On The Production Mechanism Of China's Global Discourse Power: An Interpretative Approach To Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokespersons And Western Media

This dissertation aims to research on China's soft power strategy based on an analysis of the production mechanism of Chinese discourse power. As China's hard power has moved to a new level, China's soft power still can not match with its hard power, and the discourse power as soft power is still being controlled by western countries and western media. Therefore, it is imperative to seek to improve Chinese discourse power globally.From the perspective of information communication, this dissertation has divided its discussions on the production mechanism of Chinese discourse power into two phases of agenda-setting and framing, trying to explore Chinese discourse and its roles influencing western media at two levels, namely "what to say" and "how to say." This dissertation has collected all the answers of Foreign Ministry spokespersons responding to reporters from year 2005 to year 2009, and 20 media's quotes of Foreign Ministry spokespersons in five countries (United States, Britain, France, Germany and Japan) from year 2005 to year 2009, in an effort to answer the above two questions.At the"what to say"level,this dissertation has conducted content analysis in terms of content agenda and attitude agenda, by applying agenda-setting theory. The author finds that spokesperson's discourse is relevant to what western media quote in three indicators including subject content, Involved countries(regions) and involved objects, which indicates that the contents of foreign spokesperson's discourse could set agenda for western media. But spokesperson's discourse is not relevant to what western media quote in two indicators including attitude and time frame, only relevant to definition, which indicates that the attitude of foreign spokesperson's discourse couldn't set agenda for western media. This shows that the differences between the two sets of discourses are highly concentrated. China's discourse is often presented as a self-contradictory and embarrassing image in western media while western media normally reverses the agenda to China's discourse.At the "how to say" level, this dissertation has analyzed western media's reproduction of foreign spokesperson's discourse applying framing theory. By studying five cases on Dalai Lama, the USS Kitty Hawk incident, the Darfur issue, the politicization of the Olympic Games and climate issue, this dissertation analyzed how western media have interpreted Foreign Ministry spokesperson's discourse. The author has found that western media mainly hold negative and confrontational attitude in interpreting foreign spokesperson's discourse, and cross-used "Orientalism" framework and "responsible big power" framework. While dealing with complicated international affairs, western media often switch these two frameworks depending on different discourse context. They not only demonize, dissimilate or isolate China's image with the perspective of Orientalism, they will also raise, highlight or generalize China's international responsibility in some important international affairs, so as to produce "new discourse meaning" satisfying their own countries'interests.On whether or not western media are a discourse community while they quote Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, this dissertation analyzes news samples from regional, national and individual media. From the regional perspective, media reports of the United States and Europe are significantly different in the past five years: the U.S. media's coverage mainly holds stable attitude, while the European media's friendliness has declined comparing with the past, the year of 2008 showed a dramatic decline; from the national level, French media holds the most negative attitude among European countries, but Japanese media's friendliness remains stable or even improved; from the perspective of different media, the author has not found significant differences in quoting Foreign Ministry spokesperson between media with different political parties stand, different audience targeting, and different distribution range.This dissertation also discussed possible reasons for the above phenomena in terms of national interests, cultural factors and media factors. The author has found that national interest, including group, national and personal interest is the key factor, and it is the different levels of national interest which pushes discourse game between China's discourse and western media; cultural dimensions and news framework caused by cultural dimensions has affected the production of China's discourse power in a stable and indirect manner; media systems, news ideas and news production process affected western media's deconstruction of China's discourse power daily and professionally when western media interprets China's discourse.Based on the above analysis, this dissertation has explored the production mechanism of China's discourse power. This dissertation concludes that this production mechanism is composed of three steps and interfered by three factors. The first step is agenda-setting, specifically including content agenda-setting and attitude agenda-setting; the second step is deconstructing western media's cross-used "Orientalism" and "responsible power" framework; the third step is the Chinese feedback for monitoring western media and network communication. In addition, this dissertation holds that the Chinese government needs to change this "obscure effect model" to "multi-stage classification effect model", improving the production mechanism of China's discourse power by three stages including agenda-setting, deconstructing framework and monitoring and network communication, so as to enhance China's discourse power in the international society.