Critical Discourse Analysis Of Confucius Institute Reports In The New York Times(2006-2018)

As the business card of Chinese language and culture,Confucius Institute has enjoyed increasing international influence since its establishment in 2004,and has become the world's largest and most diverse international language education community.The rapid development of the Confucius Institute has also attracted the attention of overseas media.The Criticism and doubt are mixed in the praise of the Confucius Institute by the mainstream international media.The international public opinion environment badly affects the brand building and social identity of the Confucius Institute.Especially,the mainstream American media represented by the New York Times control the international communication environment,playing an important role in image building and sustainable development of the Confucius Institute.This paper,taking the report of Confucius Institute(2006-2018)by the New York Times as an example,investigates the tendency and discourse construction strategies of China-related reports by western media in order to provide some reference for Confucius Institute overseas propagation and public opinion guidance.This paper takes the report of Confucius Institute by the New York Times as a research object.There were 118 sample reports in the newspaper database Lexis Nexis and the official website of the New York Times.The author searches the keyword of "Confucius Institute" in the time sport from Jan.1,2004 to Dec.1,2018.Actually,there were 39 effective sample reports after two rounds of selection for removing reports with the subject irrelevant to Confucius Institute.This paper adopts the Three Dimensional Discourse Analysis(text-discourse practice-social practice)of Fairclough as the research framework and makes research under the theoretical basis of news frame theory and discourse analysis theory.The key point of this paper,shows the quantitative content analysis of the sample reports from the report quantity,subject and attitude firstly.Then this paper uses the search function of the corpus search tool-AntConc3.4.3w to describe the corpus in linguistic level from three dimensions of lexical classification,metaphor analysis and ties of matter and investigate the clear intertextuality of reports from the reference analysis and default analysis.Lastly,this paper refers to the "Hierarchy of Influences Model"put forward by American journalism and communication scholars,namely the five factors that affect media report and interprets the factors that affect the Confucius Institute-related reports by the New York Times from the social system,media and personal.The study finds that the New York times,on the one hand,affirms the language and cultural communication function and global influence of Confucius institutes,and on the other hand,constructs the stereotype that China realizes cultural hegemony through Confucius institutes and Confucius institutes serves the Chinese government's politics.