| Entering the 21 st century,China’s political and economic rise has been acknowledged by all countries in the world.However,this does not mean that China’s national image has gain the same recognition.On the one hand,China hopes to build an image as a peaceful,friendly and responsible big country;on the other hand,the "China threat" theory is still rampant.This means that in the process of building and spreading China’s national image,there is a problem that needs to be solved: the gap between China’s Self-shaped and Other-shaped national image.To understand national image from the perspective of power and discourse,it can be concluded that national image is not only an embodiment of a country’s soft power,but also a social construct based on discourse.Therefore,the discrepancy between Self-shaped image and Other-shaped image is in fact a competition between different discourses,thus the game of power.This paper adopts a theoretical framework that combines CDA and news framing theory to conduct a quantitative and qualitative analysis of nearly 2,000 news reports from CCTV and BBC during the COVID-19 pandemic.The quantitative analysis draws on corpus linguistics,and the qualitative analysis mainly uses Fairclough’s three-dimensional model,van Leeuwen’s representation analysis of social actors,and Entmann’s framing theory.This paper not only describes the differences between Self-shaped image and Other-shaped image of China,but also tries to reveal the discourse competition behind and explore the social and cultural factors that cause the differences.In textual analysis,it is found that the national image of China is not a single image,but a conceptual system composed of the images of authoritative institutions,authoritative individual and ordinary people.Therefore,when building China’s national image,CCTV and BBC will highlight different parts for different reasons.CCTV’s COVID-19 report focuses more on the image of ordinary people and individual authoritaty images to represent China’s national image.The BBC’s coronavirus coverage reinforces the image of authority.Therefore,CCTV’s national image of China is more personalized,while BBC’s image is more impersonalized.In addition,CCTV and BBC both use genericization in shaping China’s national image,but for different purposes as well.Genericization in CCTV news is to build national unity and cohesion,while genericization in BBC is to distinguish between "us" and "them".In the stage of frame analysis,it is found that the CCTV news framing/discourse focuses on the establishment of power distance: the power distance between authorities and ordinary people,as well as the power distance between central authorities and local authorities.The BBC’s news framing/discourse is oriented towards the dichotomy of "us" and "them",which is related to the binary opposition frame that the West has been using to frame the East,especially China.However,the analysis of BBC’s news framing/discourse does not find that BBC has obvious negative or positive value judgment on China.Generally speaking,the language and frames used by BBC are relatively neutral.The explanation analysis at the last stage found that the reason why BBC adopted a relatively neutral news framing to shape the image of China in the epidemic may be related to the need of the UK to maintain good diplomatic relations and economic exchanges with China under the background of Brexit.CCTV’s news framework,which emphasizes power distance and ethnic unity,serves the practical needs of pandemic communication and mobilization.This paper explains national image and discourse from the perspective of power,provides a new perspective for the study of China’s national image,and further explores the social and cultural factors behind the difference between Self-shaped and Other-shaped images.This study believes,only when social and cultureal contexts were brought into news analysis,can China shape its own image better. |
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