The Narrative Changes In The Flood Disaster News From People's Daily Since The Founding Of New China

No matter how devastating flood disasters are,the party and Chinese government always put people's interests first and lead soldiers and civilians to fight the flood and provide relief.As a party newspaper,People's Daily stands in the official position to report flood disasters,which highlights that fighting the flood and providing relief has always been under the leadership of the party and Chinese government.Based on the theory of narratology,this paper analyzes the contents of selected reports and conducts the research on the levels of narrative theme,perspective and structure.In terms of narrative theme,apart from propaganda and agitation,the flood disaster reports of People's Daily also focus on the issues that got less attention,such as disaster situations,post-disaster reflections and summaries,which have experienced a transition from the imbalance to a more balanced state since the founding of China,guided by the positive actions of the authorities.As narrative perspective is a window left by the narrator for readers to see the world,the adoption of omniscient perspective in the flood disaster reports is challenged by the limited perspective and makes up a complex perspective with other perspectives together,thus the reports could be more objective and readable with both comprehensive summary of disasters and the attention to related people and facts.As for the narrative structure,which refers to the arrangement of mastered materials by the narrator,the reports have moved from vertical structure to the interlaced structure.T he vertical structure with an emphasize on the causality could demonstrate the meaning of fighting the flood and providing relief;the horizontal structure reporting different aspects of a certain theme could include both meaningful contents and facts;and the interlaced structure absorbs the characteristics of the first two structures and could report more about the facts of disaster news in a more multi-faceted and comprehensive way.Those narrative changes demonstrate that the main function of the flood disaster reports from People's Daily has changed from propaganda function to communication function,and the characteristics of n arrative techniques has turned from to one single pattern to a flexible one.According to this research,those changes essentially reflect the persistence and changes of the party newspaper.Before the reform and opening up,the reports were mainly about propaganda and agitation and disregarded the functions of information transmitting and press supervision,owing to negative messages of flood disasters;while after the reform and opening up,with a balanced theme,perspective challenges and structure changes,the reports become more comprehensive to transmit information and supervise public opinions.Nowadays,the negative messages of flood disasters and the disaster relief under the leadership of the party and Chinese government make up fairly comprehensive flood disaster news together.