Magazine, as a widely-spread medium, is amirror of the society. It records the political events and international affairin the most direct and convenient way. The language of magazine preciselydemonstrates the authentic use of language in the modern society.

The advancement of The Belt and RoadInitiative of Chinese government has reinforced the international communicationwith other countries. With the rapid development of globalization, theinformation concerning China’s policy has exerted great influence over theworld. The Economist, famous for its poignant economic and political news,attracts people's attention as a matter of course. The political news reportageon The Belt and Road Initiative has begun to arouse more and more concerns fromits readership.

However, the majority of previous studies mainlyfocused on certain specific linguistic features. Few studies involved asystematic and comprehensive analysis of the stylistic features. O’Donnelland Todd (1992) made a comparison of TheGuardian and The Sun to exhibitthe features in newspaper headlines at the lexico-grammatical level. The findingsindicate that the headlines of TheGuardian prefer infinitive verbs for time reference to the future whileavoiding finite verbs. Haws and Thomas (1996) chose to compare the thematicprogression pattern in editorials taken from The Times and The Sun. Theyfind that both newspapers use simple linear progression. Based on self-compiledcorpora, Wang and Ma (2008) investigated the differences between Beijing Review and The Economist regarding the use of main verbs. They conclude thatnative English writers are fond of employing more active and impressive words. Manystudies were also conducted from the perspective of functional linguistics. Forinstance, Chen (2010) carried out a comparison of engagement in English and Chineseeditorials using the appraisal system, finding that attitudinal meaning in Englisheditorials is closely incorporated into engagement resources. Ju (2006) analyzedthe interpersonal metaphors in editorials. His research points out that interpersonalmetaphors are a good way to help readers understand the attitude and viewpointsof the articles.

The multidimensional (MD) analysis wasoriginally developed by Biber (1988) to compare the variation between spokenand written registers in English. Since its establishment, this approach hasbeen gradually developed as an analytical method for textual comparison. Theapproach has been widely used to examine the academic papers. For example,Conrad (2014) used Biber’s dimensions to compare the academic papers in civilengineering produced by student and professional engineers. Her research showsthat the practitioner registers use more place and time adverbials to expresstheir concern, especially for the time of certain events. Crosthwaite (2016) adoptedthis approach to track the linguistic variations in academic writing ofuniversity students before, during, and after academic writing instruction. Theresults exhibit considerable variation between data in the direction ofacademic discourse across all five dimensions. Friginal and Mustafa (2017)reported the linguistic variations in English abstract writing in U.S.-basedand Iraqi-based RAs. A total of four functional dimensions wereidentified and interpreted in their research.

Similar to researchers abroad, many Chinesescholars have also done plenty of studies with the MD analysis. Wu (2004) madea multi-dimensional analysis of linguistic features of e-mails used foracademic exchange. These e-mails are found to be highly informative,argumentative and interactive. Pan(2012) compared the stylistic differencesbetween four corpora of written texts provided by Chinese learners and theLOCNESS corpus. Her research demonstrates that texts in Chinese learner corpora are low in Informative, Narrative,Explicit and Abstract dimensions, but high in Persuasive and Interactivedimensions. Cao and Xiao (2013) contrasted the abstract written by native andnon-native researchers across seven linguistic dimensions, finding that thetwo types of abstracts differ significantly in five out of the sevendimensions. Jiang and Xu (2015) conducted a multi-dimensional analysis ofbusiness English and general English, which shows that the MD approach is an effectiveway to distinguish business English from general English.

To the best of my knowledge, no publishedMD studies have specifically focused on political news. The main objective hereis to use this approach to uncover prominent stylistic features of TheEconomist Political News on The Belt and Road Initiative.