A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis Of The United States Mainstream Media's Reports On China's The Belt And Road Initiative

News reports play an increasingly important role in our daily lives.News reports are expected to be objective,yet they may deliver some hidden ideology while conveying information to people.Fairclough's Three-dimensional Framework is an effective way to analyze news reports.The Belt and Road Initiative(B&R)is a great project put forward by President Xi Jinping which tends to promote the further integration between Asia,Africa and Europe,through infrastructure and trade.However,B&R faces a series of risks and challenges.Competition among the great powers is a major issue in the construction of the Initiative,the United States is one of the major competitions China may face.This thesis selects the news reports of the US mainstream news institutions including The New York Times,The Washington Post,and USA Today.Based on the Three-dimensional Framework theory of Fairclough,reports on B&R in the self-built corpus were analyzed at three stages aiming at revealing the focus of the reports and the attitudes of the US media.The research results prove that the selected news discourses are unrealistic and contain various tendencies.The US media used special language means to shape an autocratic image of China and imply that B&R is the best interpretation of China's ambition to dominate the world.Besides,they also held skeptical attitude towards the intention and the target of B&R.China's original intention to launch B&R is to achieve win-win cooperation.The Western media has continuously reported that there are great risks in B&R and expressed their anxiety and doubts about the feasibility of B&R.They implicitly integrated their ideology into the news discourse,creating an international public opinion atmosphere that is unfavourable to China,which in turn affects the decision-making of other countries.This study broadens the academic research on B&R and enriches the applied research of critical discourse analysis.Meanwhile,it may contribute to improving the comprehension ability of news readers,and help readers figure out the implied attitudes and reporting tendency of the US newspapers on the Initiative through corpus.Finally,this study has some implications for reducing the misunderstanding of other countries when publicizing and promoting the Belt and Road Initiative.