to ensure that the city of 11 million people 

does not come to a complete halt. Workers at logistics companies such as Best Freight as well as 

JD and Suning’s delivery branches have also been risking their health to transport supplies from 

outside Wuhan. (February 7, 2020) 

Sample 5: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a heavy blow to service industries in Asia-

Pacific countries, with sectors such as tourism, catering, express delivery and retail hardest hit. 

Apart from providing direct financial subsidies to help these sectors survive, governments in some 

countries have been proactively guiding local enterprises and labor forces to develop new business 

approaches and skill shifts to adapt to the “new normal” of this difficult time. (July 11, 2020) 

As can be learnt from Sample 4, Wuhan received a very large amount of attention in the early stage of 

the epidemic. At the beginning of the epidemic, the whole city was as silent as if it had come to a standstill. 

After the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, a number of courier companies suspended the 



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work of receiving and dispatching. But there were still couriers like Yuan Shuang, who sent protective 

materials to hospitals, transported vegetables and daily necessities for the community, and packed and 

sent luggage for the evacuated medical team members during the epidemic. Sticking to the front line, 

they were an important force in the fight against the epidemic in Wuhan. 

It can be told from Sample 5 that the pandemic brought about serious influence to many countries and 

their people, including the through disruption of the order of daily life. With the first place put in people’s 

life safety and health in China, numerous workers, whose work can be dealt with by computer or other 

online tools, were required to work from home as much as possible. However, the outdoor service of 

logistics during the hard time made delivery workers more difficult to accomplish their daily work, and 

thus the Covid-19 pandemic still struck a serious blow to express delivery industry and its workers.  

To sum up, it is obvious that delivery workers have various characteristics before and after 2020. In the 

earlier period, benefiting from the mushroom growth of China’s economy and its logistics industry, 

couriers have the great opportunity to further enter the society and offer their professional services to the 

public. In recent three years, their functional role has turned into a respectable and admirable one, for the 

main reason that what they delivered was not only the basic parcels but also daily supplies to those who 

were suffering a lockdown because of the pandemic. A deeper conclusion is that most delivery workers 

fully performed their duties and contributed themselves to the development of the society. In order to 

probe the discursive characteristics of delivery workers, a further exploration will be conducted by 

observing the collocations. 

 

5. Collocational Network of Delivery 

Through observing the keywords lists, it can be found that delivery has high keyness in both corpora and 

this word is of significance to couriers’ performance in their work. In consequence, the word delivery is 

chosen as the node word and its collocations will be analyzed to explore the discursive characteristics of 

delivery workers before and after 2020. 

LancsBox 6.0 as the analytical tool is applied to make a collocational graph network. For the purpose to 

ensure the validity of data in both corpora, this study sets span between L3 and R3, MI above 5 and 

collocation frequency above 10 instances per million words in each corpus. In the collocation graph, the 

length of lines between each collocate and node word shows the strength of them, and the deeper the 

round dot is, the bigger the frequency of collocate (Dong & Buckingham, 2018). 



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Figure 2. Collocational Network of Delivery before 2020 

 

After the observation of 错误!未找到引用源。, here comes the conclusion that the lexical words above 

collocated with delivery can be roughly divided into three groups: employment market, occupational 

difficulty and career prospect. The first group are characterized by these lexical words aggregator, 

personnel, companies, firms, sf, stations, parcel, services and express, the second group by collocates 

last-mile, delays, package, slow and fees, as well as the third group with words fast, unmanned, drone 

and apps. To further understand the collocations and observe their specific context, the following 

examples are extracted from the Corpus of Delivery Workers before 2020. 

Sample 6: To achieve these goals, the Ministry of Commerce will integrate resources to enhance the 

ability of rural areas to upgrade their infrastructure facilities and market access channels. 

Express delivery companies such as SF Express, YTO Express and China Postal Express and 

Logistics have built more than 50,000 service centers and depots in rural areas, covering 56.8 

percent of the nation’s villages and towns. The Chinese government has pledged to create more than 

10 million urban jobs and to ensure that the registered urban unemployment rate does not rise above 

4.5 percent this year, according to the Government Work Report unveiled in March. (June 13, 2015) 

In Sample 6, with the support of national government departments and related policies, the express 

delivery industry is thriving. In order to accelerate the construction of rural infrastructure and connect its 

market access, the major courier companies actively expand employment opportunities and create rural 

courier network, which has eased the pressure on the job market. 



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Sample 7: Greater supervision of the industry is also urged, after postal authorities canceled the 

licenses of 116 couriers in the past year for allegedly losing mail and poor sorting. Such 

complaints plague China’s fragmented but booming express delivery industry, where delay, damage 

and outright loss of packages continually erode operators’ reliability and reputations. (January 25, 

2013) 

In Sample 7, postal authorities have taken action to punish part of couriers and improve the logistics 

industry. Some complaints about delay, damage and outright loss of packages exerted an influence on 

both deliverymen and their companies. It is clear that once a package is on the road to its destination, it 

becomes vulnerable to even more unfortunate events. Delivery workers can experience delays due to 

circumstances like slow traffic, road closures, or difficult drop-offs. Even with excellent packaging, 

there’s always the risk of item loss or damage while in transit. Traffic accidents, worker errors, and other 

unexpected circumstances can prevent packages from arriving safely, which will pose an underlying 

threat of responsibility and reputation to the couriers and this sector. 

Sample 8: Chinese engineers soon will have a world-record-holding product to offer to express 

delivery companies: the largest civilian drone. Engineers at Beihang Unmanned Aircraft System 

Technology, a part of Beihang University in Beijing, are designing a drone that will be able to fly 

1,500 kilometers carrying 1 metric ton of cargo. They plan to finalize their design before year’s 

end and construct a prototype in 2019 for test flights scheduled to start in 2020. Mass production 

will begin if test flights are successful, and a drone-based delivery network is expected to take 

shape around 2025, said Zhang Shuo, chief designer at the Beihang technology company, in an 

exclusive interview with China Daily. (Ma 31, 2018) 

In Sample 8, the rapid development of the courier industry has driven the professional difficulties of the 

courier gradually into the public eye. China’s technology sector and engineers are committed to 

developing efficient, time-saving and labor-saving equipment to help couriers solve the last-mile delivery 

challenge. Within the next decade, courier work based on drone operations may bring great convenience 

to both couriers and receivers. 

From what have been analyzed, we can learn that before 2020, the profession of courier is an emerging 

one, with both opportunities and challenges. The following figure is about the collocational network of 

delivery after 2020. 

 

 

 

 



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Figure 3. Collocational Network of delivery before 2020 

 

As shown is Figure 3, it can be learned that after 2020, the collocates of delivery are different from those 

before. The salient collocates in the graph above are workers, on-demand, unmanned, contactless, pickup, 

food, drug, sf, zto, eleme, meituan and other words. Combine with the special background since 2020, 

we can sum up: (1) The words on-demand, unmanned, contactless, pickup highlighten the change of 

logistics characteristics, including delivery method and delivery requirement, meaning that deliverymen 

shoulder more important obligations and responsibilities during this period. (2) The words food, drug, 

takeout suggest that apart from riders shipping those living materials in food delivery sectors like Ele.me 

and Meituan, couriers from express delivery companies, such as SF and ZTO, participate in the fight 

against the Covid-19. Several examples are shown below for enhancing our comprehension. 

Sample 9: Chinese e-commerce and delivery or courier companies are fast embracing contactless 

delivery to meet rising demand from health-conscious Chinese consumers who find themselves 

staying indoors mostly due to the novel coronavirus outbreak. Contactless delivery refers to 

dropping off take-away food parcels or other packages at a designated pick-up spot in residential 

communities or on office premises, which is considered a natural evolution of current practices 

in the courier industry, and could make the service more efficient and hygienic. Agreed Xiang 

Feng, vice-president of YTO Express, contactless delivery is more acceptable to Chinese 

consumers and represents the latest innovation in the country’s courier and logistics sector. 

(February 19, 2020) 



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In Sample 9, during the epidemic, courier demand increased rather than decreased. Due to the special 

nature of the spread of the epidemic, courier companies were quick to introduce no-touch delivery 

methods to meet the needs of the public. Couriers also actively cooperated with the new delivery policy, 

so contactless delivery became the best delivery method during the special period. 

Sample 10: One million orders were delivered on Sunday. Food, masks and spring clothing top 

the list for online shoppers, said Jin Xiang, manager of the Wuhan administration center of ZTO 

Express, “Express delivery enterprises are vital for daily life, and the restoration of our company 

means normal life is not far away.” Chang Yan from JD Hubei branch said that from Jan 23 to March 

19, JD transported more than 60 million emergency medical supplies, with a total weight of 

30,000 metric tons. More than 8,000 tons of medical materials and living necessities from across 

the country were sent to Hubei. “What we deliver is not only food but hope for people who cannot 

go outside,” said Wu Hui, a deliveryman in Wuhan who continued working after the lockdown. 

(March 24, 2020) 

Sample 10 tells us that in this fight against the epidemic, everyone is guarding our common home in their 

own way. The residents of the lockdown zone adhere to the policy of “staying indoors”, which means 

physical isolation is used to achieve non mobility and minimal contact, minimizing the possibility of 

potential infected individuals infecting others and reducing the risk of hidden transmission. The couriers 

are both common people and heroes. In times of crisis, they stepped forward to deliver living and medical 

supplies to the residents of the lockdown area. 

From what have been analyzed, it can be found that after 2020, the work background, working hours, 

and job responsibilities of delivery workers have all changed, but what remains unchanged is their 

purpose of serving the people with their own efforts.  

In the past 20 years, the consumption level of the people and the support of society have greatly promoted 

the development of the courier group, while in the past three years, the courier community has fully 

utilized its professional characteristics and advantages, bringing countless conveniences to the people 

and society affected by the epidemic.  

 

6. Discussion and Conclusion 

The finding to emerge from this study is that after discussing the keywords analysis and collocates of 

delivery as well as some typical concordance lines from both corpora, it can be found that before 2020, 

terms like commerce, market and companies with higher keyness told that delivery workers work in the 

environment where the express delivery industry develops at a quite high speed, while after 2020, terms 

like epidemic, outbreak and coronavirus have higher keyness, showing that delivery workers work in an 

abnormal economic environment which has brought them new chances and challenges. 

The rapid development of the express delivery industry inevitably brings some disadvantages to delivery 

workers, the most prominent of which is the exploitation of deliverymen, including low wages, high 

work intensity and restricted labor time. Therefore, the problems of large scale but low quality, fast 



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development speed and insufficient advantages in the express delivery industry are becoming 

increasingly prominent. High-quality development of the express industry is also the inevitable 

requirement to follow the laws of economic development. The development of any industry has to go 

through the process of quantitative change to qualitative change. Express industry development should 

also follow this law, when the business volume accumulated to a certain stage, must turn to quality 

improvement. High-quality development of the express delivery industry is to maintain the sustained and 

healthy development of the express delivery industry is an inevitable requirement, and therefore has a 

very great practical significance and far-reaching historical significance. To promote the high-quality 

development of the express delivery industry, it is not only necessary for express delivery enterprises to 

strengthen self-regulation, but also for the completeness of legal construction and many other aspects.  

Consequently, the shift in express delivery industry from high-speed development to high-quality 

development partly impacted on the discursive construction of news reports on deliver workers, in which 

the image construction of delivery workers roughly turned negative into positive. The slowdown in the 

nation’s economy during the epidemic provided an opportunity to carefully consider the high rate and 

quality of growth in the delivery industry. High-quality development cannot continue to follow a crude 

approach to development, but must be problem-oriented to ensure healthy and sustainable development. 

In addition to improving the quality of service of couriers, more attention should be paid to the protection 

of the rights and interests of delivery workers. 

 

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