A Proximization Analysis Of China-US Technology War Discourse

With the advent of the 5G era,the main battlefield for great powers has been shifted to high-tech domain in which China and the United States with their strong scientific and technological capacities become two of the most competitive rivals in taking the future 5G lead.At present,the competition and conflict between China and the US in hi-tech sphere are getting increasingly intensified.In fact,former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd expressed that there had been an undeclared “new cold war over technology” between the US and China.As the world’s two largest economies,the general trend of China-US technology war will undoubtedly leave profound impact on the global technological,economic and even political landscapes.In this context,the study of China-US technology war discourse which intends to dig out the discursive strategies and the hidden discursive logic of both sides is of practical significance for China to effectively respond to the ongoing tech war launched by the US.This thesis,within the theoretical framework of Piotr Cap’s proximization theory,conducts a contrastive analysis of news reports on China-US technology war based on two self-built corpora with 78 news reports collected from China Daily and The New York Times.Specifically,the study combines corpus-based quantitative approach and text-based qualitative approach to investigate the proximization patterns in each corpus and then contrastively analyze the proximization strategies and the corresponding legitimization effects in spatial,temporal and axiological dimensions.The research findings show that China Daily and The New York Times both apply the three types of proximization strategies to force the construals of increasing proximity of external threats in the discourse space in order to achieve legitimization of each preemptive actions.In spatial dimension,China Daily tends to highlight the physical impact that the US camp has exerted on the entities from China camp,while The New York Time stresses the anticipated threats and consequential effects caused by China camp.In temporal dimension,China Daily uses more future-to-presentproximization shift resources to envisage that the US unilateral actions will exist continually from now to the infinite future exerting a lasting and profound impact on 5G construction and the global technological industrial chain,whereas The New York Times lays more emphasis on past-to-present proximization shift to underline the past negative impact left by Chinese high-tech companies thereby enhancing its current claims and accusations of China’s hi-tech companies.In axiological dimension,China Daily constructs more IDC positive values highlighting the positive images of China camp in response to the tech war,while The New York Times constructs similar amount of the IDC positive values and the ODC negative ones,deliberately creating intense ideological conflicts between China camp and the US camp.In practice,both newspapers develop and adjust their proximization strategies in accordance with the current contextual needs and the audience’s predispositions,which provides discursive guarantee for their own legitimization goals.Furthermore,the two newspapers’ distinct discursive strategies reveal their attitudes and stances towards the tech war.China Daily insists on China’s adherence to multilateral cooperation in the field of science and technology which puts emphasis on mutual trust and shared prosperity,aiming to delegitimize the US of launching the tech war against China.The New York Times,influenced by the Cold War mentality and ideological prejudices,fabricates the security threats and illegality of China’s technologies with the purpose to portray the US’starting the tech war as a legitimate action to defend national security and international orders.The research significance is that,theoretically,the study further expands the application scope of proximization theory.Meanwhile,the incorporation of contrastive analysis method and corpus-based quantitative method into proximization analysis verifies the strong explanatory power of proximization theory in discourse analysis.Practically,it is of referential significance for China’s response to the tech war.