Research On The English Version Of The White Paper On China-US Trade Friction From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

The Chinese white paper is specially issued by the government departments on the issues of concern,which is used to elaborate the views and understandings of the major issues in the current or future political,economic,social and other fields of the country.On July 6,2018,the United States imposed import tariffs on Chinese products,and China was forced to counterattack.The China-US economic and trade friction triggered by the strategy of “US interest first” was upgraded to a trade war.On September 24,2018,the Information Office of the State Council of China issued a white paper entitled “The Facts and China’s Position on China-US Trade Friction” to clarify the position and attitude of the Chinese government.The government white paper is a political discourse.The author,on behalf of the country,conducts a conscious dialogue with domestic and foreign societies,which contains a large number of evaluation resources to show his position,expecting to gain support from potential audiences and enhance interpersonal relationship.Appraisal Theory is a theory founded by Australian linguist Martin and other scholars on the basis of interpersonal function,which is one of the three functions of systemic functional linguistics.Through the three subsystems,Attitude,Engagement and Graduation,the lexical terms used in oral or written discourse are explored to reveal the attitudes held by the speaker or the author.Each subsystem of the Appraisal Theory contains a more detailed division,which focuses on how the speakers use language to to conduct evaluations,express their own attitudes,and coordinate audience relationships.According to Martin’s Appraisal Theory,this paper is based on both qualitative analysis and quantitative data statistics to investigate the English version of the White Paper “The Facts and China’s Position on China-US Trade Friction” issued by the Information Office of the State Council of China in 2018.Various types of appraisal resources are analyzed to explore China’s policy stance for china-us economic and trade frictions.Through the analysis of the appraisal resources in the white paper,the findings show that in the Attitude system,the write paper uses more positive attitude resources to express the support and approval for the trade cooperation between China and America.In the Engagement system,Heterogloss resources are widely distributed,in which the number of dialogic contraction resources exceeds that of dialogic expansion ones.That indicates the Chinese government prefers to use authority to highlight their views,align the readers,and gain their support.In the Graduation system,the frequency of force is much higher than that of focus,and quantificationresources far outnumber those of the intensification ones,which indicates that the Chinese government is more inclined to use specific data to show the facts,thus making its views more specific and objective.Also,these evaluation resources can inform the rest of the world about the Chinese government’s stance on China-US economic and trade friction and meanwhile strengthen the persuasion.This study enriches the research on government documents and political discourse,expands the application of appraisal theory,and provides a new attempt to apply it to such official documents.In practice,this paper can not only help people accurately understand the official attitude and position in the white paper,but also shed some lights on deepening the interpretation of the government official documents.