The Construction Of The People’s Daily In Kunming City Image And Communication

Kunming, as the capital of Yunnan, is the provincial centre of politics, science, economy and culture. It is not only the fourth largest city in the southwest China, but also the gateway to the Southeast and South Asia for China. The city is well known as the’Spring City’for its mild climate without cold winter or hot summer. There are abundant tourism resources here besides the comforting weather. However, the location of Kunming, which is on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau and far away from the coastal cities, has impeded the city’s development.To build a better image of Kunming requires efforts from government, citizen as well as the media industry. This paper, in particular, focuses on investigating the image of Kunming built in media through People’s Daily. The study samples news in People’s Daily which related to Kunming from1978to2008. By applying two methods, which are text analysis and reference review to the sampled news, this paper takes a mixed approach-both quantitative and qualitative, and summarises the features/characteristics of Kunming’s image. Suggestions of how to improve Kunming’s images are offered accordingly.The results show that a large number of the reports related to Kunming are concerned with politics and economy. Although the news tend to be positive and implies that the city is a tourist city, there are no direct supplementary evidence to support such an image. Moreover, there are only few reports related to the typical figures and the news on characteristic industries in Kunming are rare.