Discursive Construction Of Wanda Group’s Corporate Image By European News Media

During the process of Chinese enterprise globalization,corporate communication in the organization of business activities and corporate identity or image construction has been playing a more and more significant role.It is generally held that mass media has the social function of shaping different corporate images.From the perspective of discursive construction,the communication of media discourse,especially news discourse,is of strong intentionality,orientation and constructiveness.Wanda Group is one of China’s representative multinational companies,and its subsidiary announced to acquire the largest cinema chain in Europe.When the announcement came out,the major European mainstream media published follow-up reports.This thesis aims to find out how Wanda Group is represented in European media and what the discourse strategies the European Media have conducted in constructing Wanda.For this purpose,the news reportings by European media on Wanda Group’s acquisition of Odeon&UCI cinema chain in the database NewsBank are purposively collected.Using Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework and the approach of corpus--based discourse analysis with the aid of toolkit Antconc 3.4.4,this thesis focuses on the linguistic representation of Wanda in media discourse,analyzing the vocabulary,including high frequency words,concordance of key words and verb(phrases),and headlines and voices used in the collected news reports.According to the thesis,the corporate image of Wanda Group in the European mainstream media can be summarized as "an ambitiously expanding overseas Chinese company that has affected the European market and good at speculation,led by an aggressive military background China’s richest man".The discourse strategies the European media have adopted are discourse strategies as creating opposition,demonization,stigmatization,leadership negation,silencing the voice,and avoidance to construct the corporate image of Wanda Group.This thesis also attempts to explain the biased corporate image of Wanda Group in social context and suggests constructing"Wanda-featured" discourse system by telling "Wanda Story" for further external communication.