A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On The Belt And Road Initiative In Chinese And American Newspapers

In 2013,President Xi Jinping proposed the initiative to jointly build the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road,known as the Belt and Road Initiative.Spanning over the continents of Asia,Europe and Africa,China-purposed Belt and Road Initiative is regarded as a blueprint of win-win cooperation that strives for common development and prosperity and a road toward peace and friendship.Since it is put forward,the Belt and Road Initiative has attracted worldwide attention and become one of the significant issues that both domestic and foreign mainstream media cover frequently,which is conducive to the promotion of the Initiative to some extent.However,as Fowler(1991:12)argues that news report provided by news media is not unbiased and impartial but a kind of social practice,different news media may adopt different linguistic features to report the Belt and Road Initiative,and news on the Belt and Road may be greatly affected by different political attitudes,ideology and social-cultural contexts.This study sets out to investigate the news reports regarding the Belt and Road Initiative from September 1st 2013 to May 31st 2017 in news media of China and America,i.e.China Daily,Global Times,The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal,on the basis of Fairclough’s Three-Dimension Model—Description,Interpretation and Explanation,and Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar.The creative point is that this study forms larger research corpora than previous researches,and applies corpus linguistic software into the research to make a quantitative and qualitative analysis with the attempt to explore similarities and differences in linguistic features of news reports on the Belt and Road Initiative from Chinese and American newspapers so as to unveil the political and cultural factors behind the differences.The major findings of this study are listed as follows:First,in terms of description stage,keywords analysis reveals that Chinese and American newspapers have many shared keywords,reflecting that the topics and contents that Chinese and American newspapers cover have many in common.In the meantime,each corpus has its unique keywords,and different lexical choices contain the different concerns and foci of Chinese and American news reports.The detailed sample analysis shows that Chinese and American newspapers also have commonalities and discrepancies in constructing the image of the Belt and Road.Second,in the interpretation stage,the analysis of modal verbs shows that in Chinese and American news reports,modal verbs in median value account for the largest proportion,manifesting that both Chinese and American newspapers try to deliver news on the Belt and Road objectively.However,the subtle differences in ratios of modal verbs between Chinese and American news reports and the concordance of modal verbs demonstrate that American newspapers use high value and low value modals to express skeptical and negative attitudes towards the Belt and Road Initiative;while Chinese newspapers adopt more median value modals to highlight the aspiration and convey positive attitudes.Through analysis of mode of speech,the research finds out that the ratio of indirect speeches in American newspapers is larger than that of Chinese newspapers which reflect that American newspapers exert more interference in new production and readers’perception.Third,in terms of explanation dimension,the cultural and political causes are investigated to explain the differences in report contents,reporters’ attitudes and linguistic styles of Chinese and American newspapers.It can be summarized that that the cultural and political practices have a profound impact on news discourse on the Belt and Road.The findings of the study can provide a critical perspective for readers to interpret Chinese and foreign news reports,and enable readers to keep awareness of the delicate connection between language and ideology,and give implications for Chinese media to adopt better strategies in reporting the Belt and Road Initiative so as to enhance the understandings of the Initiative in different countries.