A CDA-based Analysis Of Ideological Representation In Reports To Congress On International Economic And Exchange Rate Policies2001-12

Since the beginning of the21stcentury, with rapid development of the Chineseeconomy, China’s comprehensive national strength and international influence havewitnessed a huge leap forward. What is particularly worth mentioning is that in the yearof2010, China’s GDP exceeded Japan for the first time, ranking China the secondlargest economy in the world, only second to the United States. Apart from thatachievement, China’s foreign trade growth and trade surplus have been greatlyincreasing year by year since its accession to the WTO in2001, and China has been ontop of the list with reference to the world’s foreign exchange reserves. As a result, Chinaand many issues related to China have gradually become the focus of the internationalcommunity, among which China’s exchange rate mechanism for its RMB is becomingprominent and hotly-disputed.The United States, as the greatest industrialized nation and sole superpower of theworld, has also been paying close attention to the world’s largest developing country—China. Due to the differences and misunderstandings in political systems, history,cultural beliefs and economic systems between China and the US, as well as theSino-US trade imbalance and various contradictions, more and more people in Americadeem China as having posed threats to the interests of the United States, and some evenconcocted the so-called “China threat theory”. Therefore, the US government,understandably, often makes use of various means to suppress China in recent years,among which the issue of exchange rate, otherwise known as the “financial bomb” ofthe Americans, is often taken up by the US government to contain China.Like the Taiwan issue, China’s exchange rate regime has long been a core issuethat jeopardizes the US-China relationship. In the present study,24Reports to Congresson International Economic and Exchange Rate Policies released by the US TreasuryDepartment from2001to2012are selected as the data to investigate the ideologiesrepresented therein. To realize this research objective, an analytical framework based onNorman Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework and Michael Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics has been worked out. This three-dimensional model sees discourseas simultaneously a piece of text, discursive practice and social practice, whichcorrespondingly leads to the three stages of critical discourse analysis: description,interpretation and explanation. The data analysis is carried out by following theanalytical procedure. Furthermore, at each stage of the analysis, different research toolsare employed respectively: at the textual level, lexical choice, overlexicalization, andmodality choices are examined; at the discursive practice level, the sources and modesof discourse representation are explored; at the social practice level, political, economicand cultural factors are investigated to explain the ideology-loaded choices both at thetext and discursive practice levels.The purpose of this study is to identify and decode the ideological messagesembedded in the US Treasury exchange rate reports and uncover the hidden social rootsbehind these ideologies through a detailed critical discourse analysis of these reports.The findings of this study indicate that language is by no means objective, unbiased ortransparent, and it is inevitably subject to the influence of ideologies. And this onceagain proves the tenet of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), namely, language is socialpractice and language use is influenced by the ideological environment language usersare in while the language used will in turn reproduce or consolidate these ideologies.