A Study On The News Reports Of The Belt And Road Initiative In The Times Of India:Cultural Discourse Studies

Since its introduction,the Belt and Road Initiative(BRI)has attracted much attention,with numerous media reports around the world.Since the support of the surrounding countries for the BRI has become an important indicator for observing its attitude towards China’s rise and India is the largest developing country bordering China on land,studying its discursive construction of the BRI is of great significance.The Times of India(TOI),as the oldest English newspaper with the largest circulation in India,is representative.This thesis is to explore the discursive construction and image of the BRI in news reports in The TOI,and analyze it from the macro and micro levels.On the macro level,the research paradigm of cultural discourse studies(CDS)is adopted,and the focus of the news reports in The TOI is explored by analyzing the discursive subjects and discursive content.As for the micro-analysis,the corpus approach is used to analyze the discourse strategies,and then combining with the results of the macro-analysis,the image of the BRI is discussed.The study found that the main subjects are government departments,national officials,experts and scholars,etc.,and the proportion of discourse subjects is uneven.The content of the discourse mainly focuses on the economic and sovereign security aspects.The micro analysis shows that the discourse of the BRI is constructed by the use of metaphors,metonymy and specific vocabulary selection and the negative image of “violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity”,“entailing political intent and geopolitical goals” and “getting trapped into debt” and positive image of“promoting global economic development” and “creating shared future and benefiting the world” is constructed.This study enriches the research perspective of studies on the news reports of the BRI and provides an empirical basis for the construction of the image of the BRI in news reports in Indian mainstream media.It also provides a strategic reference for China to promote the BRI in India.