China's National Image Construction In News Reports On South China Sea

The escalating tension in South China Sea and increasing concentration of news media on the dispute bring China's national image construction into an unprecedented stage.Main-steam English newspapers from the three disputed countries of China,the Philippines and the US are chosen as the research object.The reports on South China Sea issue from China Daily,Washington Post and The Manila Times from March 1st to August 31st in 2016 will be collected to build a small corpus and each newspaper will select 30 pieces of reports randomly by SPSS to be discussed.Following the three-dimensional approach put forward by Fairclough,and drawing on the analytical tools offered in Michael Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar,this paper,within the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis,aims to unravel the ideological and political standings of China,America and the Philippines involved in South China Sea and also to explore how China's national images are constructed in each of the newspapers and how language involves itself in these processes.Different from previous studies,this paper adheres to not only reveal the relationships among language,power and ideology,but also find a combination between linguistics and international relations in order to prove the important role played by language in constructing national image.Based on the words frequency statistics by software Wordsmith7.0 and detailed illustration of linguistic analysis from the perspectives of lexical classification,appraisal theory,transitivity,ergativity,news sources,and reporting modes,the hidden ideology in news reports is disclosed and language's role in influencing national image is explored.Meanwhile,by analyzing self-shaping and others-shaping from the perspective of constructivism,China's national images constructed by three newspapers are discussed in explanation level.Philippines constructs China as an aggressive,threatening country,and US shapes China into a military power.While what China wants and needs to construct is a peaceful and cooperative country.Therefore,this study proves the power of language in constructing national image,and hopefully provides a reference to China's foreign publicity in building a positive China's national image.Besides,it also attempts to help Chinese media to adjust diplomatic strategy and improve influence in the world.