In the formation of the journalism thoughts in modern China, the famous British newspaper “The Times” is a western resource that is frequently brought up and used throughout the whole modern history. This paper aims to seek the purposes of citation of the term in the context of journalism thoughts and to demonstrates different images of “The Times” during different periods. In late Qing, people took The Times as an ideal of “new media”, compared with the official gazzette. In the party politics of early ROC years, its profile of “independent press” was stressed. In the 1920s to 1930s , with the rise of professionalism of news, the press was reconsidered the pros and cons of the commercialization of The Times. After the anti-Japanese War, during the civil war between and KMT, The Times was criticized by both sides in the discourse of class struggles.