A Critical Discourse Analysis Of American Broadsheets On China's Current Military Reform

The current military reform in China is a revolution.The past reforms have never been in this promotion,interest and influence.The historic reform will ultimately update China's armed forces in a systematic way,and make it become a powerful support for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and a defender of world peace.Given its profound influence,the reform is drawing considerable attention and has received widespread media coverage home and abroad.Then,for a linguistic researcher,some questions as follows might be interesting and worth investigation: What is the focus of the western mainstream media? Any significant differences in the positions of Chinese and Western journalists? Any ideology embedded in the Western coverage? To answer these questions,this thesis tries to use the method of critical discourse analysis(CDA)to study American mainstream media's report characteristics,attitude of the standpoint,hidden value orientation and ideological tendency towards China and explores the reference significance of the CDA method to the external publicity strategy.As for the data,40 sample reports from September 2015 up to February 2017 about China's military reform from three American influential broadsheets,namely The New York Times,The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times are chosen.Based on the theoretical framework built by Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar(SFG)and Fairclough's three-dimensional model and the word list function in WordSmith(5.0)Tools,the paper analyzes the news samples in terms of text,discourse practice and social practice.The major findings are listed as follows:First,through the textual analysis of the language features from transitivity,modality and lexical choice,it is found that American media reports on China's military reform tend to choose negative words to distort the reform reality and implant western ideologies in a disguised way,which proves that the “China military threat theory” is still the desirable tendency taken by American mainstream newspapers.Second,as far as the discourse practice is concerned,the discourse representation and news sources are analyzed to show the discourse production.When it comes to the unfavorable statements about China,American media are more likely to choose opinions from the officials and authoritative experts to make news reports seemingly objective,or indirectly quote the speech from “someone” or China's radicals to shift responsibilities.Third,the social practice of the news discourse is explored in the social and cultural context.For one thing,the U.S.harbors deep-rooted prejudice against China and often labels China as “conservative” and “ignorant”.For another,China's rapid development frightens them.Therefore,driven by national interests and news concepts,the mainstream media represented by the United States can not be objective and comprehensive,especially with regard to major events involved with China.In conclusion,the critical discourse analysis of the reports on China's current military reform is to deconstruct American discourse hegemony and provide some empirical references to the improvement of the external publicity strategies.How to lead the international public opinion and build the grand nation image under the environment of media discrimination is the ultimate focus of this paper.That's where the innovation and value lie.