Abstract: This paper set out to examine the image of China as constructed in New York Times editorials. First, the collocates of China were obtained from a selfbuilt corpus of approximately 16, 000 words by means of BFSU, a corpus concordancing program. Then, the top five frequent collocates were examined indetail with reference to their respective contexts as well as political and economic backgrounds. The analysis reveals that Chinas growing economic andpolitical power has been recognized by mainstream American media represented by New York Times. However, discontent and reprehension have also beenelicited at the same time.