A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On "Diaoyu Island Incident" By Chinese And American Mainstream Media

As a branch of discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, which appeared in thelate1970s, is based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. The main tasks ofCDA are to analyze the relationship among language, power and ideology; to discussthe power and ideology hidden in the discourse, then to reveal the ideologicalinfluence on discourse, and the effect of discourse on ideology, and how bothdiscourse and ideology originate from and serve social structure and power relations.News discourse, as a means of mass media, with its focus on the relationship betweenlanguage and ideology, has always been in the interest of critical discourse analysts.This thesis adopts Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework and Halliday’s SystemicFunctional Grammar as its theoretical framework. According to Fairclough’s point ofview, discourse plays a key role in the construction of social identity, social relations,and the knowledge and meaning system.‘Discourse’ should be combined with‘discursive practice’ and ‘sociocultural practice’.The analyzed data of this thesis are picked up from China Daily and Washington Post.The topic is about ‘Diaoyu Island incident’, in particular, China’s establishment ofADIZ in the East China Sea. Research data of the study consist of12pieces of newschosen from Chinese and American mainstream media,6of which are extracted fromChina Daily,6from Washington Post. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses areadopted in the research. At the discourse level, lexical choice and transitivity areadopted to describe the linguistic feature; at the discursive practice level, news sourceand reporting mode are adopted to interpret the relationship between news discourseand communication process. At the sociocultural practice level, the relationshipbetween communication and social context is explained.Through the study, it is found that although the two newspapers have reported on thesame event, there is a huge difference in the language choice and discursive practiceswhich reveal the different attitudes and ideologies. It also demonstrates that thegeneration of news discourse is influenced by the specific power relation and ideology.At the same time, power relation and ideology are represented by language features ofnews discourse. Readers are inevitably influenced by the ideological tendency in newsdiscourse.The study has shown that the Chinese media thinks China’s establishment of ADIZ inthe East China Sea is in line with the principles and spirit of international laws. Themain aim of the ADIZ is to safeguard the legitimate rights, and it will not affect anynormal international flights. While the US media takes China’s action as inflammatory,and that it will pose threat to the normal order of the international airspace order, and also it may lead to regional tensions.