A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Sino-U.S. Trade War

In March 2018,the U.S.initiated a trade war against China,which has caused widespread concern throughout the world.Major newspapers are scrambling to cover the trade war issue.It is important for readers to interpret the news reports properly.Critical discourse analysis(CDA)mainly reveals the hidden ideology in discourse by exploring the linguistic features and the wider social context of the discourse.This thesis intends to use a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to analyze a total of 28 news reports on the Sino-U.S.trade war selected from the official websites of China Daily and The New York Times.Two self-built small corpora are combined with 15 structured interviews,and Fairclough’s three-dimensional model is applied as the theoretical framework.Three aspects of contrastive analysis—description,interpretation and explanation—analyze the differences in language use and implied ideologies in the Chinese and American news discourses.Under the framework of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model,it is found that the linguistic features in China Daily and The New York Times news reports on the Sino-U.S.trade war are different.Firstly,in the descriptive stage,although the distributions of the six processes are similar,there are significant differences in the adoption of the material processes,verbal processes and relational processes,and the transmitted ideologies are different.In the reports,China stresses its firm position and determination in dealing with the trade issues.They advise the U.S.to stop their protectionist and unilateral trade behaviors and to resolve their trade differences through peaceful negotiation by utilizing material,verbal and relational processes.In the U.S.reports,the adoption of these processes is to indicate that China is a threat and to establish a negative image of China.In terms of lexical choice,adjectives are frequently used in Chinese news reports to express a negative and oppositional attitude towards the U.S.’s initiation of the trade war,while in U.S.news reports,nouns and adjectives are adopted to convey an image of an irresponsible China.Secondly,in the interpretation stage,it can be seen in the choice of source and mode of reporting that Chinese news reports are more objective than American news reports.They mainly select specific sources and use indirect speeches to convey ideology.Furthermore,news reports do affect readers’ understandings of the Sino-U.S.trade war.Finally,in the explanation stage,the differences in the choice of linguistics features are explained from the wider situational,institutional,social and cultural contexts.It is also observed that the language choice serves to convey reporters’ political stances.