The Discursive Construction Of China’s Opening-up Image For Foreign Investment

This paper examines China’s opening-up image for foreign investmentcon structed as discourse in Chinese textual reports from the Chinese mainstreammed ia. By employing analytical techniques of Critical Discourse Analysis, the articlecritically investigates how the discourse is constructed and whose interests aresatisfied in the news. Specifically, in the case of Coke-Huiyuan acquisitiontaken asan examp le, the paper focuses on three research questions:(1) What perspectives areconstructed discursively before and after the Coke-Huiyuan bid goes through the legalreview?(2) How do the news reports construct what counts as China’s official imagefor foreign countries?(3) Whose interests are satisfied in the news reports?According to the collection and categorization of49reports on the acquisitioncase, it is found that the media mainly unfold the news from two perspectives, namelyanti-monopoly and no-protectionism, which intertwine with each other penetrating theentire case. Methodologically, this study presents a quantitative and qualitativeanalysis, implementing a three-level analysis of the reports, namely lexical choices,grammatical analysis and narrat ive analysis. The data are sourced from Xinhuanet,China Daily, Shanghai Daily and Beijing Review, which are all the mainstreamChinese media opening to foreign countries and edited in English.It is found out that the two perspectives of anti-monopoly and no-protectionismconstruct each other mutually, which orient readers to perceive the case as the mediaexpected. More explicitly, it indicates that the media reports are centered on thenational ideology, i.e. whether or not the bid gets approval, it never changes theChina’s economic policy, and enable readers to accept the constructed world.