Study On The Chinese Government's Countermeasure Discourse In Maintaining Rights And Interests In The South China Sea

As the situation of the South China Sea getting tenser and tenser since 2009,the Chinese government has taken positive measures to maintain its rights and interests in this area.Meanwhile,relative actions of the Chinese government were usually labelled with EXPANSION,MILITARY,and VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW.The ever increasing activism of the Chinese government together with the joint criticism posed by the Philippines,Vietnam and the US have made it more and more necessary for Chinese government to adopt urgent action for its discursive power.And China has put up effective countermeasures against the infringement posed by main claimants.Based on the South China Sea dispute cases published on People 's Daily from 2009 to 2016,this paper tried to define the government's countermeasure discourse.In this process,certain research methods which combine qualitative and quantitative analysis will be used;quantitatively analysis on the countries,the attitudes and the areas concerned in the reports will be made,and a detailed analysis will also be given to demonstrate the difference between the discourse countermeasures of different fields made by the People 's Daily.Analysis shows that the concertation has been made on the "Huangyan Island" case,"the construction of reefs and island in south China sea" and "the south China sea arbitration".Thus this paper will take these cases as the focus to make a dissection on the game of discourse countermeasure,and an overall conclusion on feature of the government's countermeasure discourse will be exposed.This paper generated four main basic influential elements of the government in maintaining our rights and interests in the South China Sea;they are the development of the government's policy on the South China sea,the challenge of basic legal principles between domestic and international laws,the construction of national images,and the project of the common values.These facts offer us four characteristics of the Chinese government's countermeasure discourse:the combination of counter discourse hegemony and countermeasure discourse,combination between social context and discursive strategy,combination between actively countermeasure discourse and national images construction,and combination between initiative countermeasure discourse and agenda-setting.Although the government's countermeasure discourse developed from reactive to proactive responses,it is actually not easy to persuade other countries to accept,let alone the construction of the basic political identity.Thus the current practice of countermeasure discourse need to be improved to deal with the complex international situation.