The Construction Of China’s National Image

Nowadays,with the rapid development of China’s economy and improvement of its comprehensive national strength,China’s achievements in international affairs,politics,economy,culture and so on have received widespread concern and attention from international community.For a civilized country with a history of five thousand years,how to re-position our national image has become a new thinking point to interact with other counties on the basis of self-cognition.The study on the construction of national image has been focused on the field of international politics and communication.News media has directly affected the national image construction for a long time,it is the main means to construct national image.The progress of China in various fields is fruitful and highly recognized and appreciated since the Belt and Road Initiative was put forward by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013.People’s Daily is an influential news media with a large circulation in China.Therefore,this thesis explores the construction of China’s national image by analyzing the Belt and Road news reports in People’s Daily from the perspective of discourse analysis to further improve the Belt and Road news discourse system and enhance China’s discourse power in international affairs.This thesis selects 8 news reports on the Belt and Road in People’s Daily from October 12,2017 to April 10,2018 as research corpus,the research instrument is UAM Corpus Tool 3.3 text analysis software,quantitative approach and qualitative approach are adopted as research methods.Based on theoretical framework of Transitivity System Theory in Halliday’s Systematic Functional Grammar and Discursive Strategies in Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach,it aims to answer the following three research questions: 1)How is transitivity distributed and realized in the Belt and Road news discourse of People’s Daily? 2)How is China’s national image constructed through transitivity in the Belt and Road news discourse of People’s Daily? 3)What discursive strategies are used to construct China’s national image in the Belt and Road news discourse of People’s Daily? The system of transitivity provides an important semantic representation for the construction of China’s national image.Firstly,this thesis makes a quantitative analysis to get the process,participants and circumstances statistics in transitivity system in the Belt and Road news discourse of People’s Daily by using UAM Corpus Tool 3.3.Secondly,words,phases and clauses in process,participants and circumstances of transitivity system are counted in the light of their frequency of occurrence to explore the realizations in the Belt and Road news discourse of People’s Daily.Then,words “China”and “the Belt and Road” are taken as construction base point words to analyze the construction path of macro-discursive of China’s national image based on micro-linguistic facts to explain how China’s national image is constructed.Finally,with the help of Discursive Strategies inDiscourse-Historical Approach to analyze what discursive strategies are used to construct China’s national image in the Belt and Road news discourse of People’s Daily.It is found that in terms of distribution of transitivity components,transitivity process(26.13%),participants(41.88%),circumstances(31.86%).People’s Daily mainly uses material process(24.50%)and relational process(5.29%)in the Belt and Road news discourse of People’s Daily.For participants,the proportion of material process participant(24.50%)takes the largest proportion,followed by relational process participant(10.33%).For circumstances,Location(12.18%)and Manner(6.17%)account for the largest proportion.In terms of transitivity realization,the micro-linguistic facts of China’s national image are realized by high-frequency words,phase and clauses,which is determined by the collocation of transitivity components.In the construction path to explore China’s national image,the process path is the core of transitivity,the circumstantial component plays an auxiliary role to realization of transitivity process.On the basis of the distribution and realization of transitivity process,it constructs a positive,responsible and objective national image of China from the the analysis of material process and relational process.In the aspect of discursive strategies,the strategy of reference /nomination,strategy of predication,strategy of argumentation,strategy of perspectivation,especially through the prominent realization means like personal reference,spatial reference,explicit predicate,topos of usefulness,topos of number,topos of culture,direct and indirect speech to further indicate that People’s Daily has constructed a positive national image in the Belt and Road news discourse.This study explores the macro-construction of China’s national image through micro-linguistic facts by combining Halliday’s Systematic Functional Grammar with Critical Discourse Analysis to construct an objective and real national image of China.It aims to provide some reference for the study of national image construction from the discourse analysis in future.