Discursive Construction Of China’s National Image

In recent years, along with the advanced economy and upgraded political position in the world, changing and bettering China’s international image has gradually become an emergency to Chinese government. Actions have been taken in order to promote China’s national image. However, those actions barely get payback. Academics from various fields begin to pay close attention to the issues of China’s national image. In this present research and social situation, twenty online news reports on Chinese author Mo Yan’s winning the Nobel Prize in Literature from The New York Times and China Daily are selected as the data of this thesis in order to study how national image is discursively constructed.Drawing on Ruth Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach which is adopted as an effective way to study the national. identity, this thesis adopts three analytical tools, reference, perspective and schema to analyze the selected data, in order to explore the constructive function of news discourse on national image, uncover the ideology hidden behind and further dig out the historical root of the difference in image construction by China and the US mass media.After the data analysis, it is concluded that in the American mass media the dominant presentation of China’s national image is still negative. In the selected data from The New York Times, Chinese government is presented as a leadership strictly controls its people with the political power, wild, cruel and sanguinary. Chinese people are presented as a group of people living under the control of Chinese government with extreme misery without the basic human rights, such as the right of speech, right of giving birth and personal liberty.Within DHA, the root of such different image constructions and the reason of the sense of American superiority and Chinese inferiority are historically traced. In fact, the American culture and the culture-determined value system greatly influence American way of looking at the other countries. In their eyes, China is a country run under an out-of-date political system. They need to "help" China and its people. Chinese people are regarded as the group of people needed to be "saved". China’s sufferings in history and the continuous negative presentations leave an impression on the Americans that Chinese people are always poor in lives and fatuous in thoughts. After the founding of People’s Republic of China, the China-US relation is never static. After the Cold War, the USA diplomatic policy changed. Its needs of the domestic politics directly result in the continuing changing attitudes towards China. But broadly speaking, due to the political and historical influence, the dominant national image of China is still negative.