A Contrastive Study On The Construction Of China’s National Image Under The COVID-19 Epidemic By The Chinese And Us Mainstream Media

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 epidemic,the US mainstream media,represented by The New York Times,have been stigmatizing China by making issues of coronavirus through its global propaganda system,which impinged on “China’s national image under the COVID-19 epidemic”(CNICE).Meanwhile,as an important force in China’s international publicity,Chinese mainstream media,represented by China Daily,shoulder great responsibility in safeguarding CNICE.Currently,however,studies on CNICE are few and limited to the macro discussion on foreign media’s impact on CNICE through their news on COVID-19 in China(NCC).These studies mainly use few reporting cases to summarize the CNICE constructed by foreign media,and thus lack research depth,perspectives,methods and persuasion.Besides,no scholar has compared the CNICE-construction of Chinese media with that of foreign media to reveal the effect of the former one.To overcome the above limitations,this research applies a self-built analysis model adapted from the three-dimensional framework for discourse analysis to conduct a corpus-based contrastive analysis of the CNICE-construction of China Daily and The New York Times with both quantitative and qualitative methods,in the hope of contributing to the protection and promotion of China’s national image(CNI)in the post-epidemic era.It first reveals the specific CNICE constructed by the two media and the deep social reason for their CNICE-construction results through collocation analysis of “China”,news sources analysis and analysis of NCC as a social practice.Next,it discusses the effect of China Daily’s CNICE-construction according to the above analysis.Finally,based on the above analysis and discussion,this research proposes strategies to improve CNI-construction for Chinese mainstream media like China Daily under the three-dimensional concept of discourse.This research finds:(1)China Daily constructed CNICE positively as“an active outbound-aid provider”,“a global anti-epidemic war promoter”,“a stigmatized victim”,“an anti-epidemic achiever” and “a tough and flexible world-economy promoter”,while The New York Times constructed CNICE negatively as “the culprit for the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19”,“an enemy of the US”,“a disinformation disseminator”,“an economic sufferer”and “an improper anti-epidemic measures conductor”;(2)The two media constructed CNICE in a totally different way,for China Daily’s NCC is in essence an “anti-epidemic practice” which is a part of China’s overall anti-epidemic war,while that of The New York Times is a political practice which is part of the US government’s conspiracy of escalating the Sino-US strategic competition;(3)China Daily’s CNICE-construction generally managed to counteract the negative CNICE constructed by The New York Times,enhanced the self-construction of positive CNICE,and timely publicized the idea of “a global community of a shared future”,but it did not produce corresponding specific CNICE in response to the stigmatization on China’s anti-epidemic measures;(4)To improve their CNI-construction,at the micro textual level of China-related outbound news,Chinese mainstream media should make “China” collocate with more words carrying positive semantic preference so as to render positive semantic prosody to “China”,which can convey a positive CNI;At the middle discursive practice level,they need to produce more soft China-related outbound news in the low context so as to construct a more “close to life” CNI and degenerate the stigmatization on China in a “gentle” but convincing way;At the macro social practice level,they can enhance the role of China-related outbound news in the protection and promotion of CNI by setting more active and flexible agendas,echoing diplomatic discourses and making good use of new media platforms.With China’s peaceful rise,CNI will undoubtedly face more severe challenges in the post-epidemic era.This research not only breaks the limitations of the former CNI research in terms of research depth,methods and perspectives,but also provides Chinese media with useful insights into CNI-construction.