A Critical Analysis On News Reports About China-Africa Relation From The Western Media

In recent years. China has greatly extended and deepened the exchange and cooperation with African countries, and China-Africa relation becomes a focus in many important western media. With its strong economic strength and forceful language power, how the western media report China-Africa relation will affect the objective understanding of China-Africa relation by people in the world. Therefore, a study of language features in reports about China-Africa relation is helpful for us to know more about how media produce news and mirror China.Among all the linguistic studies, the critical discourse analysis (CDA) studies language structures of news reports and the social contexts and focuses on the relations between language, ideology and power. Based on Halliday's systemic-functional grammar, the present study carries out quantitative and qualitative analyses on news reports about China-Africa relation and aims to reveal the dialectical relationships between language and ideology concealed in the news reports. Halliday's systemic-functional grammar is the major methodological resource of CDA. Halliday believes that the nature of language is closely related to the functions it has to serve. The particular form taken by the grammatical system of language is closely related to the social and personal needs that language is required to serve. So language is social and is not a transparent medium for communication about an objective world. In this study, the author searched news reports about China-Africa relation from the Guardian and the New York Times from 2005 to 2010. Questions about the media attention, the contents and the overall attitudes in the reports are dealt with in the quantitative study. The qualitative study analyzes the transitivity system, lexical choice, the speech reporting and thematic choice and discusses the social contexts of the texts. Hence, the relation between language, power and ideology are examined.Through analysis, the author found that in most reports. China's image in Africa has been distorted. The reporters criticize that China, like a new colonist, plunders resources, pays no attention to human rights and environment protection, intervenes politics, etc. The reasons for these negative attitudes are that China-Africa relation has affected the traditional influence of the western countries and their interest in Africa. Besides, the differences of ideologies and values between China and western countries also lead to their negative reports about China. This study emphasizes the significance of critical reading and teaching of English language, and proposes measures that China should take to make the western media have more objective attitude towards China-Africa relation.