On Social Change Reflected By The Coverage Of The NPC And The CPPCC

The NPC & the CPPCC stand for National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. The NPC serves as China's fundamental political system. The CPPCC plays a major role in ensuring people's participation in and deliberation of state affairs. They attract high attention from not only the domestic media but also international ones when they are in session in spring every year ever since China's adoption of reform and opening-up policies. What kind of changes has taken place in the news coverage of the NPC & the CPPCC in newspapers? And what kind of correlation exists between the changes of the coverage and that of China's society? What can be inferred from the correlation? These are the questions the thesis is going to answer.The thesis takes the coverage of the NPC & the CPPCC in People's Daily as an example. It selects the coverage in People's Daily in 1979, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003 and 2008 as its research objects, which will be analyzed by introducing in some related concepts and analytical methods from narratology. Based on the results of the analysis, it will explain the constructional features of the contexts of the coverage and then further illustrate the correlation between the changes of the reporting and that of the society, as an effort to offer some instructional help to the practice of news writing about the NPC & the CPPCC. The major theory used in the thesis is Teun A. VanDijik's theory on discourse analysis, from which the common model, news schema and structure characteristics will be used to analyze the macrostructure of the context. To find out the correlations between changes of the reporting and the changes of the society, the change of topics and the metaphors will be discussed.By the content analysis of the coverage of the NPC & the CPPCC in the newspaper, we will know about the context construction, features of writing and changes of context of the reporting. In the meantime, from the changes of the topics and the metaphors in the coverage, we will get a view of the social changes in the thirty years since China's adoption of reform and opening-up policies.