A Contrastive Study On News Discourse About "Confucius Institute" Images In Chinese And British Mainstream Media

Since the founding of the first Confucius Institute in 2004,Confucius Institute has developed rapidly and its international influence is increasing.Through the Chinese language,Confucius Institute spreads China’s broad and profound culture to the international community and makes people around the world know China better.In this way,Confucius Institute brings some positive influence on China’s soft power,intercultural communication,economy and other aspects,so the international media pay increasing attention for Confucius Institute.In recent years,Chinese scholars and foreign scholars have increasingly done researches on Confucius Institute,but the study on the overseas media image of Confucius Institute is still in its infancy.This research aims at investigating how Chinese and British media construct the news discourse about Confucius Institute’s image by analyzing the specific differences in the aspects of discourse themes,discourse speakers,discourse strategies and the historical and cultural factors for the news discourse to answer the three research questions:(1)What are the main discourse themes of Chinese and British mainstream media’s news discourse about “Confucius Institute” image?(2)What are the systematic differences in the presentation of “Confucius Institute” image between Chinese and British mainstream media’s news discourse?(3)Whether there are biased reports on “Confucius Institute” in British news discourse and Whether there are deficiencies in Chinese news discourse and how to improve?In this thesis,the reports on “Confucius Institute” image in People’s Daily and The Guardian,from 2006 to 2016,are used as corpus and Shi Xu’s Cultural Approach to Discourse is adopted as the main theoretical framework.Applying contrastive analysis,based on the literature review and analysis by AntConc and artificial reading,the corpus are analyzed from the aspects of discourse themes,discourse speakers,discourse styles and discourse rhetoric to investigate the discourse differences between the news discourses about “Confucius Institute” image in British and Chinese mainstream media.As the research result shows,the similarity of Chinese and British news discourses about “Confucius Institute” image lies in that both of them give affirmative and positive comments on Confucius Institute as a whole.The differences are as follows.First,in the aspect of discourse theme,compared with British media,the focus of Chinese media is relatively unitary.Chinese news discourse centers on the introduction of Confucius Institute’s positive impact on the spread of Chinese language and culture and gives a high evaluation on Confucius Institute.British media focuses on the whole image of Confucius Institute: on the one hand,Confucius Institute has brought convenience to the British people to learn Chinese language,but on the other hand,it also brought about negative issues,such as the restrictions of academic freedom,cultural invasion and political propaganda.Second,in the aspect of discourse speaker,Chinese media focuses on the official discourses,including the discourses of Chinese government and schools representatives;while British media not only pays attention to the discourses of Chinese government and schools representatives,but also quotes a lot of words of media and journalists,experts and scholars.Third,in the aspect of discourse style,direct speech is used more frequently in Chinese media than in British media.The use of direct speech entrust the news discourse a stronger sense of the scene and authenticity to show readers a more realistic image of the Confucius Institute and enhance the authority of the news discourse,which are more convincing.Fourth,in the aspect of discourse rhetoric,through the analysis of the headlines,more metaphor are used in the headlines of Chinese media news reports,which is more vivid,imagery and interesting and can show readers a more vivid and impressing image of Confucius Institute,while more questions and rhetorical questions are used in the headlines of the British media,which can strengthen the tone.Especially when it questioned Confucius Institute and gave the negative evaluation of Confucius Institute,rhetorical questions would be more convincing and could stimulate the reader’s feelings,deepen readers’ impression.Based on the analysis,this thesis thinks in the aspect of discourse theme,Chinese media should pay more attention to the overall image of the Confucius Institute,not singlely give Confucius Institute a high evaluation;in the aspect of discourse speaker,Chinese media should also pay attention to the discourses of ordinary people when focusing on the official discourses of Chinese government.This thesis provides case analysis for news discourse study to develop in an interdisciplinary and multi-angle research direction.