China's Image Construction In Belt And Road Initiative News By American Mainstream Media

In September and October of 2013,Chinese president Xi Jinping proposed to jointly build the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21^st Century Maritime Silk Road.The Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation was then held in Beijing from May 14^th to 15^th in 2017.As more and more international media pay attention to this heated topic,Belt and Road Initiative?BRI?has become an important symbol for the construction and communication of China's images by international media.The study takes the Attitude system of Martin and White's?2005?Appraisal Theory as the analytical framework and 30 news reports on the BRI from three American mainstream news media?The Associated Press,CNN and The New York Times?dated from September 7^th,2013 to September 7^th,2018 as the research data to explore features of China's image construction.Two research questions are to be addressed:?1?What attitudinal resources are employed by the three American mainstream media in their Belt and Road Initiative news and how are these resources distributed??2?What image?s?of China is/are constructed through these attitudinal resources employed by American news media?Through qualitative and quantitative analyses of the news reports,the following findings are achieved.?1?In terms of attitudinal resources employment features,the three American mainstream news media all employ Affect?25.51%?,Judgement?32.31%?and Appreciation?42.18%?resources in these BRI reports and their negative resources are all higher than their positive ones.Among them,the salient resources are Valuation of Appreciation,negative Propriety and negative Capacity of Judgement and Insecurity of Affect.?2?These attitudinal resources construct China as a powerful threat,an economic competitor,a geopolitical planner and an incompetent cooperator,which are inconsistent with the facts.The findings suggest that facing the distorted news released by some international mainstream media,Chinese news media,government,enterprises and scholars are supposed to voice actively in international publicity through different channels and present a real BRI to the world so as to eliminate the possible negative effects brought by the inaccurate news and enhance the global image of China.