The Image Construction Of Confucius Institutes In Western News

Since the first Confucius Institute was unveiled in Seoul,South Korea on November 21,2004,525 Confucius Institutes and 1,113 Confucius Classrooms have been established in 146 countries around the world.Under the auspices of Hanban,Confucius Institutes have gradually formed their own unique mode of running a school,and have become an important place for countries to learn Chinese language and culture and understand contemporary China.They have always been committed to developing friendly relations between China and foreign countries,promoting the development of multiculturalism in the world and building a harmonious world.However,it is worth noting that since 2018,many universities have announced the closure of the Confucius Institute.The FBI has repeatedly investigated the Confucius Institute.The signing of the US National Defense Authorization Act also explicitly prohibits the Pentagon funds flowing to the Confucius Institute.After 18 years of hard work,the development of the Confucius Institute is facing a severe test.Many questions in the West have never been reduced since the day of its birth.In the new chapter,only by truly understanding the characteristics of Western media can we overcome the obstacles in cross-cultural communication and tell the story of China better.In order to provide a thorough understanding of the Confucius Institute reports in the West,this article selects Access World News,a news database only for a foreign mainstream information publishing company NewsBank,with the word "Confucius Institute"as the key word,from January 1,2016 to November 12,2018,takes the news reports of the United States,Britain,Australia,Canada,and New Zealand as sample,and the code was quantified after multiple screenings.The content analysis was carried out from three dimensions:descriptive statistics,news framework,and internal and external influence factors of news reports.The results show that the number and attitude of the Confucius Institutes in the West are influenced by the number and key time points of the Confucius Institutes.Western countries have their own preferred news frameworks,and the news institutions and cultural dimensions all influence the selection and construction of the news framework to some extent.Subsequently,this paper uses the critical discourse analysis as a way to analyze the specific content of the report from three levels:vocabulary,grammar and discourse.By examining the specific factors such as word frequency,ideology matrix,metaphor,and physicality,voice and modality,it is found that Western reports implicitly express cultural prejudice from various ways in content organization,constantly widening the distance between self and others,and deepen the stereotype of the external groups within the group again and again.In the comparative study of Chinese and Western ideology-led media,the case study also gets some specific news techniques with rich cultural characteristics,such as the "abstention" argumentation strategy and the appeal of moral quality.Finally,in view of the above points,this paper attempts to make recommendations for the future cross-cultural communication work of the Confucius Institute.Only by accepting differences,understanding differences,and using Western techniques to tell the story of the East can we effectively and efficiently promote the understanding and integration.