A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Chinese Population Issue In Time And Beijing Review

Language is a power, which not only expresses people's thought, but also controls their cognition of the world. Nowadays, the mass media of English have an increasing influence on the public. These news reports seem objective and unbiased, but they influence the public opinion in their own way. For the social groups with different ideologies, exporting their own culture and ideology through media is regarded as a method to struggle for power. In 2013, China promptly changed the long-term policy of family planning, and put forward the second-child policy. The policy shift leads to considerable attention and reports from the domestic and foreign media.The previous CDA studies on news discourse mostly focus on the topics like politics, economy, conflicts and natural disasters, while the news discourse analysis on population issue is rarely investigated so far. Concerning the relative issues of Chinese population policy, it is worth studying on how the Chinese and American media pay attention to these issues, the way ideologies are presented and the differences between the two countries'media.From the perspective of critical discourse analysis, the paper uses Fairclough's three dimensional framework and the analytical tool of Halliday's systematic functional grammar to analyze the news reports selected from Time and Beijing Review. The research object consists of 35 news reports which were published on the official website of Time and Beijing Review from 2009 to 2013. In order to reveal the ideology diversity hidden in language structure and the relationship between news reports and socio-cultural background, the paper makes a comparative discourse analysis from three dimensions (Description, Interpretation and Explanation). The linguistic features are analyzed from the view of transitivity, modality, the modes of news reporting and sources of news. The findings of the study are illustrated as follows:(1) Material process occupies the largest proportion among the six process types in the news reports of the both media. Relational process ranks the second place in American media, while in Chinese media verbal process takes the second largest percentage. Chinese media frequently use affirmative and obligatory modal auxiliaries, while American media often use modal auxiliaries of possible and supposed meaning.(2) In both media, the direct speech takes up larger percentage than indirect speech and the "slipping" preset direct discourse is rarely used. Comparatively speaking, the proportion of direct speech in Chinese media is larger than that in American media. For American media, the proportion of definite source is almost equal to that of indefinite source, while in Chinese news reports the percentage of definite source far exceeds that of indefinite source.(3) American media prefer to report Chinese population policy from a negative perspective, and express a gloomy attitude to the Chinese human right situation, gender equality, labor force conditions and other related problems. In contrast, Chinese media tend to illustrate the official data and the fact published by the government. They usually show a moderate concern about the social problems caused by the population issue and express an active attitude to solve the problems.(4) The study puts the language features into socio-cultural background and makes a comparative analysis combining the long-term argument on human rights between China and America. It is found that the different choices of language strategy are not random results, but influenced by the respective social ideologies of the reporters and their social system. The reporter often uses the seemingly objective language strategy to cover the ideological significance.Through a multidimensional analysis, the paper tries to reveal the ideological significance covered by the news reports. On the one hand, it proves the effectiveness and appropriateness of Fairclough's three dimensional framework and Halliday's systematic functional grammar when they are applied to CDA of news discourse. On the other hand, it is helpful to improve readers' ability to see through the appearance and perceive the essence of news discourse. Thus, the public will enhance their resistance to the unjust ideological control.