A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis Of English News Reports On The Belt And Road Initiative In America And China

Since "the Belt and Road" initiative was proposed by Xi Jinping,President of China,in 2013,it has been widely reported by Chinese and Western media over the past years.As a kind of media,news reports influence people's thoughts and values through subtle ways.Critical discourse analysis reveals the hidden issues in discourse from a critical perspective and provides a method for news discourse analysis to reveal the dialectical relationship between discourse and ideology.This study is a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of news reports of the Chinese and U.S.media on the Belt and Road Initiative.The present research selected 30 English news reports on "the Belt and Road" from China Daily,30 from New York Times and the Washington Post,and then built two small-scale corpora.The author aims to reveal the ideologies embedded in these news reports and explore attitudes of China and U.S.towards the Initiative,so as to provide some references for external reports of the Chinese media on the Initiative in future.Based on the results obtained from the above-mentioned process,the research adopted Fairclough's three-dimensional model as the theoretical framework and made a detailed analysis on the discursive construction of the news reports of Chinese and U.S.media at the levels of text,discursive practice and sociocultural practice.The study found out that,in the news reporting of the Belt and Road Initiative,the Chinese news media tends to emphasize the positive influences of the Initiative such as benefits for the surrounding countries and the regional economic cooperation,while the U.S.media pays more attention to the political impact of the Initiative.The U.S.media even regard the Initiative as a geopolitical strategy of China and worry that America's influence in the Asian-Pacific region may be impaired.In light of this,the author suggests that the Chinese government and media carry out external publicity more actively and explain the economic attribute of the Belt and Road Initiative to the U.S.government and public so as to make them to have correct understandings of the Initiative.Discourse describes a certain version of reality and serves as a vehicle of ideology,this thesis reminds readers that critical thinking is necessary if they intend to see through conflicting accounts and get hold of what is truly going on in reality.