A Transitivity Analysis Of Fujian Image In Maritime Silk Road Discourse

It is well-known that the quality of a regional image will exert impacts on the development of this region both economically and culturally. Naturally, regions all over the world try every means to construct positive images for themselves. Fujian province, as a coastal province of China and, historically, the eastern end of Maritime Silk Road, makes painstaking efforts in recent years to use the "Maritime Silk Road" discourse to help construct a positive regional image.Against this background, this thesis, by integrating Critical Discourse Analysis and Transitivity System Analysis into the National Image Rhetoric Analytical framework, carries out an analysis to find out what images of Fujian have been constructed in reports related to both Fujian and Maritime Silk Road and whether the effort is successful nationally and internationally.To fulfill the task, the author builds up three corpuses, collected from such three levels of media and websites as provincial, national, and international, of the Maritime Silk Road discourses which all cover issues related to Fujian, each amounts to a total of 50 newspaper articles. With "Fujian" as the key word, the thesis uses Antconc to find out the clauses in the corpuses and analyzes these clauses with Transitivity System to compare the similarities and differences of Fujian image constructed rhetorically in the three corpuses. Then it tries to figure out the causes and consequences of their similarities and differences and finally offer some suggestions for constructing Fujian image in the future.It is found that Fujian image constructed by the regional media is almost fully recognized nationally, but it is paid little attention to by foreign media, although it is incidentally mentioned as the starting point of the Maritime Silk Road. Actually, it is "the 21st century Maritime Silk Road" initiative and the new "One Belt & One Road" initiative that have been widely discussed. The main reasons are the differences in political, economic and cultural systems and our weak awareness of promoting our regional image. It is suggested that to make a regional image accepted by people of other countries, one should try to build up the mind identity, behavior identity and visual identity of the region.