A Critical Study Of Reports On China's Economic Development In The New York Times

The news discourse, as a type of non-literary mass media discourse, has been drawing great attention from critical discourse analysts. However, the most studied news discourses are only political news, or reports on war, strikes, or similar sensational and event-driven news reports. Other news genres, which seem to be more 'neutral', such as economic news, sports and entertainments, are rarely examined. Therefore, this study focuses instead on one of the seemingly neutral news genres-the economic news.Fairclough has pointed out that the research questions of CDA should be defined outside it, about particular forms of social practice. In this sense, the current research questions are about reports on China's economic growth in the New York Times. The questions are: are the reports value-free? If not, then how are they ideologically invested and by what ideologies? And what are the relations between such representations and the broader politico-cultural context?The samples for analysis are selected from the New York Times during the years from 2002 to 2004. And Fairclough's three-dimensional model is adopted for discourse analysis. A discourse is viewed as a communicative event consisting of three dimensions: text, discursive practice and social practice, and the analysis is made at all three levels. At the textual level, aspects of transitivity, nominalization and modality are examined. At the discursive level, discourse representation practice is analyzed to explore discourse production; represented sources, representing modes and the setting of the secondary discourse are targeted for analysis. At the level of social practice, political, historical and cultural factors are looked into for an explanation of the ideology-driven choices of linguistic forms and in the discursive practice.The study finds that the reports on China's economic growth in the New York Times are far from value-free. China's economic growth is construed as antagonistic to other interests and represented as a threat to these interests, including its neighbors' economies and security, the stableness of global...