National image constitutes one of the significant elements of the national power in a country, so a good image not only enhances the centripetal power and cohesion power of people who are living in a nation, but also promotes the competition of this nation in the international community. What is the national image? it is theorized that it consists in the self-cognition of a nation and the acknowledgements of other countries to this nation. According to the patterns of its manifestation, the national image includes the real image and the medium image of a nation as well as the image recognized by people in the country.Many researches at present which are more attentive to how a nation constructs its image and to how this nation propagandizes and embellishes its image, but that studies focused on the national image already formed and the reasons why it came into being are not yet much touched from the sociological perspective. Therefore, this paper is attempted to adopt a sociological research method based on the medium sociology to pay attention to the formation of national image of Saudi Arabia in China, striving for analyzing the cognition and concrete feedbacks of Chinese people to the image of Saudi Arabia. Specifically speaking, this paper firstly refers to the content analysis of Saudi Arabia's image constructed by website of People's Daily in China and secondly deals with the national image of this country in common Chinese people's minds according to questionnaire survey on the internet, and based on the aforementioned two research ways, the paper concludes the ultimate national images of Saudi Arabia in China and also investigates the reasons why the kingdom of Saudi Arabia forms such a image in China.The paper claims at last that the national image of Saudi Arabia in China is negative and the reasons caused this negative image are the following:in the first place, a majority of Chinese people do not go to Saudi Arabia to experience the real image of it but instead construct their cognition of this country by negative-medium-image in China; second, that the lack of channels to effectively disseminate their national image in China leads Chinese people seldom to see the related reports about the national image of Saudi Arabia; finally, that the kingdom of Saudi Arabia did not propagandize its culture, ideology and politics efficiently results in the misunderstandings of Chinese people who have the different culture and context.In the end, this paper devotes to giving advices on how to better construct Chinese national image combined with our research findings. |