A Study On China’s Image In The Jakarta Post From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

China’s rapid development and increasing influence have aroused widespread attention around the world,and China’s image presented by media of other countries has become a hot topic in research circles.As the largest economy in ASEAN,Indonesia’s attitudes and views towards China cannot be ignored.This research focuses on The Jakarta Post,the Indonesia’s most influential and largest circulation English newspaper as an example to explore the image of China presented by the Indonesian media.The research uses the Appraisal Theory proposed by Martin and White(2005)as its analytical theoretical framework.The Appraisal Theory focuses on how language users use language to evaluate people and things,express their positions,and negotiate interpersonal relations.It is a set of language resources for expressing attitudes,which contains three subsystems(i.e.Attitude System,Engagement System and Graduation System).Thus,it helps to reveal the attitudes and views in discourses.The research corpus is 218 reports on China in The Jakarta Post from January 1,2017 to December 31,2019,covering different fields such as economy,science and technology,culture and society.The research uses UAM Corpus Tool to annotate and count the evaluation resources,and tries to analyze what evaluation resources are employed in The Jakarta Post and their distribution characteristics.Combined with qualitative analysis,this paper discusses how The Jakarta Post uses linguistic evaluation resources to display China’s images.The research results are shown as follows: 1)The Jakarta Post uses a wealth of evaluation resources to express its evaluation of China.Among them,Attitude resources are the most,followed by Engagement resources and Graduation resources.2)Among the Attitude resources,positive-attitude resources account for a much higher proportion of79.64%,while negative ones take up 20.36%.Obviously,The Jakarta Post’s attitude towards China tends to be positive.Within Engagement resources,the number of Contraction resources is far less than that of Expansion resources.It shows that The Jakarta Post uses more external voices to express opinions and positions,so as to strengthen its objectivity and persuasiveness.In Graduation resources,The Jakarta Post mainly employs Force resources to intensify the positive images of China.3)Overall,The Jakarta Post presents positive images of China,such as the world’s second-largest economy,advanced science and technology,the high global contribution rate,a large amount of foreign aids,the pursuit of peace and sharing,a responsible power.At the same time,negative image such as the influx of Chinese goods posing a threat to the local area is found.