The Military Image Of China In American Broadsheets From Relational Progress

It is believed that there exits a dialectical relationship between discourse and the socialcontext which it relies on. The social context influences and determines the production ofdiscourse, and conversely the discourse influences the forming of social statue, relations andvalue system. Critical Discourse Analysis is one type of discourse analytical method aiming toexplore the dialectical relationship between language and hidden ideology. It has beenadopted by more and more scholars to reveal the underlying relationship between language,ideology and power in the discourse.In the modern society, globalization helps the communication between nations closer andcloser. News report becomes the mainstream way for people to get information. Newspaperhelps people get useful resources of information. The media, as one symbol of a country’s softpower, can influence people’s thinking patterns and ideas of value in direct or indirect wayand shape people’s ideas of other countries’ images. America, as the first super power of thecurrent world, has a dominate statue in media such as newspapers. Reports about othercountries in American newspapers can affect the country images in the readers’ mind greatly.The thesis establishes a corpus by collecting the news reports about China’s military from2009to2010from three influential American broadsheets The New York Times, Los AngelesTimes and Washington Post. The corpus was analyzed by the corpus linguistics, Fairclough’s3D Model and Halliday’s SFG and studied from perspectives of Appraisal Theory andRelational Progress.It is found from the research that when reporting about China’s military, the Americannewspapers are not likely to reflect the facts from an objective and just perspective but fromconcerns of ideology and American national interests to intentionally aggrandize China’smilitary strength and contort China’s national image. When dealing with military news aboutChina, American media will make different decisions of reporting in the choice of content,perspective of report and forms of article out of the differences of ideologies and valuesystems. Meanwhile, the national culture of America and its ideologies will also be publicizedand diffused in the reports. This thesis is about discourse analysis concerning military news reports and makes aseries of analytical researches towards military news discourses, which were not frequentlystudied before, in order to reveal the linguistic applied tactics in military news discourse andhelp readers observe the ideologies hiding behind the news discourse and critically understandthem. Besides, this thesis can also help Chinese military carry through its exterior propaganda,bring forth the military development of China in a rational and appropriate way, decreaseSino-American misunderstanding due to mistaken comprehension, push Sino-Americanmilitary relationship move forward to positiveness and establish a healthy atmosphere forChina’s peaceful development.