A Study On Discursive Constructions Of Chinese Medicine In British Mainstream Newspapers

With the development of economy, the international status of a country is not only depends on economic, but also on the cultural soft power,and this element becomes more and more important. Comply with the time development, the Sixth Plenum of the 17 th CPC Central Committee passed a resolution putting forward cultural strategy of "going out", promoting Chinese culture to the world, and improving Chinese culture’s influence and appeal for the first time. China has a history of five thousand years, Chinese culture has a deep inside, Chinese medicine is a treasure of traditional culture throughout the history of the China, it covers the Chinese philosophy, embodies the Chinese people’s lifestyle and the way they get along with the nature, thus, the communication of it is of great value. Traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine rooted in different cultural background, and they have great differences, but the two are not incompatible, "Traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine all belong to medical culture, they have common research object, same social functions, and they shares common values and responsibility. The dialogue between the two is frequent and in-depth. The culture of both Chinese medicine and Western medicine is the wealth of the world, and there is consistency between they, and the compatibility between them is more than incompatibility." They are like Yin and Yang of Tai Chi, complementing each other and learning from each other. In addition, traditional Chinese medicine can not only cover the shortage of western medicine but also provide a different perspective to the world, for instance, the whole concept of "harmony between man and nature" and "therapy with syndrome differentiation" based on the theory of the Five Elements can open a new window to the world when we face many issues. However, as a foreign thing, Chinese medicine may have many opposing viewpoints to western world, so it’s very difficult to gain the cultural identity from the western society. Therefore, continuous communication of culture and increasing the exposure of Chinese medicine to westerners are very important, and these can help them understand the Chinese medicine culture more easily. Although China has experienced 30 years of reform and opening to the outside world, but to most of the foreigners, China is still a mysterious country, and those who have not been to China can only get information of China through the Internet or other media, so media have a strong power on constructing people’s cognition to the environment around them. Newspapers has a long history in Britain and has penetrated into the daily life of the British people, becoming their reading habits, even in nowadays when the Internet developed more and more fastly, newspapers still have a large number of audience. The object of this study is the news coverage of five British newspapers(the times, "the independent", the daily telegraph, the guardian, the Financial Times) from 1978 to 2015, reporting on Chinese medicine, in order to find how British media construct the image of Chinese medicine. According to the characteristics of these reports, we can not only think of the construction of "Pseudo Environment" from the horizontal level,but also explore how Chinese medicine’s image shaped by British press effect the concept of audience from vertical aspect, these two aspects will cause a great impact on the audience’s cognition. In addition, this study will also dig into the focus of the British press when it reports Chinese medicine, and discover the news frame of these reports, then put forward communication strategy of traditional Chinese medicine according to the results of the study.