In 2024, the international relationship between China and the US is becoming more intense, and false perception arises in both sides towards each other. Under this context, an opinion piece ‘What makes Chinese students so successful by international standards?’ by Peter Yongqi Gu and Stephen Dobson is issued on the Conversation. The platform Conversation is a credible, independent, and non-profit news organization from the US, ‘dedicated to unlocking the knowledge of experts for the public good’. The intended audience can be educational scholars and people who are interested in education and China. The article mainly counters the perception that Chinese education lacked of innovation and encourage the Western World to re-examine and even learn from the Chinese education system. To achieve this goal, the authors used credible ethos, convincing logos, and objective language.

Firstly, the author used ethos to make the article more credible to the audience. The authors showed themselves as experts to the readers. Beside the article, the authors showed their titles: ‘Associate Professor, School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington’ and ‘Professor and Dean of Education and the Arts, CQUniversity Australia’. These titles convey the profession of the authors to the readers, making the readers to think authors as the professional and thus persuading the readers more effectively. Disclosure statement of not recieving any fund also strengthens the objectiveness of the whole article, demonstrating that there are no commercial or political purpose in the article to the audience, so that the readers are less skeptical about the potential purpose of the author and more easily to accept ideas in this objective article. Furthermore, the author applied evidence from credible sources or widely-known people. For example, when the author was making counter-argument of the common perception of Chinese education, the author quoted Apple CEO Tim Cook, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to counter the common misunderstanding of Chinese education support the claim that ‘the Chinese education system is producing highly successful students and an extremely skilled and creative workforce’. These credible sources effectively strengthens the arguments of the article, making the readers to accept the evidence and the