A Comparative Discourse Analysis Of Sino-US News Reports On American Trade Policy Towards China

At present,with the pace of opening up and modernization,China is in an unprecedented period of rapid development in culture,economy and import and export trade.In March 2018,US President Trump instructed the US Trade Representatives to levy tariffs on goods imported from China,and this incident marked the beginning of the Sino-US trade war.After that,although the two sides conducted multiple rounds of negotiations and consultations on this issue,the Sino-US trade relationship has still continued to become increasingly tensed.The purpose of this research is to make a comparative analysis of the news reports of the mainstream media on the American trade policy towards China.In order to construct the corpus of China Daily and The Wall Street Journal,a large number of news discourse are gathered about the American trade policy towards China.And this thesis interprets the focus and differences between China and the United States,so as to further clarify the cognitive forms hidden behind the discourse structure and provide enlightenment for Chinese newspapers.By creating a corpus of80 news samples,the comparative analysis of the present study is conducted from three stages: description stage,interpretation stage and explanation stage.The first thing worthy of our attention is the description stage.At this stage,analytic tools are explored including lexical choice,transitivity and modality.At the interpretation stage,reporting mode and news source are explored in detail.While at the last stage,a reasonable explanation is given from the three perspectives of political system,economic environment and cultural background.Through the comparative analysis of the corpus,the major findings are as follows:(1)At the description stage,there are some differences in high-frequency words between China Daily and The Wall Street Journal.When describing American trade policy,China Daily mostly chooses positive and commendatory words.On the contrary,The Wall Street Journal mostly chooses negative and derogatory words.In addition,both of them mainly focus on material process and verbal process.These meaningful choices are influenced by the ideology of the reporter or the position of the news organization.(2)At the interpretation stage,it is obvious that in most cases,the reporting method adopted by China Daily is indirect speech,and its news sources mainly include relatively official personnel such as spokespersons of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and state leaders,while the news information sources of The Wall Street Journal are more diverse.The above differences show that Chinese and American newspapers report the same event with their own unique perspective and ideology.(3)At the explanation stage,by putting different language features in a broader social and cultural context,it is found that the choice of these language strategies made by the media in China and the United States is not arbitrary,but is influenced by the ideology of the reporters and the position of their news organizations.