A Corpus-based CDA Study Of Editorials On China-Japan Relations

Recently,with reform and opening-up policy being deepened,China has increasingly raised concern from media and public abroad.During the period of 2014 APEC held in Beijing,some foreign media regard the conference as China's "showing off" to the world.Under such circumstance,"China-Japan relations" also become one of the topical issues in the public opinion.From 2012,it begins with the incident that Japanese governments attempted to "purchase" the disputed(Diaoyu)islands.The relationship between the two countries deteriorate violently as the upcoming celebration of the 40th anniversery of the normalization of deplomatic ties.Therefore,the present research aims to probe into media's view over China-Japan relations,and analyze how much difference they have regarding stance and ideology.By using corpus retrieval and text processing tools,the present thesis selects broadsheets editorials of China,Japan and the US from the beginning of 2012 to the end of 2014.Furthermore,paragraphs directly related to China-Japan relations are collected and three subcorpora,namely the CD,the AJW and the N&W are built.The research is based on the exploration of keywords by the adoption of WordSmith tools 5.0.Thus,the significant keywords are grouped respectively as Unique keywords,Shared keywords and Common keywords.From the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA),the China-Japan discourse is firstly linguistically analyzed and then,different stance and ideology is discovered;and lastly,it's necessary to evacuate the internal linkage among lauguage,ideology and power.The analysis of media discourse faciliates us to better understand China's image in every respect,and gain some perception to the society as well as one particular history.The finding shows that the discourse is mainly about territorial disputes between China and Japan.China(Chinese media)has a clear stance and proof towards disputes based on the historial facts and previous consensus.Besides,China holds a unitarily negative view towards Japan and is cautious about the US;while Japan(Japanese media),on the one hand,looks forward to resolving the dispute and improving the relations,on the other hand,some negative remarks attibute to China.Above all,Japan's stance is obscure and is a mixture of positive and negative view.Moreover,the USA(American media),as a third party to the China-Japan disputes,has fewer keywords or discourse expressing a specific stance.The discourse is seemingly neutral,but actually takes sides.The thesis is a corpus-based analysis of China-Japan relations from the CDA perspective.Linguistically,it aims to find out stance from different countries to discover different ideologies.In addition,it helps readers or researchers have more objective view of the relations between China and Japan and gain some 'critical awareness.