| Since The New Silk Road Strategy was introduced in2014, China has made a series of efforts to promote its cooperation with Asian-Pacific countries. China, therefore, will be determined and willing to involve in the regional organizations, above all, APEC. APEC Economic Leaders Meeting (AELM), the summit of APEC meetings, is highly concerned by China. In the situation, the successful coverage on it will surely attract world’s attention and further promote China’s diplomacy. Thus, the function of English media in international communication is more and more evident.China Daily, the state-owned national English-language newspaper, is a vital platform for international communication. Since the establishment in1981, it has been acknowledged for the most authoritative English newspaper with high reprint rate and the only Chinese newspaper that successfully achieves a global reach. This thesis selects141reports of AELM during a20-day period respectively in2001and2014in China Daily as research objective, including85pieces of news,45pieces of commentary,7pieces of feature and4pieces of others.For analyzing AELM coverage, the thesis, based on the theory of new values, takes Impact, Prominence/Eliteness, Proximity and Human Interest as theoretical framework to analyze the coverage content on international communication. By applying the methods of relevant theories, the study uses corpus-based critical discourse analysis assisted by the corpus software AntConc3.4.3and content analysis to explore the similarities and difference on the coverage of AELM2001and AELM2014and try to identify how China Daily realizes its discourse construction on the news values and what strategies of discourse construction lead to changes on its reporting style.Results indicate that coverage on AELM in2014is better as a whole than in2001regarding discourse construction on news values. On Impact, coverage on AELM in2014includes more diverse and novel topics besides the meeting achievements,and puts more emphasis on public interest and citizen life; on Eliteness, both still value the celebrity effect but coverage on AELM in2014employs different techniques to construct it with more professionals and experts to provide deep interpretation on AELM; On Proximity, both have a wider view to cover the world and Asia Pacific region, and coverage on AELM in2014presents more diverse aspects of all walks of life in China and does better to construe more personalized stories, keeping AELM close to ordinary people. Still, it needs harboring more international elements; on Human Interest, both are centered on positive reports to show the meeting achievement while the coverage in2014presents bigger proportion of negative coverage on public interest to balance the positive and negative coverage and provide much more information close to life and also offers more professional interpretation and soft news to cater for readers’interest with more varieties of news forms.The thesis aims to enrich the studies on Chinese media’s effective international communication. By providing a new approach to study news values from the linguistic perspective, namely, how language devices construe news values, this thesis compensates for the weakness of previous research centering on quantitative analysis and definition controversies. And studies on AELM are rare now and most of them are journalistic practice-focused and there is no vertical analysis to compare the coverage in different years. The thesis conducts the comparison to analyze the successful experiences and limitations, and proposes the suggestions to provide references for improving China’s international communication in the new context. |
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