An Study Of 10 US And UK Newspapers' Coverage Of China' 9-3 V-Day Parade

In order to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the victory the World War II(WWII), and the Chinese people's war against Japanese aggression, Chinese government held a parade to mark the day, which in short is named the 9-3 parade, part of the V-Day commemorate activities held by Chinese government. The parade was implemented in Tiananmen Square, central Beijing, on September 3,2015. It is the fifteenth military parade in the history of People's Republic of China, the second after the year of 2000, and the first that was not held on the national day.To provide a glance at how this parade are framed in the western media and to facilitate China's image-building efforts in similar activities, this study chooses reports from selected newspapers of the United States and the United Kingdoms, and make a content analysis of these reports. Framing analysis and discourse analysis will be conducted to trace the interpretations of news information from the news reports.Thisstudy selected 54 reports from 8 newspapers in the United States and the United Kingdom. The 54 reports were selected as samples of reports on the 9-3 V-Day military parade by the western media. A frame analysis was conducted with "media package" approach to identify the frames adopted by selected newspaper. A corpus-based critical discourse analysis was conducted with the software of AntConc 3.2 to examine the attitudes of western media towards China's role in WWII.This studyidentified 7 frames in the selected news, namely, the frame of commemorating WWII, the frame of China's politics, the frame of international politics, the frame of China's military might, the frame of troop reduction, the frame of WWII history narratives, and the frame of disturbance to local civilians. And from the findings of discourse analysis basing on AntConc 3.2, this study found that the key word "China" was mostly linked with China's military "threat" to the world, China's territorial disputes with neighboring countries, and so on. Thus we could safely draw the conclusion that the selected news reports of China's V-Day parade were under the impact of ideological reasons, national interests, and other reasons. Suggestions of countermeasures to this situation were given within the study scope.Though this study is limited in the selection of samples and analysis perspectives, the study plays a significant role in understanding the attitude and viewpoints of China from western media, acknowledging the factors influencing the western media's building up the Chinese national image, exploiting the countermeasures of our international communication, and finally build up a better country image in the world stage. Further studies should include more samples and employ more analysis perspectives in studying China.