China’s National Image From The Perspective Of Cuban Media

Cuba was the first American country to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China.Sino-Cuban relation has been,after 62 years of tortuous development during which a solid foundation was laid and rich experience was accumulated,steadily developing in recent years.Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic in early 2020,unfavorable views towards China increased in global public opinion.The media are generally regarded as the main carrier of a nation’s image,and the relationship between news coverage and the nation’s image has also extensively received academic attention.However,studies on foreign news coverage of China are mostly focused on media of English-speaking countries,with only a little attention paid to those of Spanish-speaking countries,among which Cuban media are rarely mentioned.The Republic of Cuba and the People’s Republic of China are both socialist countries.What is China’s national image in Granma,the official newspaper of Cuba,and how is it constructed? What is the ideology behind this Cuban medium and what factors affect the construction? These questions will be explored in this study.This study utilizes the three-dimensional analysis method of Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis,with the assistance of corpus analysis,to investigate the construction of China’s national image by the China-related coverage of COVID-19 of Granma.The analysis will be conducted respectively from the perspective of text,discursive practice,and social practice to reveal the hidden ideology behind the Cuban news media discourse and other factors that may affect the construction of China’s national image.Through quantitative text-level analysis of the corpus of the Granma’s Chinarelated coverage of COVID-19 in terms of high-frequency words,concordance,and metaphors,this study finds that in the textual dimension,the high-frequency words in the Granma reflect a people-oriented coverage,inferring China’s Nature of State,demonstrating focusing on people;the analysis of concordance suggests that China’s National Acts in fighting COVID-19 and its National Public Relations towards public opinion.The analysis of metaphors finds that the newspaper often uses human metaphors and war metaphors to construct the image of China.From the text-level analysis,it can be concluded that the Granma newspaper constructed China as a people-oriented,responsible country that endeavors to serve as a model and build a global community in fighting against COVID-19,but meanwhile questioned by Western public opinion.In terms of the dimension of discursive practice,a quantitative analysis of news sources and quotation type reveals that the selected material tends to report the facts by using more authoritative quotations from people from different countries and official institutions,and also experts in different fields.Quotation types include direct discourse,indirect discourse,and direct discourse(slipping),reflecting the objectivity and comprehensiveness of Granma’s news discourse and explaining the path of discourse practice in constructing China’s national image.In the dimension of socio-cultural practices,the author qualitatively explains the socio-cultural and ideological reasons behind the contrition of China’s national image from three perspectives: historical experience,ideology,and economic interests.The author finds that the similar historical experiences of China and Cuba endow the two countries with precious brotherhood;the similar ideology reinforces Cuba’s imagination of China as “we” under both pandemic and international threat;and the economic interests deepen the relationship between this Caribbean Island and the Asian giant.