Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Reports On Chinese Coal Mining Accidents In Western Media

Coal mining accidents have frequently happened in China with a large number of victims. Many domestic and international media focus on reports about Chinese coal mining accidents. Western countries have different political systems and social, historical and cultural backgrounds from China. Additionally, news is selectively reported influenced by reporters'interests, the interests of their institutions and their countries. Critical Discourse Analysis of reports on Chinese coal mining accidents is to be conducted in this research. And the following questions are to be explored: How Chinese mines are evaluated? What images of China (the Chinese government in particular) are created? What ideologies are embedded in the reports? What social, cultural and historical factors influence the production of discourse and ideologies? The purpose of this research is to provide for English news readers with a critical perspective to read news, helping readers cultivate critical language awareness, be more sensitive to ideologies, and improve the ability to free themselves from the control of news discourse.The model of Fairclough's three-dimensional discourse analysis is adopted. Altogether 15 reports on Chinese coal mining accidents in Western media including the Associated Press, the Reuters and the Agance France-Presse are analyzed at the three levels: text analysis, processing analysis and social analysis. In the text analysis, the analytic tools of lexical choice, transitivity, transformation and modality from Halliday's grammar are employed. In the part of social analysis, historical, social, and cultural factors are involved. Methodologically, qualitative analysis is combined with quantitative analysis.Through detailed analysis, it can be concluded that news reports are not a neutral reflection of the facts. And there is no exception of the three Western media which are internationally influential. The reporters'ideologies are implied behind different language structures. Although positive reports are covered, mostly negative images of China are presented in the reports, which are closely related to the particular social backgrounds in Western countries.