National Interest In News Discourse

With the stable and quick development in recent years, China plays amore and more important role in the world. China’s peaceful rise hasshocked the world, and this makes it become the world media’s attention.This should be a good opportunity for China to be learned by the world.However, everything has two sides. As many researches have found,Western media’s reports of China tend to speak for their country’snational interest. Besides, United States, the most developed country inthe world, plays a key role in many international matters. China, anuprising star in recent years, is expected to have and show more and moreimpact on the world stage. Considering the peculiar status of U.S. andChina, potential conflicts can not be avoided when they maintain theirown national interest. Therefore, it will be a meaningful research to studyhow an American media speak for its national interest when reportingChina. Such a research will mirror how China is constructed andevaluated by an American media, which will provide valuableimplications for China to build a positive image in the world stage infuture.This study, selecting the reports related to China in2013on thewebsite of Time as research materials and employing content analysis andVan Dijk’s discourse analysis, aims to find out how China is constructedin American discourse and what skills have been used to speak for America’s national interest. It is found that a negative image of China isconstructed, and the skills used include focusing on the high-profiletopics, smartly quoting sources, employing abundant pictures. Besides,some structural characteristics are also found by studying four cases. Thethematic structures of them inclines to be close to readers’ cognitiveknowledge. Their news schema includes nearly all categories which willmake the text contain more information. In microstructures, localcoherence and implications are its typical features. As to styles,interrogative sentences and key words are frequently used. Quotationsand numbers are two rhetorical devices used to strengthen persuadingeffects of news. These skills and devices help these reports to attractreaders, express comments and speak for America’s national interest.