Discursive Strategies Of Corporate Image Construction Of Chinese Enterprise In American Mainstream Media

During the age when economic and cultural globalization deepens the mutual independence among different countries,the strategy of "Go Global" is an inevitable choice for Chinese enterprises to enhance development.Receiving impressive economic benefits,Chinese enterprises face great challenges in the world market at the same time,which have led to immediate harm to the corporate images of Chinese enterprises.The construction and promotion of corporate image are considered as the core parts for the international strategy of enterprises.American mainstream media,holding the international discourse power,leave a far-reaching impact on the construction and promotion of the corporate images of Chinese enterprises.The research of how American mainstream media construct the corporate images of Chinese enterprises can not only reveal their reporting preference on Chinese enterprises,but also reflect the social and historical context of image construction,and thus unveil the hidden ideology behind the constructionThe current study reifies the research of how the corporate images of Chinese enterprises are discursively constructed in American mainstream media to a case study of Huawei’s corporate image construction in The New York Times.The data in the self-built corpus were selected from news reporting about Huawei during the Huawei Case.Following the theoretical framework of the Discourse-Historical Approach,this study investigates the prominent discourse topics of the corpus,and analyzes the discursive strategies as well as linguistic realization devices used to construct Huawei’s corporate image with the assistance of corpus analytical tools.Based on the analysis at both the lexical and the grammatical levels,the social and historical context of corporate image construction is further explained.The results show that in the self-built corpus,news reporting about Huawei mainly focuses on different interested parties in Huawei Case,accusations and restrictions against Huawei and Huawei’s identity problem.The five discursive strategies,including nomination,predication,argumentation,perspectivization and intensification/mitigation strategies,are employed to construct Huawei’s corporate image.With the assistance of corpus analytical tools,including keyword analysis,concordance analysis and collocation analysis,a variety of specific linguistic forms are illustrated to suggest a negative attitude towards Huawei.Huawei is constructed as the telecommunications giant which seeks for global dominance,a national security threat and an arm of the Chinese government.The discursive construction of Huawei’s corporate image is settled in the social and historical context of China-U.S.economic confrontations and strategic competition in cyberspace governance.Besides,settled in the social and historical context,media stereotypes of Huawei’s corporate image are discursively expressed and activated in the news reports of The New York Times.Theoretically,the integration of the Discourse-Historical Approach and corpus analytical methods offers a diverse perspective in the linguistic study of corporate image at both the lexical and the grammatical levels.In addition,more practically,the findings of the discursive construction of Huawei’s corporate image in American media indicate the significance of the promotion of the corporate images of Chinese enterprises.For the future study,data of longer time span and of more diverse sources shall be collected to analyze the discursive strategies in the construction of corporate image.