The Contrastive Analysis Of Ideologies In Chinese And American Newspaper Editorials: Ukrainian Crisis In 2014

Among various sub-genres in newspaper, editorial is considered the most prestigious form of writing as well as one of the most polished text types. It is written carefully to inform the reading public of the opinion of the newspaper on current events and it is also believed to play a crucial role in manipulating public opinions, which make editorial a suitable discourse particularly for observing the media’s ideological representations. There is a growing interest on editorials in linguistics. Previous studies either focused on their schematic structures, lexical-grammatical features or appraisal distribution features whereas little attention has been given to the constructive role of editorials in society.Based on the framework of Martin’s Appraisal Theory and with assistance of quantitative analysis, this paper is an attempt to explore different ideologies represented by China and US as reflected in editorials of two representative newspapers—China Daily and New York Times—on Ukrainian Crisis in 2014. The results show that although there is no statistically significant difference found in the total number of Appraisal resources employed in two newspapers, they displayed remarkable differences in using some specific appraisal resources. Firstly, the expansion and contraction resources distribution suggests that NYT is more open to alternative positions and voices; secondly, CD used nearly 10 times of positive affect resources as much as NYT did in discussing the relationship between Ukraine and Russia; besides, in NYT the majority of negative judgment and appreciation resources are concentrated on Russia; these two findings indicate that compared with China who recognizes and admits the historical and emotional bonds between Russia and Ukraine, US is more inclined to condemn the behaviors of Russia as a role getting involved in this crisis and believe that Russia violated Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; finally, there is no notable difference discerned between CD and NYT in regard to graduation distribution.This research is supposed to provide a new perspective in political discourse analysis and hopefully, has some pedagogical significance in raising journalists’ and students’ cross-cultural and cross-language awareness.