Critical Metaphor Analysis On English News Coverage Of China's Overseas High-Speed Rallway Projects In China, United States And Thailand

Based on China's national conditions and long-term interests,President Xi Jinping put forward the initiative of “One Belt and One Road”.In the promotion of this great idea,China's high-speed railway has become a representation of China's economy in the global market.However,there are still various risks and challenges faced by China's high-speed railway in the external development.One of the main reasons lies in the lack of real understanding about why foreigners hold different and fluctuating attitudes towards China's high-speed railway.News coverage,as an indispensable approach to know the public's perception of social issues,deserves the attention from Chinese investors.The comparative analysis between Chinese and foreign news coverage on China's overseas high-speed railway projects is conducive to explore the reasons why China failed to cooperate with some countries in building high-speed railway.With the aim of revealing language users' underlying intention,Critical Metaphor Study is an important means to analyze news reports.Under the framework of Charteris-Black's Critical Metaphor Analysis,this thesis selects the news coverage on China's overseas high-speed railway projects from Chinese media,American media and Thai media,and establishes four corpora for further study.With the combination of qualitative study and quantitative study,this research makes a comparisonbetween Chinese media's and American media's attitudes towards Sino-US high-speed railway cooperation as well as between Chinese media's and Thai media's attitudes towards Sino-Thai high-speed railway cooperation,in order to summarize the reasons why China's overseas high-speed railway projects encountered numerous obstacles in these two countries.This research shows that there are both similarities and differences between Chinese media and foreign media in the usage of conceptual metaphors when they report China's overseas high-speed railway projects.In Chinese media and the United States media,similar types of metaphors are employed: human metaphor and building metaphor.As to war and conflict metaphors as well as journey metaphors,they are similar in the source domain but different in the target domain.New York Times and Los Angeles Times utilize more war and conflict metaphors to demonstrate that the introduction of China's high-speed railway would threaten their own development.With regard to journey metaphor,they highlight the local development of high-speed railway and its status in the international market.Compared with the United States media,China Daily employs more protection-concerned metaphors,which implies that the Chinese government intend to protect their own benefits in face of American protectionism.Compared with Chinese media,Thai media adopt similar categories of metaphors(journey metaphor,human metaphor and building metaphor)but have different tendencies in the application of war and conflict metaphor.The Nation stresses the divergence in negotiating Sino-Thai high-speed railway project,which demonstrates the Thai government expects to gain more benefits from this project.However,China Daily emphasizes the Chinese government's willingness to cooperate with neighboring countries,which shows that they expect the construction of high-speed railway would help realize the common prosperity.The further analysis manifests that these differences are caused by social and cultural factors,among which historical evolution,ideology,political and economic situation should be concerned by investors.Through the critical analysis of metaphors in Chinese and foreign news coverage on China's overseas high-speed railway projects,this research enriches the application of Critical Metaphor Analysis in the study of economic news reports and broadens the research of China's high-speed railway,so as to promote its further development in the international market.