A Critical Discourse Analysis Of China’s News Reports On Garbage Classification Exemplified By People’s Daily

This paper conducts a critical discourse analysis of garbage classification by taking the news reports in People’s Daily as the object of investigation.As the main channel for ordinary people to acquire information,the mass media can not only influence people‘s social cognition and attitudes through controlling the production,distribution and consumption of discourse,but also achieve the interpersonal meaning of dialogicality and negotiation.By taking Fairclough‘s dialectical-relational approach to CDA and Tian‘s―3-dimension 2-direction‖ model of discursive interaction as the theoretical foundation,this paper examines as data 78 news reports on garbage classification in People’s Daily from2019 to 2020,and explores the relationship between media discourse and the social practice of garbage classification,as well as how the interpersonal function of media discourse is realized and how relevant ideology is at work and constructed.This paper analyzes the hierarchical power relationship in the order of discourse and the attitude resources in the media reports,and explores People’s Daily‘s discursive interaction with different social actors through structural and linguistic analysis.The study finds that:(1)From a macro perspective,People’s Daily,China‘s most important mainstream media,controls the discourse power and represents the will of government.The media discourse presupposes people in a familiar context and encourages them to comply with regulations and participate in the social practice of garbage classification.(2)In terms of linguistic/semiotic analysis from a micro perspective,the media takes advantage of the interpersonal function of affect,judgment and appreciation to construct garbage classification as positive and highly advisable,to change people‘s opinion about it and get people to do it.(3)In the interaction between media discourse and social practice of garbage classification,governance discourse controls the policy release from vertical dimension and emphasizes the implementation effects on people‘s participation through the interaction with public discourse on governing policies,manifesting the multiformity of social actors and constructing the image of service-orientated government.Also,when addressing environmental issues,discourses like public discourse,legal discourse and economic discourse interact with media discourse on the horizontal dimension,and it is in this interaction that the philosophy of refined governance and ecological civilization is constructed.Moreover,the changes of polices realizes in the diachronic discursive interaction as a formal and imperative activity,reflecting and reinforcing the ideology of ecological environmental protection and governance in the social practice of garbage classification.