| Social conflict refers to conflict in which the parties are an aggregate of individuals, groups, communities, organizations, and crowds. The pursuit of different social groups competes for their own interests generate different kinds of conflict. Examining the concerned parties of social conflict reveal some truth related to social groups’ willingness to collaborate, their tendency toward conflict and reveal where real power concentrates.The appropriate understanding and analysis of the study of social conflict is of great significance for the building of a harmonious society in China. Influenced by traditional culture, Chinese regard harmony as fundamentality in interpersonal relationship. Different ethnics integrate and embrace each other. The study of social conflict helps to strengthen racial equality and harmony.This paper explores how the western media reproduces "social conflict" through a case study of a typical social conflict event--Xinjiang Riot on July5of2009. Xinjiang possesses very important strategic position for its vast territory and largest supply of many resources. However, it is troubled by terrorist, separatist and extremist forces. Therefore, Xinjiang plays a critical role in the integration of economy, homogeneity of culture and unity of politics.Social conflicts are necessary phenomena during social transformation in China.In July5th,2009, a series of serious riots and fire occurred in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China. Media abroad have published a series of reports on this event which is labeled Xinjiang7-5Event. What are linguistic features in the news reports on CNN concerning Xinjiang7,5Riot from the aspect of lexical classification, transitivity and modality? What does news discourse practice on issues of social conflict? What social and cultural contexts affect the reporters’ attitude and make corresponding selections of expression? These are what the author trying to answer in the paper.Specifically, based on Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model and Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar, this paper chooses six typical samples of Xinjiang Riot reports from CNN to do deeply textual analysis from multiple angles as lexical classification, transitivity and modality to discover how the media construct the social conflict event; and then through a intercourse-text analysis of the six samples, explores how the media go through news discourse practices; At last, theories in the discipline of communication such as news value standard are applied to explain the ideology-driven choices at the level of textual analysis and discursive practice.The critical analysis of the six samples reveals that the news discourse does a tendentious construction of social conflict in the micro-level. Through the textual analysis, it is found that these news reports from CNN website tend to use a large scale of derogatory items to describe the Chinese government’s attitudes and response to the event. At the discursive stage, these reports are inclining to listen to the voices of Rebyia, WUC and their supporters, and the critical voices from abroad, which result in some negative impact on Chinese government’s international image in the world. The study achieves its original intention to promote the readers’ critical sensibility and awareness when they read social conflict news; It will be also helpful to give the domestic Chinese media workers the implication that they should take initiatives and pay more attention to the methods and tactics in the news reports concerning social conflict issues to the outside world, and at the same time protecting the international image of Chinese government. |
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