A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Chinese And American News Reports On Sino-Vietnam Confrontation In South China Sea

Language functions not only as a means of communication, but also as a reflection of ideology in a certain society. As a science on discourse study, critical discourse analysis (CDA) studies the linguistic features as well as the social and historical backgrounds of discourse in order to reveal the concealed power and ideology in discourse as well as the interrelationship among them.As the primary means in mass media, a non-literal discourse—news has been receiving increasing attention from people. It is noticed that news is not only a report of the event itself, furthermore, it is not always impartial and objective. Actually, news reports convey a variety of non-verbal information:discourse power, views and attitudes, social and cultural backgrounds, etc. For political events, the reports can to some degree reflect the countries’political stances, etc. all of these can be attributed to the hidden ideologies behind the news language. Recent studies have shown that CDA is an effective approach to study ideology in news discourse.The present study aims at investigating the interrelationship among language, power and ideology as well as the linguistic and ideological differences between Chinese and American news agencies. Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar, the thesis conducts a comparative study of ten news reports from Xinhua Net and New York Times respectively on the Sino-Vietnam Confrontation in South China Sea. The analysis is conducted at the following three levels: at the textual level, the differences of the linguistic features and ideational meanings of the two countries’news reports are explored in terms of classification and transitivity; at the level of discourse practice, the production process of the two countries’reports are investigated from the perspectives of discourse representation and news sources; at the level of social practice, reasons for the differences in discourse practice and social practice are given by studying the social, cultural and political institutions, finally the hidden power and ideology in news discourse are revealed.The research findings mainly include two aspects:First, Chinese and American news agencies differ a lot from each other at both the textual level and the level of discourse practice like lexical classification, transitivity, modes of discourse representation and news sources. By analyzing and comparing the two countries’social, cultural and political institutions, it is found that the above differences can be attributed to their different ideological orientations and political stances. Second, news discourse is far from objective as it claims, on the contrary, news reports are full of views and attitudes, especially political news discourse, for news agencies always represent their own countries’ ideological systems as well as the governments’political stances, thus the objectivity of news discourse is only a relative concept.As regards the South China Sea issue, the wide linguistic differences between Xinhua Net and New York Times can be attributed to the different ideologies and power relations. In terms of power, China is a developing country led by the proletariat, advocating the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. The reports in Xinhua Net show China’s demand for safeguarding state sovereignty and territorial integrity, which is absolutely normal. Different from China, the US has always posed as the world leader, reports from New York Times clearly demonstrate its hegemonism and power politics. Furthermore, the US’s intervention in the South China Sea issue actually indicates its ambition to expand its interest field as well as dominating the world. From the perspective of ideology, China is a socialist country, whose core interest is to safeguard state sovereignty and territorial integrity. The unjust US intervention in the South China Sea issue has obviously violated China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, thus is strongly opposed by China. By contrast, the US is a capitalist country who accords great importance to democracy and freedom, in order to maximize its interest, the US enacts a global strategy and makes Asia as one of its targets. In view of the important geographical position of South China Sea, the US had a hand in the South China Sea issue regardless of international equity and justice.Significance of the research lies in two aspects:theoretically, it once again proves the applicability of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar in analyzing news discourse, and reveals the injustice of news discourse; practically, it activates people’s language awareness, helps them acquire real and valuable information from news reports and enhances their ability to appreciate and evaluate news, thus a more objective eye towards the language in news will be achieved.