Pentadic Rhetorical Criticism On China’s Images In Chinese And Western News Reports

Chinese and Western media’s news reports on China have aroused heated research on China’s images in them. This paper makes a comparison between images of China in Chinese and Western media, and probes into their motivations. It takes pentadic rhetorical criticism as the theoretical foundation, a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses as research methodology, reports on the Shanghai World Expo as a case study. The reports are from New York Times, Daily Telegraph, China Daily and Global Times,5pieces from each paper.Firstly, we try to locate the agent, act, scene, purpose and agency, as well as the ratios between any two of them. After finding the foregrounded ratios, we conclude that Chinese media shape an ambitious and modest China, as well as civilized Chinese people; while Western media shape a dictatorial and hypocritical China, as well as uncivilized Chinese people.In creating different images of China, Chinese and Western media locate the "scapegoats". The "perfection" Chinese media are searching is trying to be or be closer to the Number One in the international ranking, and the "scapegoat" to help achieve the perfection is showing the best side to the outside world. The "perfection" Western media are searching is to keep the current international ranking, or to improve it, and the "scapegoat" they resort to is uglifying China.