Attitudes And Ideologies: A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And British News Reports On The Tibetan Question

The present paper is a corpus-based contrastive study of Chinese and British news reports on the Tibetan question. The objectives of this paper are three-fold: first, it aims to examine the dialectical relationship between discourse and ideology as instantiated by the Tibetan question; second, it explores how Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Corpus Linguistics can be better combined to analyze significant social issues; third, it is hoped that this study could help readers to raise their linguistic consciousness in reading Western news reports and provide a chance for Western readers to know the truth of the Tibetan question.The present study is based on two self-built corpora—Chinese News Texts (CNT) and British News Texts (BNT). Both consist of news reports on the Tibetan question from March 14th to April 30th 2008, with a size of 333,451 tokens and a size of 429,856 tokens respectively. Texts in CNT are sampled from two sources: China Daily and People's Daily Online, which are considered to be the most authoritative English media in China. Texts in the BNT are collected from four British quality papers and their Sunday editions, including the Times and the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph, the Guardian and the Observer, as well as the Independent and the Independent on Sunday.With the combination of qualitative analysis and quantitative methods, wordlists of CNT and BNT are compared against each other and three key words—TIBET, CHINA and DALAI are analyzed in detail. Drawing on Sinclair's Model of Extended Units of Meaning, these words'collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody are described through the examination of their collocates and concordances in the two corpora.It is found that systematic differences exist between the Chinese media and the British media in ways in which the Tibetan question is represented. First, in the BNT, the Tibetans are portrayed as victims under China's ?oppression'. While in fact, as evidence in the CNT shows, the Tibetans have benefited from the whole country's social and economic development. Second, the British media tend to represent the Dalai Lama in a relatively positive light. In contrast, the Chinese media exposes his nature as a separatist, liar, and violent politician. Third, in terms of power struggle, the Chinese media sees China and Dalai clique as the opposing powers in the Tibetan question, while the British media sees the conflict as between the Chinese government and the Tibetan people who are led by the Dalai Lama. Fourth, British media usually use subtle discursive strategies and indirect assertions, insinuating false beliefs into the minds of readers.Linguistically, corpus linguistics is proved to be extremely useful in CDA. It is hoped that this paper can contribute to the improvement of methodology in Critical Discourse Analysis.