The Media Narrative And National Identity Construction

This paper focuses on the relationship between the contemporary Chinese media and the construction of national identity from the perspective of the media narrative. That is how media narrative helping to construct national identity. Reconstruction the narration of Chinese nation is an important part of Chinese media. Scholars at home and abroad are concerned about China's rising nationalist sentiments and national discourse. However, the emergence of nationalism has its historical roots. Media played an important role in the course of its development. With this curiosity, the author puts forward her main point that media narrative helps to build national identity from two aspects, national culture identity and the national political identity. So the author reviews the literature from the domestic and international about media and national identity. She finds that these researchers are aware of media and national identity related closely, but they don't give strong theories to illustrate how and why media have huge impact on national identity.Therefore, the author boldly puts forward two points in support of this view. First, national identity construction includes construction of national culture identity and national political identity. Second, media narrative is a kind of historical narrative. Media is one of the tools to perceive of our history. But media narrative is full of metaphor like other historical narrative. This point of view is from Hayden White's theory of historical narrative. Thus media use metaphor to express special cultural and political significance when illustrating history. Therefore, the introduction of Hayden White's historical narrative theory into the media narrative is a new view of this article. With the support of this theory, the analysis of media narrative is more convinced than other research.The author chooses content analysis as her approach. She selects CCTV on behalf of TV media and "People's Daily" and "Southern Weekend" on behalf of newspaper media. The author believes that they are representative of current mainstream media. Also she selects WenChuan earthquake and the Beijing Olympic Games as typical cases to research. The two events are typical domestic disaster event and international sports event, including two forms of reporting that are follow-up and live.Finally, the author reflects on the media construction of nationalist discourses because the media narrative of the history will be more close with national construction as the time changing. I believe that the research in this area will be deep into the depth indefinitely.Therefore, the aim of the study is to have a correct understanding on the development of the media. We should overcome skeptical attitude and information reserved psychology.However, this paper has its limitations and inadequacies in the analysis of the media narrative metaphor. Analyzing the metaphor of "home" and "Hero" only is not enough. In this regard the research does not exceed the scope of previous researchers. But this paper doesn't analyze the character of the media narrative from the perspective of linguistic and semantic level, but from the culture and narration. It is the innovation of this article.