A Critical Analysis Of The U.S. Hearing Discourse On China's "Market Economy Status"

Following China's accession to the WTO, the number of antidumping investigations initiated involving Chinese products, instead of decreasing, has risen rapidly. One of the key grounds relied upon by the initiating countries (such as the U.S.) is the China's being characterized as a"Non-Market Economy (NME)". Though having received recognition from other countries, China's"Market Economy Status"is still under heated debate between China and the U.S.On June 3rd, 2004, the U.S. organized a public Hearing with Chinese government officials for the first time on the issue mentioned above. At this Hearing held by the Department of Commerce of the United States of America, representatives from the U.S. and China used different surface expressions ("discourse") to show their opinions on the issue of recognition of China's Market Economy Status (MES) and hence represent corresponding government's ideologies. It is believed in the field of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) that ideology exists in language and discourse can express power and one of the aims of CDA is to"demystify"discourses by deciphering ideologies.With the help of Fairclough's three-dimensional analytical framework, the thesis analyzes the differences in lexical selections and modality strategies as well as nominalization at the text level, semantic relations at the discursive level and the historical, cultural, political, economic background of the Hearing as well as the reasons for different attitudes held by China and the U.S. toward the MES issue at the social level.Through analysis of the hearing, the author finds that China's achievements in its marketization process are neglected by the U.S. representatives while the consequences of China's practices that are beneficial to China and unfavorable to the U.S. as well as other countries are stressed. By using negative words, many modal verbs as well as contrastive and causal semantic relations, the U.S. representatives fully convey their self-conceited attitude towards China and its superiority over China as well as its urge for China's change to meet the WTO commitment. By using more positive words, present tense and adverbs as well as causal and elaborative semantic relations, the Chinese representatives attach great importance to China's"efforts"and"progress"in its marketization process and their belief that China is a de facto market economy.In conclusion, the discourse of each party cannot be value-free or objective, but fully represents one's ideology and interest. Political, historical and cultural factors always play a part, explicitly or implicitly in discourse. This implies the need to raise critical language awareness in discourse understanding and language learning in general.