A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Reports On Hong Kong National Security Law In The New York Times

Until July 1,2020,China promulgated the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region(shorted as National Security Law).It is aimed at combating the so-called “democratic”behavior of pan-democrats in Hong Kong and foreign anti-China forces.Present study takes the reports on National Security Law in The New York Times(shorted as NYT)as the research object,and tries to reveal the inseparable relationship between Western discourse hegemony and ideology from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis(shorted as CDA).In the study,176 highly relevant news reports on National Security Law are retrieved and selected from the Lexis Nexis database.Then a small specialized corpus(HKNSL Corpus)is built by the author and analyzed with reference to the American Brown corpus.In analytical framework,present study combines corpus analysis methods with Fairclough’s three-dimensional discourse analysis model.And the main research questions of the present study are: 1)How are the discourse representations about National Security Law presented in NYT? 2)What are the characteristics of its semantic prosody,discourse production and discourse consumption? 3)What social factors influence the value orientation of reporting National Security Law in NYT?After examining the high-frequency words,keyword lists,N-gram lists,and collocations of National Security Law in HKNSL corpus,the study found that the semantic prosody of National Security Law in NYT tends to be negative.Discourse production is mainly aimed at two major readerships of Asia and Europe,while discourse consumption focuses on the profits of NYT itself.In the process of implementing the National Security Law,situational,political and economic context are proved to be in connection with the implicit negative attitude and ideology of NYT.It could draw a conclusion that the media reports of NYT have potentially tarnished the image of the National Security Law.Only if China gradually enhances its voice and external communication ability on the international stage,Chinese media can respond to prejudice with facts.