With a corpus-assisted discourse analysis (CADA) on South China Sea (SCS) issues in Chinese, American, and Philippine newspapers over the past 10 years, this paper aimed to reveal ways of representing the SCS issues from three leading newspapers (China Daily, the Manila Times, and the New York Times) and expound the complicated relations between language use and the historical-socio-political contexts, which, in the end, provides valuable context for the study of the dispute between Japan and South Korea as well as other significant issues. The synchronic and diachronic analyses of the issues from 2010 to 2019 were conducted through a synergy of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and corpus linguistics (CL). The results showed that the representations in China Daily are generally cooperative negotiation-oriented. Those in the Manila Times were inclined toward being proactively and radically oriented during the Aquino III period, while they were moderately oriented during the Duterte period, which is characterized by instability. Those in the New York Times showed a tendency be militarization- and internationalization-oriented. The method used in this study enabled us to find semantic fields within text corpora to explore political issues connected to relevant countries.