Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Economist Reports On Chinese Private Enterprises(1993-2017)

Since the reform and opening up,the development of Chinese private enterprises have gone through many twists and turns.Apart from tremendous achievements at home,they are also playing a significant role on the worldwide stage.They have naturally attracted more and more attention from the western mainstream media,where relevant reports appears frequently with diverse images endowed to them.This thesis aims to research on the image construction of Chinese private enterprises in the western media.The corpus source is The Economist from 1993 to 2017,one of the famous western mainstream media,from which 196 reports related to Chinese private enterprises are selected.Both quantitative and qualitative analysis are applied.Quantitative analysis is conducted with the help of corpus tools to give an overview of these reports and find out what The Economist focuses on.Qualitative analysis is conducted under Fairclough's three dimensional framework of Critical Discourse Analysis to find out how The Economist constructs the image of Chinese private enterprises through linguistic tools.Finally,causes,effects and suggestions of the image construction are presented.Results show that the focus of The Economist is consistent with the development of Chinese private enterprises:they become more and more diverse and distinguished;the development can be divided into three stages with the first stage from 1993 to 2002 mainly about traditional companies and their private essence,the second stage from 2003 to 2008 mainly about companies from industries from car,mobile,etc.and their initial overseas development,and the third stage from 2009 to 2017 mainly about Internet companies and their maturer overseas development;the development trend of media exposure can be divided into three kinds,decreasing all the way,increasing first and then decreasing,and increasing all the way.What is more,various linguistic tools including vocabulary,grammar and discursive practice are applied to construct the image of Chinese private enterprises.All these linguistic tools can lead to the construction of negative images and only some of them construct positive images as well.The dominance of the negative image construction is caused by several factors including institutional,political,cultural factors and information restrictions.And it can consolidate old stereotypes and raise new ones in the minds of western readers,enterprises and governments.It can also set their behaviors through turning superiority and opposition into actions.Based on the above study,three suggestions for enhancing the image of Chinese private enterprises constructed in the western mainstream media are offered:overcoming existing weaknesses,enhancing information dissemination channels and improving publicity strategies.