National Identity In China Rising Reports

“China rising” gradually becomes a hit phrase in the news report from different media withChina’s rapid development in various areas. Among all these media forms, newspaper has itsirreplaceable status due to its news worthiness, broad and rapid transmission and serves as one ofthe most authoritarian media forms in the political arena. Therefore, OP-ED (editor’s opinion)discourse with key words of “China rising” from newspapers will be the source of this research.Since commentary news reporting featured as a kind of subjective oriented article which largelydemonstrate different national ideologies. Methodology adopted in this study is synergy of thehistorical discourse analysis (HDA) branch of CDA and corpus linguistics (CL) to explore whatkind of discursive methods and linguistic strategies are used by different editors in theconstruction of China’s national identity，taking “China rising” as focus. Specialized corpus willbe compiled and word smith4.0tool will be applied in the current study.Seven chapters are constituted in the current paper and among them, chapter four, five andsix are the key chapters. In chapter four, a detailed data collection process and rationales behindit are described to make sure the completeness, authenticity and feasibility of the corpus. ChinaDaily Corpus (CDC), New York Times Corpus (NYTC) and The Times of India Corpus (TOIC)are three sub-corpuses compiled. Diachronic content analysis of the three sub-corpuses isanalyzed. Politics and diplomacy, economy, culture, livelihood, military, environment,technology as well as comprehensive strength are eight micro-contexts found, which pave theway for the following discursive analysis. The other findings from content analysis are differentcountry’s different focus on these eight arenas. On the construction of “China rising” identity, thetop concern of New York Times is China’s economy situation, follows by politics, the articles ofwhich occupy31.1%and30.2%respectively. The Times of India put politics as the top focusfollows by economy, taking up33%,25.8%respectively. Other than the previous two countries, China Daily highlights the livelihood in the China rising process, articles of this kind accountingfor29.1%. Content analysis suggests different countries’ bias towards China rising. On the basis ofthe findings from the above chapters, in chapter six, specific linguistics strategies and devices withinWodak’s constructive strategy and transformative strategy are analyzed.The conclusion is that with the adoption of referential strategy in the specific context and phrase,a positive, constantly developed “China rising” image is constructed by China Daily. On the contrary,New York Times and the Times of India constructs a more “complicated” China rising image by theway of taking referential strategies, prepositions, metonymy directly and indirectly.