What National Images Of China Are Constructed In News Discourse On The Belt And Road Initiative

When visiting countries in Central Asia and Southeast Asia in September and October of 2013,President Xi Jinping proposed the initiative to jointly build the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21 st Century Maritime Silk Road,known as the Belt and Road Initiative,which has obtained the high attention of mass media at home and abroad.The relevant news reports have been increasing continuously.Naturally,the Belt and Road Initiative plays a more and more crucial role in the communication of China’s national image.Based on Martin and White’s(2008)Appraisal Theory,this paper makes a comparative analysis of news discourse on the Belt and Road Initiative to investigate how appraisal resources,specifically Attitudinal values and Graduation values,are employed to build China’s national images.The discourse is collected from The Times(TT)and China Daily(CD).The present study aims to answer two questions:(1)What appraisal resources are used by TT and CD to construct China’s national images?How are the resources distributed?(2)What images are constructed by TT and CD using these resources?This paper firstly reveals that TT mainly adopts negative Attitudinal values,while CD employs positive ones for the most part.Specifically,TT shows the attitude chiefly by presenting passive reactions to China,inappropriate behavior of the Chinese government and low values in China’s policy while CD expresses the attitude principally by providing a high degree of satisfaction with China,a high level of competence of the Chinese government and significance of China’s policy.With respect to the distribution of Graduation resources,precisely Force resources,TT and CD take on a similar pattern,that is,almost all of them play a role in up-scaling the evaluative meanings with respect to China’s national images.Interestingly,about two thirds of the up-scaling is realized though Intensification in both newspapers,with the rest done by Quantification.With the Force resources,negative images in TT and positive images in CD are greatly strengthened.The study then illustrates that TT focuses on reporting from the following three aspects:(1)describing states of keeping alert to China,(2)making pessimistic assessments of the Initiative as well as China’s foreign policy,and(3)passing negative judgement on China’s future,trustworthiness,financial expenses as well as motivation of investment overseas,which builds a threatening,insincere,unreliable and irresponsible,unstable image of China.In comparison,CD concentrates on covering from the three perspectives below:(1)showing positive emotions for China,(2)making optimistic assessments of the Initiative,and(3)passing appreciative judgement on the above listed aspects of China(China’s future,trustworthiness,financial expenses as well as motivation of investment overseas),which constructs a helpful,decisive,confident,reliable,capable image of China.Besides,this paper conducts a case study of China’s national image which confirms the findings as revealed above.Evidently,the research can raise governments’ awareness of paying close attention to their national images in the domestic and foreign media,let journalists attach more importance to the discursive construction of national image in news reports.Secondly,comparative study on China’s national image in the Belt and Road Initiative news discourse can enlighten China on giving high priority to the building and the communication of the Belt and Road,and continuously improving China’s national images worldwide.It is also hoped that the study can be of some help for governments to make relevant decisions and policies and can also benefit journalists in composing news reports in the future.