This comparative study of thematic choice and progression in English and Chinese radio news texts, performed within the systemic functional Theme–Rheme theory (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) and the thematic progression model emanating from Daneš’s work in the 1970s. Overall, the encountered core differences are that the English news has a greater occurrence of multiple themes, whilst the Chinese news admits obscure participants and incidental elements to be thematized more often. This may be ascribable to differences in grammatical structure across these languages.