Abstract In the light of critical discourse analysis and Halliday's systemic functional grammar, the major objectives of this study are to analyze editorials about the 2008 financial crisis in China Daily and the New York Times. Through word-choice, collocation, and modality, I can reveal and contrast the attitudes and opinions between the two publications. The study argues that lexical analysis reflects what the discourse was about and the modality analysis shows how the discourse was constructed. The study analyzes the texts in detail through the concepts of SFG and makes a critical discussion through CDA, to better reveal and contrast the different attitudes and opinions between the two publications. Index Terms — critical discourse analysis, lexical, word-choice, collocation, modality