Discursive Construction Of Overseas Returnees' Collective Identity In China's Newspapers

In recent years,the intensification of overseas education has generated growing numbersof Chinese students studying abroad and returning to China after graduation,constituting a newly rising social class.According to the report on Chinese returnees' employment and entrepreneurship in 2017 released by the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization(CCG)on Aug.12,the number of Chinese overseas returnees has reached history record,which indicates that the rapid speed of China's economic and social development makes China become a "talent magnet".This report gives a profound interpretation in returnees' entrepreneurship,employment,scientific research,social life and other aspects,providing an important evidence of encoding news data and studying Chinese overseas returnees' collective identity.Print media is one of the easiest ways to contact the public and convey important information.Since media,itself a power resource,intertwine the discourse power and information sharing altogether,they are able to control and influence other groups in certain situations and domains.To a further extent,the media practitioners or relevant institutions can manipulate the formation and transformation of public cognition,and even indirectly affect social actions.So,the discipline of Critical Discourse Analysis,which always focuses on the relationship of language,power,and society,is regarded as the important way to analyze the media discourse related to collective identity.Its sociocognitive approach connects discourse structure and social structure through the mediation of an interface——mental model,so as to interpret the construction process of certain social phenomena and collective identity.With the aim to obtain a comprehensive understanding of Chinese returnees in newspaper media represented by People's Daily,the research,based on Critical Discourse Analysis-sociocognitive approach,analyzes the discursive construction of "overseas returnees" collective identity from such three perspectives as language structures and discursive strategies at micro level,social cognition at meso level,and social context at macro level.Micro level analysis concentrates on the topic-comment structure and discursive strategy analysis to find out how sentence structures and strategies affect the discursive construction of collective identity.By "discursive strategy",we generally mean a more or less intentional plan of discursive practices adopted to achieve a particular social,political,psychological or linguistic goal,so CDA,featuring its interaction between language andsociety,has become an increasingly popular method for examining the linguistic elements in the construction of social phenomena or collective identity.Meso level pays much attention to the social actors of discourse practice,the role they played in their communicative events and the social cognition they are conducive to forming.And macro level emphasizes social contextual analysis so as to uncover the major influencing factors of collective identity's text and discourse practice.The research findings suggest that:(1)Newspaper media report "overseas returnees" with various language devices and discursive strategies,like perspectivation strategies,predicational strategies,denial strategies,which construct the group as an upper-class identity in starting business bravely,working steadily,studying dedicatedly,and living optimistically;(2)Most reports show a positive attitude toward "overseas returnees",the number of which is obviously higher than those adverse news on returnees' negative stereotypes;(3)The absolute power of newspaper discourse is the main factor of manipulating readers' ideological formation and constructing the collective identity of overseas returnees,besides the favorable policies of governments and enterprises are also important influencing elements.Therefore,it is hoped that,through this study,discourse practice of newspaper media should be more responsible for the collective identity construction of any group of people,or rather it should present the real situation objectively.The leaders of newspaper media had better play a role of supervisor,properly guiding or examining the direction of news reports,which is important to influence the whole ideological atmosphere toward a certain group;readers should rationally justify the reports on newspaper and refrain themselves from spreading and distorting unreal news to exaggerate the tangled tensions among groups in society.Only in this way can the collective identity of a group be constructed appropriately.