Critical Discourse Analysis Of Reports On Unexpected Incidents In China By Western Media

The eventful year of 2008 witnessed a number of major unexpected incidents in China, which captured much attention of foreign media. In this thesis, through a quantitative analysis, it is found that among those incidents, the Tibetan Riots and the Wenchuan Earthquake were reported most frequently in The New York Times in 2008.In this study, critical discourse analysis is conducted both quantitatively and qualitatively on forty sample reports about the two incidents by adopting Thompson's methodological framework of depth hermeneutics and employing the analytical tools of Halliday's systemic functional linguistics. The objectives of the study are to bring out the hidden ideology behind the language of the media and find out the image of the Chinese government portrayed in those reports. The analysis here consists of three phases: social-historical analysis, formal analysis and interpretation/re-interpretation. In the second phase, the aspects analyzed include classification, transitivity, transformation, modality and news source.It is found in the analysis that there are remarkable differences between the images of the Chinese government portrayed respectively in the two groups of sample reports. In those reports on the riots, the Chinese government was depicted as a totalitarian regime. But in the quake reports, the Chinese government was on the whole lauded for its quick response to the disaster, although some problems were also reported. To sum up, on the one hand, The New York Times, as a representative of the mainstream Western media, recognized the fact that the country was making progress; on the other hand, stereotyped views and bias remained in its reports. Some underlying causes of the bias are explained in this thesis and a number of suggestions are made concerning how the government can improve its image in Western media.