A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On China's Multinational Corporations

Huawei,as the leader in the global telecommunications industry,is a representative of Chinese private enterprises to be one of the Fortune Global 500,but when entering the markets of developed countries,it is repeatedly rebuffed and often portrayed as the national security threat of other countries.Therefore,this study wants to explore the problem of constructing the media image of Chinese multinational corporations through the contrastive study of English news reports about the Huawei among China,Britain and America.This research has four main purposes: First,it aims at finding the differences of news report on Huawei between the Chinese and Western(British and American)media,the British and American media by comparing different corpora;second,it applies critical discourse analysis(CDA)to explain how these differences are reflected and produced on Huawei‘s case;third,it is hoped that taking the news of Chinese multinational corporation as the research subject,and combining corpus-based study with CDA attempt to provide some reference for the future research;fourth,it is expected to offer some inspiration to raise the critical awareness of newsreader and build a good image of Chinese multinational companies.This study is conducted based on four self-built Corpora: Chinese Media Report on Huawei(CHC),British Media Report on Huawei Corpus(BHC),American Media Report on Huawei Corpus(AHC),British and American Media Report on Huawei Corpus(BAHC).Then it uses BFSU PowerConc to conduct the keyword comparison.It also performs semantic prosody comparison with the help of BFSU Collocator,to clarify the differences of news topic coverage between three countries.Finally,CDA is employed to illustrate how news generates differences in reporting and how news influences readers and enterprises.Through the keyword comparison,it is uncovered that the proportion of topic arrangement of Chinese media is more in line with the public perception of corporate news,but the British and American media focus more on the security investigations of Huawei.Moreover,the U.S.media relatively places the security issue into a more important position than the U.K.media.Through the semantic prosody comparison,it is found that the word "security" has obvious negative semantic prosody,and the BAHC news apparently involve more negative significant collocates of three node words than CHC news,and the negative semantic prosody of node words in American news is stronger than the British news.Hence,we can conclude that both the British and American news agencies hold a negative attitude toward Huawei,but under the overall negative situation,the British media has a relatively more positive attitude than the U.S.media.Eventually,with the assistance of CDA,it is discovered that under the guidance of ideology,selection of news contents,hidden premises and assumptions,suppression of discourse power,historical and cultural differences,and different government attitudes can result in reporting differences;simultaneously,the ideology or attitude reflected in news discourse will in turn react to the readers,thereby strengthening the readers‘ ideology.