A Study On The Rhetorical Motives Behind The South China Sea Reports In Chinese And American Public Opinion Fields

Due to its important geographical location and abundant resources,the South China Sea has been a conflicting place for its neighboring countries and even for the great powers outside this region since ancient times.In recent years,the situation of South China Sea remains tense and has attracted attentions all around the world.As an important part of the public opinion field,mainstream media from different countries have made a series of reports on it.Because of their different national,social and cultural backgrounds,they are often affected by certain interests and ideologies.Therefore,the message transferred by media is usually not as objective as they claim to be.Instead,there are often hidden motives behind their reports.From the perspective of Kenneth Burke’s new rhetoric,and taking the news reports of mainstream media in China and the United States as the research object,this thesis tried to use “dramatistic pentad” theory to reveal the hidden motives in news discourse,and meanwhile apply the theory of “identification” to explore their rhetorical strategies.Considering the representativeness and authority of the objects,the author selected 5 news reports on South China Sea from China Daily and New York Times respectively as the corpus of this study,and then employed Burke’s “dramatistic pentad” and “identification” theories to carry out a contrastive analysis.In this study,the author tried her best to be objective and impartial while analyzing the motives and rhetorical strategies hidden in these news reports.The results of this study show that,as the important windows for international communication of their own countries,China Daily and New York Times applied different rhetorical strategies to hide different motives in their news reports.By employing “identification by sympathy”,China Daily has tried to assert China’s territorial sovereignty in South China Sea,and to build an image of a friendly,responsible and peace-loving country.However,as for New York Times,in order to get more support from other countries to safeguard the interests of the United States in South China Sea,it portrayed China as a bullying and irresponsible country by using “identification by antithesis”.Therefore,readers should be more alert when reading news reports and view them from a critical perspective.Although there are great differences between the two media in terms of their specific motives and rhetorical strategies,there are still some similarities between them in a more macroscopical level,that is,both of them applied “identification” strategy to achieve the hidden motives of safeguarding national interests.