Reconstruct The Other With Imagination:Study On Media And Discourse Representations Of Traditional Chinese Festivals By The New York Times

The world culture under the background of cultural globalization presents a homogenized trend,which is harm to the cultural diversity worldwide.In recent years,in response to the needs of diversified world culture,China has been committed to protecting traditional Chinese culture and exchanging it with the world.The traditional festival,as a symbol of national gene,is an important cultural symbol of the Chinese history and in national life,and thus has become an important object during worldwide cultural communication.Since 2008,the Chinese Ministry of Culture has held more than 65 overseas "Happy Spring Festival" series activities in 42 countries and regions worldwide,making traditional Chinese festivals an important brand in the international communication.The overseas celebrations of traditional Chinese festivals set off a wave of "Spring Festival Fever",attracting the active participation of people globally and the attentions from media overseas.In addition,the Chinese Foreign Languages Bureau published the "China Discourse Overseas Cognitive Survey Report" in February 2018.The traditional Chinese festivals,including the Spring Festival,Mid-Autumn Festival and Dragon Boat Festival,are at the forefront of the list,presenting the increase of the significance of Chinese culture in overseas countries.Paying attention to the overseas communication effect of traditional Chinese festivals should also focus on other countries'representation and discourse construction of traditional Chinese festival culture,exploring whether they had presented accurate culture or with misunderstanding.Media reports are based on the social background,cultural context and international relations as an important study object.Therefore,this paper chose the New York Times to analyze the changes that lie in the perspectives of traditional Chinese festivals in the past decadeMedia representation and discourse construction as the product of social reality and consciousness also represent the mainstream ideology and values of the west and the cognitive attitude towards traditional Chinese culture.Therefore,analyzing the construction process of state consciousness,power relations,America's prejudice in news framework and discourse narratives can help us understand the way that overseas mainstream media employed in revealing society and culture,and further help us learn the related social context and deconstruct the discourse prejudice and stereotypes.From the perspective of constructivism,this paper combines Stuart Hall's media representation theory and orientalism theory,and employs content analysis and Van Dijk's discourse analysis theory to explore the coverages.The study focus on the coverages about the traditional Chinese festivals on the New York Times from 2008 to 2017,exploring its subject framework and interpretation rules for traditional Chinese festivals.The study is divided into the following sections:The first chapter introduces the research background,research questions,literature reviews,research methods and theoretical perspectives,and research significance related to this research.The second chapter summarizes the framework and interpretation system of the New York Times.This chapter establishes a content analysis coding table and carry out a chi-square test on the relationship between multi-variables in the table,and then makes the cross-analysis among the subjects.The third chapter analyzes the application of discourse symbols,semantic styles and rhetoric in constructing traditional Chinese festivals.The New York Times infiltrated its ideology and cultural attitudes into the coverages and enriched the implicit meaning layer of its discourse through the semantic structures.With the help of preset discourse,connotations,exaggeration,metaphor,comparison etc.,the coverages reconstruct traditional Chinese festivals as a cultural other.The fourth chapter analyzes the social backgrounds for the prejudice expression and stereotypes of traditional Chinese festivals.This chapter concludes the changing political,economic and cultural relations between China and US and their interactions with the reconstruction of Chinese festivals.The fifth chapter proposes strategies for the international communication of traditional Chinese culture from the perspectives of communication subjects,contents,discourses and routes.This paper finds that the traditional Chinese festival culture presented by the New York Times is based on the American imagination of Chinese social reality and is reconstructed from the perspective of Western culture.The extended frameworks and selected news sources and ethnic conflicts were added to the description of Chinese festivals.In general,the New York Times presents colorful,homogeneous,wild,fogyish,and conflicting traditional Chinese festivals.This paper argues that Sino-US relations in various ways contribute to the reconstruction of traditional Chinese festival culture by the New York Times with American discourse hegemonic system.Therefore,this paper proposes to collect compound sources,interconnect public discourses,interpret folk culture and compete with other discourse space to deconstruct the American cultural prejudice.