Image Construction Of Chinese Outbound Tourists In Mainstream Foreign Media:A Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective

As tourism develops and thrives in recent years,a growing number of Chinese people decide to travel abroad and news reports about them abound.This thesis takes Chinese outbound tourists as the research object and selects English news reports about them from 2014 to 2018 on CNN and Reuters as data of analysis.Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework,the image construction of Chinese tourists is explored from three aspects: text,discursive practice,and social practice.At the textual level,this paper mainly employs the discourse-historical approach and appraisal theory to analyze the linguistic features of the reports.At the discursive practice level,intertextuality is examined to analyze the reporting modes and news sources in the reports.In terms of social practice,this thesis reveals that the discursive construction of Chinese tourists’ image is deeply influenced by social culture and economy from a macro perspective.It is found that the most salient image of Chinese tourists constructed is the economic image of consumers with strong purchasing power.This kind of image is mainly achieved textually through referential,predication,and argumentation strategies.In addition,western media often list the problems of Chinese tourists through predication strategies at the beginning of a report,but they use the perspectivization strategy to call on destination countries to develop as many services as possible to cater to Chinese tourists.Meanwhile,by means of mitigation or instensification strategies,these media also suggest that people in destination countries should understand Chinese tourists.By employing Martin’s attitude system,this thesis also finds that in the news reports,the employment of judgment and appreciation resources are relatively frequent.On the whole,CNN and Reuters’ media coverage of Chinese tourists is not restricted to only reporting negative images as people previously have assumed.Morespecifically,both media have begun to construct the image of Chinese outbound tourists in a more impartial way.It also can be seen that western media are showing an ambivalence--on the one hand,destination countries value Chinese tourists’ purchasing power;on the other hand,their deep-rooted mentality of looking down on Chinese will not be eliminated in a short time.From the perspective of ideology,it will be a long and slow process for western media to change from being biased to being truly impartial.