A Contrastive Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On "China-Us Trade War"

The trade war between the US and China since 2018 has become a momentous event in the world economy.The escalation of the ‘trade war' now has spill-over effects on the world economy and has received a lot of media coverage from China and the United States.Nowadays,getting news through various media,people believe that news discourse is the faithful recordings of what has happened,and that journalists always provide them with value-free and unbiased information.However,that is not always the case.Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA),one of the important theories of discourse research,attaches importance to all the non-literary discourses and takes news discourses as its main research object.In the field of CDA,language is regarded as a form of ideology and linguistic activity is considered as a social practice.It aims to reveal the embedded ideologies by integrating the textual analysis with the wider sociocultural context and further find out the relationship among language,power and ideologies.CDA resulted from the evolution of Critical Linguistics,which in turn has its origins in M.A.K.Halliday's theory of three meta-functions of language: ideational,interpersonal and textual.Based upon the theoretical framework of Fairclough's threedimensional model,the thesis adopts Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar as the analytical tool to make a comparative critical discourse analysis of 60 news reports on the China-US trade war from the mainstream American newspaper “The New York Times” and Chinese authoritative English newspaper “China Daily”.By analyzing the linguistic features and intertextuality of news reports,this study intends to reveal the different ideologies of the mainstream media in the United States and China,and explore the causal relations among texts,discursive practices and sociocultural contexts.This research is mainly carried out from three stages of description,interpretation and explanation with a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods: in the description stage,UAM Corpus Tool 3.0 and AntConc 3.5.8.are used to compare and analyze the two corpora from three aspects of transitivity,modality and classification.In the interpretation stage,the thesis focuses on intertextual analysis,including news sources and reporting modes.In the explanation stage,the different ideologies behind The New York Times and China Daily are analyzed from institutional,historical,political and economic contexts.The study finds that there is a sharp contrast of ideologies between The New York Times and China Daily corpora: reporters from The New York Times see the trade war as an opportunity to put pressure on China and stabilize the United States' leading position while reporters from China Daily are worried about the chain effect of the trade conflicts on the global economy and hope the two countries can resume normal and mutually beneficial trade relations.In addition,American journalists try to shape China as being unilateral,aggressive and vindictive while Chinese journalists tend to shape China's open,collaborative and responsible image.The study shows that news content is affected by different ideologies,and it is difficult to get absolutely impartial and unbiased reporting.Theoretically,it proves that CDA is an effective tool to reveal the relationship between language and ideologies and further verifies that Fairclough's three-dimensional model plays an important role in the analysis of news discourses.Practically,it draws people's attention to the ideologies embedded in news discourse and improve their critical reading.