Discursive Construction Of The Belt And Road Initiative In Chinese And Indian Mainstream English Media:a Corpus-based Approach

As an important neighbour of China,as well as a major developing country that plays a special role in the Belt and Road Initiative,India’s comportment is closely related to the successful implementation of this initiative in South Asia.A comparative study of the news discursive construction of the Initiative can not only deepen our understanding of India’s attitude,but also shed some light on China within the context of international communication.The present thesis investigates reports on the B&R Initiative from mainstream English media in China and India.Two self-built corpora are imported into AntConc and Wmatrix to conduct a corpus-based quantitative analysis of linguistic devices,including keywords,concordance lines,collocation,and key semantic domains.Critical Discourse Analysis is also employed to conduct qualitative study on sociocultural practice,thus exploring the hidden reasons behind different discursive constructions.Major findings concerning the differences in discursive construction of the B&R Initiative are concluded as follows:(1)Chinese media focus more on illuminating the positive significance of this initiative through specific description of cooperative projects in various fields;meanwhile,they emphasise the support China has offered,portraying China as a friendly and responsible major country.(2)As for Indian media,although they pay great attention to the opportunities provided by the B&R Initiative,they commit to illustrating the threats the cooperative projects may bring to South Asian countries.They also purposely relate the initiative with issues like border disputes and national defence,thus constructing China as an ambitious hegemonic power.(3)The investigation of social-cultural contexts shows that,reports from India’s mainstream English media can largely represent attitudes of India’s elite classes,who have immediate influence on the government’s foreign policy agenda.In this situation,Chinese media should enhance the international communication targets with the mutual interests of China and India,so as to ensure the success of the B&R Initiative in South Asia.