The Image Of Giant Pandas In The Eyes Of American Media (1949-2018)

The giant panda is a rare animal in China,but it has always been "shining" on the international stage.The giant panda has been an important business card in China's external communication activities.The image of giant pandas has been closely linked to China's national image.Studying the image of giant pandas helps us interpret China's national image.This study focuses on the image of giant pandas in American media from 1949 to 2018.This article selects reports about the giant panda in the New York Times as the research text.This paper adopts the perspective of critical discourse analysis,and uses Fairclough's three-dimensional analysis framework,and discusses the problem from three levels: text,discourse practice and social practice.In the text research,the content analysis method,the corpus-based discourse analysis method and the symbolic rhetorical analysis method are mainly used to research the media image of giant pandas from 1949 to 2018.The analysis of the content analysis method shows that from the period of 1949 to 2018,the international image of giant pandas showed a staged pattern,and different stages of reconstruction constructed different the international image of giant pandas.Then,using the corpus-based discourse analysis method and symbolic rhetorical analysis method,the text of each stage is analyzed,and the law of the giant panda's international image is found from the vocabulary practice strategies such as word frequency,subject words and symbolic rhetoric.The results of the study show that in the first phase,from 1949 to 1971,the national identity of the giant panda was emphasized,giving the giant panda a certain ideology and establishing the image of the communist giant panda.During this period,the image of giant panda breeding difficulties was gradually constructed.In the second phase,from 1972 to 1980,the focus was on the image of the giant panda friendly ambassador and the popular image.In the third stage,from 1981 to 1992,the focus was on the image of the giant panda as a symbol of endangered animals and the difficulty of breeding.In the fourth stage,from 1993 to 2018,the key construction of the giant panda is China's symbolic image and China's soft power image.Then,the second step of discourse practice in the three-dimensional analysis framework is analyzed to try to solve the production process of news discourse of the giant pandas.The results of the study show that news value orientation,agenda setting,and intertextuality of news texts all affect the production of news discourse of the giant pandas.The value of the news and the nature of the media agenda setting determine what utterance text is presented to the audience.The intertextuality of the news further strengthens the construction of the image of giant pandas.Finally,a social practice analysis of the giant panda media image discourse helps us understand why such an image constructs discourse.The reason why giant pandas produce different media images at different stages and construct discourses with different images is determined by power relations and ideology.The image of giant pandas in the early American media was dominated by ideology.With the changes in international relations and the changes in China's diplomatic strategy,the power relations between China and the West have changed from unfair to equal,and China has participated in the activities of the international image construction of giant pandas.These factors have affected the transformation of the image of giant pandas in American media.