A Comparative Analysis Of China’s Image In Chinese And Western Media Based On Appraisal Theory

With the rapid development of economy, the influence of China in international world isincreased significantly in recent years. It has an important status in so many fields, such aspolitics, economy, and culture etc. As everyone knows that superstructure depends oneconomic foundation. The international status of our discourse power is also developinggradually with the development of comprehensive national strength.Appraisal theory is an extension research, conducted by scholars like Martin oninterpersonal function, which included in Halliday’s three metafunction of language insystemic functional grammar. This theory system changed the limitation that researches oninterpersonal function of language could be conducted only from tone to modality, andprovides a new perspective for the interpersonal meaning research. Focusing on thespeaker/writer, evaluation system is used to express specific evaluation position and the actualor potential respondent consultation these position vocabulary language resources. Martinmade the vocabulary evaluation resources category change description, and summarized intothree sub-system of evaluation: attitude, intervention, and graded. Each of these resourcescould be separated into sub-categories further.Taking the Chinese national leader’s speech in public as chief sources, the author of thisthesis collected ten news reports published in two representative media of Chinese andwestern of the recent years. And then a comparative analysis of two major resources wasmade relies on the appraisal theory and a summarization of diachronic changing research onthese news discourses was also conducted. Through the study process, it could found that:1. In the news discourse selected from two authoritative news media, the using of dialogicexpansion is more frequent than dialogic contraction. And this phenomenon is particularlyobvious in the Chinese report. Thereby, China’s powerful and inclusive image was embodied.2. In dialogic contraction, which is the sub-category of engagement, the using of denyresources by Chinese media, is far less than the western media, and this phenomenon alsoreflects the Chinese kind and positive image in treating international economic developmentaffairs. But the western media, which apply a large numbers of deny resources, plays anegative role in shaping China’s image, and it’s easily to cause readers to have a mistakeunderstanding of China, at the same time, weaken the prestige of China’s official comments,and then making China carry on the evaluation of arrogance and impractical. While in thedialogic expansion, both Chinese and western media employ a large number of attributionresources. For Chinese media, it embodies the responsible power image; for western media, itcould make the reports become more objective, and then gives the reader much more space.3. Through diachronic research on the news discourse, the tendency of changing on usingof the engagement resources in the Chinese and western media is smooth. Otherwise, changing in the peak data is in the opposite direction. In general, China’s image is reflectedout in the news reports, which is optimistic, friendly, positive, responsible, and authoritative,besides that some stereotypes of China still exist, and misunderstandings toward China’simage still appeared now and then, and this question should be noticed.