Cirtical Discourse Analysis Of Reports On The "First Lady" Of China In The Western And Chinese Mainstream Media

In the era of globalization, the mainstream news agencies collect informationaround the world to report. The development of China has attracted great attention bythe media around the world. When the western mainstream media spread their newsaround the world, they spread their ideologies at the same time. Particular ideology isunder the coat of the languages in news reports. Western reporters report China’ssituation with their own values from many aspects. Then, they spread the news to thereaders, even to some news agencies all over the world.The author collects and organizes a certain number of news reports on China’sfirst lady from the authoritative sites. By using Fairclough’s three-dimensionalanalysis model and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, the author conducts acritical discourse analysis of the news reports on China’s first lady. The author appliesthe method of qualitative analysis to analyze the selected news reports. The analysisincludes three steps: description, interpretation and explanation. With the tool ofHalliday’s systemic functional grammar, the author makes a qualitative analysis of thelinguistic features of the selected news. Secondly, the author makes a thoroughexplanation on the process of discourse generation. Last but not least, the author aimsto illustrate the dialectic relationship between language and ideology from theperspective of social context related to the social and historical backgrounds.As for the research method of the study, firstly, the author collects nearly onehundred news reports on China’s first lady from the western mainstream newspapersand China Daily. Secondly, the author makes an inductive integration of the selectednews reports. Thirdly, the author tries to make a linguistic description of the languages,interpretation of discursive practices and explanation of social context. The aim of thethesis is to make a thorough explanation from three aspects, discourse and ideology,control and power, discourse and society. It is also a social analysis by thecombination of discourse, language use and communication. The author tries to put up with a critical reading method for the readers when they read news reports. The authoralso aims to cultivate the critical reading consciousness of readers. The study isconducted in three stages. At the first stage (description) of the study, the author putemphasis on the linguistic features of the news reports, like lexical choices andmodality. The author also makes a thorough explanation of the textual structure of thenews in this stage. In the interpretation stage, the author reveals how the news iscomposed through the analysis of news sources, speech reports and speech verbs. Atthe third stage (explanation), the author analyzes the news with the relevant social andcultural background in order to reveal the hidden ideologies of the news. Theinnovation of this thesis embodies in three aspects. Firstly, the author selects andintegrates the news reports on China’s first lady. Secondly, the author makes athorough explanation on Chinese and western mainstream newspapers. Lastly, theauthor tries to establish a model of reading on news discourse.The major findings are as follows.(1) With the study of the lexical choices，bothpraise and some different voices are embodied in western mainstream media indescribing China’s first lady. The entire world’s newspapers, not only China Daily,think highly of China’s first lady. The attitudes of western media on China’s first ladyare not like some people predicated. China’s first lady has successfully won theattention of the whole world. About China’s first lady, western reporter’s views areconsistent with Chinese reporters. The hidden ideologies and values of differentcountries can be seen from the linguistic features. That is to say the diction of thewords and the structure of the news reports are affected by different values, politicalsystems, social and cultural backgrounds.(2)Furthermore, some criticisms are alsodisplayed in the two different countries’ newspapers. Due to the different systems,America’s reporters have a sense of superiority when describing China’s first lady.From westerner reporter’s perspective, capitalism is much better than socialism. Thatis the very reason to explain why they say that China’s government controlling theweb sites and newspapers.(3)The study also implies that the hidden ideology can bedrawn out from the analysis of the social and cultural background of the relevantevents. Chinese people are influenced by traditional Confucian culture, while the United States is a typical Christian country. Their culture traditions and religiousbeliefs are quiet different. If one wants to understand the difference between theirlanguages, he/she has to do some researches on their culture and society.There are still some limitations in addition to the major findings and implicationsof the study. The number of the news reports on China’s first lady is about a hundredsince two2013to2014. If the author collects more samples to analyze, the conclusionof the study could be more convincing. The samples which the author selects fromChina Daily and western newspapers can not represent all the news reports. Theauthor will make further study on the discourse concerning with China’s first lady infuture.Some specific suggestions are proposed to the development of critical discourseanalysis, the improvement of news English teaching and the cultivation of Englishlearners’ critical language awareness and critical reading ability. Through the analysisof the news reports on China’s first lady, the study justifies that the writers can investtheir ideologies and values through the languages. The readers can also perceive theirideologies which are hidden behind language. Different linguists make criticaldiscourse analysis from different angles. But all of them emphasize the factors ofsociality and functions. They always make analysis with the consideration with socialstructures. It may produce some relatively subjective analysis if the linguist put toomuch consideration on social structure. But given that situation, the author will makecritical discourse analysis from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and other newareas of linguistics，like corpus-based approach. Maybe it will be the future work ofcritical discourse analysis.