A Contrastive Study Of Media Representation Of Chinese Dream Between Chinese And Western Mainstream English-Language Newspapers

Chinese Dream is proposed by Chinese president Xi Jinping in a visit to the National Museum of China in November 2012.Its proposal and popularization quickly attract the attention from the Chinese and western English-language media.Since news reports can influence people's attitude towards events and reflect the hidden ideology,analyzing how media construct Chinese dream is thus of great importance.With the combination of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics,the present study has collected 86 news reports from China Daily and 55 news reports from The New York Times and Financial Times on the topic of Chinese Dream.Under the Fairclough's three-dimensional model,the analysis of keywords and collocation at the stage of description,the analysis of news sources and reporting mode at the stage of interpretation and the analysis of institutional context,situational context and societal context of news reports at the stage of explanation,are performed in the present study to probe into the hidden ideology behind the news reports.After a detailed and thorough analysis on all the selected news reports,this paper has found that there exist great differences between the images portrayed by Chinese and western English-language newspapers.Chinese mainstream newspapers put stress on elaborating the profound connotation of Chinese Dream from the perspective of the whole nation and all the Chinese people in order to portray a positive and aspiring image of China,while western mainstream media prefer to regard Chinese Dream as Xi's political tool,exaggerate the problems and difficulties that Chinese Dream encounters with and portray an aggressive and threatening image of China.With the verification of the applicability of exploring media representation integrating CDA and corpus linguistics,the present study thus can provide some empirical evidence for the construction of this combined analyses.In addition,the present study will help readers to bear a critical thinking and raise their awareness for fear that journalists may infuse bias and slant into news reports.Moreover,the results will help Chinese English-language media to deal with the distorted news reports on China and portray a better image of Chinese Dream.