The current study explores how ESL students in an international high school in East Asia position themselves after reading a politically-oriented English news article about the Taiwan Straits from a Mainland China perspective. The news article and the students’ responses were collected and analyzed with a corpus-based discourse analysis approach. The analysis revealed three primary findings: (1) the news article represents distinct views about the issue of the Taiwan Straits; (2) the ESL readers identified these distinct views; and (3) the cultural and social backgrounds of the ESL readers play a crucial role in their position and evaluation of the news article.