“Chinese Dream” And “Made-in-China” In The Eyes Of Western Media

With the development of its economic power and comprehensive national power, China has come to the forefront of world's attention and enjoyed a high status in the world. What's the image of a rising China in the eyes of western media? The importance of this study is self-evident. Studies of how western media(represented by British and American media) perceive China can provide suggestions as well as references to build better images of China. In order to reveal China's image reflected in the western media, this thesis, on the basis of corpus linguistic methods and from the perspective of Discourse-Historical Approach(DHA), attempts to explore “Chinese dream” and “Made-in-China” in the eyes of western media.This thesis collects data from six major western newspapers(namely The Times, The Guardian, BBC Monitoring: International Reports, The Washington Post, The New York Times and USA Today) and builds the corpus of “Chinese dream” and “Made-in-China”. With DHA as the theoretical basis, this thesis explores the relationship between news discourse and its social and historical background, revealing the historical root of discourses of “Chinese dream” and “Made-in-China” constructed in the western media. More specifically, this study intends to analyze news discourses of “Chinese dream” and “Made-in-China” from aspects of topic, discourse strategy and linguistic realization revealed by corpus techniques, mainly by keyword analysis and Collocational Network. The analysis of topic is carried out to reveal different topics in the British media and the American media when “Chinese dream” and “Made-in-China” are reported. The analysis of discourse strategy aims to discover images of “Chinese dream” as well as “Made-in-China” constructed in the two corpora through nomination strategy, predication strategy, argumentation strategy, perspectivization strategy and intensification strategy. The analysis of linguistic realization is interspersed with the analysis of topic and discourse strategy. The research indicates that both the British media and the American media hold a positive attitude toward “Chinese dream”. However, a few newspapers regard “Chinese dream” as a manifestation of China's ambition to dominate the world. As to “Made-in-China”, the British media and the American media tend to take a negative attitude toward it, believing that “Made-in-China” has severe safety problems. Only a few newspapers think that “Made-in-China” is improving its quality and technology.Through discourse-historical analysis of news discourses, the thesis investigates discourses of “Chinese dream” and “Made-in-China” constructed in the western media. In a theoretical sense, the applicability of exploring news discourses integrating DHA and corpus linguistics is verified. The scope of DHA is also extended to the analysis of news discourse about China. In a practical sense, images of “Chinese dream” and “Made-in-China” in the eyes of western media are demonstrated.