Cultural Discourse Studies Of China’s Abortion Issues

The abortion issues in China have long been a target for the international community especially the western world to attack China’s lack of human rights. Every year there are numerous pieces of negative news about China abortion issues from the western world. While back in China few voices are given out specifically for them, though there are millions of abortion surgeries conducted in China each year. All these factors have made the abortion issues in China a note-worthy topic both at home and abroad.Different from the past approaches like demography or medical science, this thesis is going to analyze the abortion issues from a Cultural Approach to Discourse (CAD), an emphasis to analyze the discourse involved here and an attempt to provide a new and holistic view of the whole abortion situation in China. With the guide of CAD, this paper aims to reveal the specific strategies of how the discourse of the abortion issues of China is constructed here. A detailed analysis on the discursive subjects, contents as well as effects will be given in this study. Moreover, this study can be seen as a resistance against the western discourse imperialism by revealing the underlying intentions in their media, and further to rectify China’s abortion situation as well as the human rights conditions.This thesis chooses the leading US newspaper---Wall Street Journal (WSJ)---as the data source by means of the ProQuest Databases. As an empirical study, this paper focuses on the series of reports over China abortion issues in2012, when two internationally high-profile abortion-related incidents took place in China. Led by the two incidents, this paper presents a thorough introduction of related historical and cultural information as well as a detailed analysis of those discursive strategies in order to make the abortion issues of China better understood by the international community. After all the critiquing process of the US media discourse over the issues in question, this paper reaches its conclusion by raising more implications for China to further cope with the western discourse imperialism problems.