A Critical Metaphor Analysis On China's Economic Image In The Stage Of New Normal

New Normal is a stage of China's economy facing transformation and upgrading,which focuses on establishing symmetrical economic structure.This dissertation makes a critical study on economic metaphors in the reports on China's economy in the stage of New Normal in the western mainstream media and takes the Economist reports as a case study,trying to answer the three questions:(1)How are conceptual metaphors of China's economy distributed in the reports?(2)What kind of China's economic image is shaped?(3)What are the ideologies and attitudes towards China's economy?This study collects the reports concerning China's economy in the Economist to form a self-built corpus,dating from December,2014 to December,2016.Totally amount to 140 articles and 135992 words.Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff&Johnson and the Critical Metaphor Analysis put forward by Chartris-Black,the author makes an integration of quantitative and qualitative study to analyze metaphors by metaphor identification,interpretation and explanation.This study finally finds out four major China's economic metaphor types:living organism metaphor,journey metaphor,up/down metaphor and war metaphor,whose distribution accounts for 34.87%,34.60%,15.00%and 13.25%respectively in the whole corpus.It concludes that the Economist,as one of the typical western mainstream media,shapes a negative,unbalanced and ill-managed China's economic image,and turns a passive attitude and prejudice towards China's economy in the stage of New Normal by emphasizing its drawbacks;attributing the slowing-down of the world economy to China's slowing-trend economy and even taking China's progress as a great threat.