A Discourse Study Of The US Congressional Hearing Testimonies On China's Space Developments

As one of the important channels of information gathering for the United States Congress,the US congressional hearing is of great research value.This study concentrates on the testimony discourse of which the topics are related to China's space developments.In order to analyze and interpret the testimony discourse,this study chooses critical discourse analysis(CDA)and network-based content analysis as the analytical framework and mainly answers the following three questions:(1)What are the major topics in witnesses' testimonies?(2)What are the relations and logic connections among policy claims in these topics?(3)What discursive strategies are applied by witnesses in the testimonies?After manually coding and checking the policy statements,this study summarizes 16 opinions about China's space developments and 9 suggestions on how the United States should respond to such developments.According to the concept congruence networks drawn based on these opinions,it is found that witnesses tend to discuss “threats”,“espionage” and “space race” when they talk about China's space developments;while they tend to discuss “cooperation” most frequently when they talk about suggestions for the United States.Besides,the comparison of the two networks illustrates that two distinctive images of “trouble-maker China” and the “rational problem-solver US” are constructed.At last,the study focuses on three common discursive strategies—nomination strategy,predication strategy and argumentation strategy and analyzes the effects and realizations of them in helping the image construction.