The Discourse Strategy Of Indian Media

This paper analyses the role of news media in(re)producing geopolitical narratives in relation to the 2017 China-India Donglang stand-off.Based on the perspective of critical geopolitics,this paper uses Zeng Qingxiang's news narration framework as the main reference and analyses 34 news commentaries from the Hindustan Times.In this paper,three research questions are raised: RQ1: Does the Hindustan Times creating China as the “other” in news discourse? RQ2: How does the Hindustan Times construct a narrative of the "other" of China? RQ3: What factors influence the image of China in the Hindustan Times' representation? News content and textual analysis shows that,through the approach of vocabulary-choosing,sentence patterns choosing,myth-making and construction of ideology,the Hindustan Times describe China as the "rising military power","destroyer of power balance in the border areas”,"the aggressor of boundary friction and conflict","bully who does not obey the rules of international law" and "shrewd diplomatic manipulator",and to attribute the rise of crisis to Chinese expansionism.Media's representation of the Donglang stand-off is partly framed by India's geopolitical anxieties of the “threatening rise of China”,and features media competition and domestic nationalism.Seeking to explain the widespread circulation of such representation,this paper suggests that the changing role of news media has in turn contributed to a rapid and uncritical circulation of elite-based interpretation of,and neoliberal geopolitical approach to international relation.The paper also points at the importance of critical enquiries into geopolitical representations of “threatening rise of China” and of opening media space for a counter-geopolitics of “threatening rise of China”.