| Till December 2020,China has successfully opened 541 Confucius Institutes and1,170 Confucius classrooms in 162 countries and regions.Besides praise and appreciation,it also invites accusations and criticism,especially from the United States.It is necessary to ponder over US media’s intentions and attitudes behind the lines by examining the special discourse--the US news reports on the Confucius Institute.From critical cognitive perspective,this study aims to explore the ideological confrontations in cultural discourse and expose the attitudes of US media towards the Confucius Institute,so as to enrich studies on the news discourse of the Confucius Institute.Based on the proximization theory,this paper attempts to answer the following two questions:（1）What is US media’s attitude towards the Confucius Institute?（2）What proximization strategies are used in US media’s reports on the Confucius Institute?And for what purpose they are used?This study is a data-based research.It first selects the key words“Confucius Constitute”in Down Jones Factiva Online News Database from January 1st,2019 to December 31th,2019.Next,it filters the repeated and irrelevant reports,and those whose length is less than 300 words.After selecting,41 pieces of US news reports on the Confucius Institute are finally obtained.The 41 pieces reports,which contain27620 words,are selected as a self-built database.Then,the study marks the discourse according to Cap’s categories of proximization by corpus retrieval software Antconc 3.2.0 and manual identification.Later,it carries out a qualitative analysis on the construction and legalization of the discourse space in spatial,temporal and axiological axes and delves into the possible causes.The research has two findings.In the first place,the study finds that US media have not come to an agreement yet.The attitudes of American politicians and college staff and students in the reports vary a lot.The former resents Chinese Confucius Institute out of political confrontations.However,the latter is tolerant and grateful to Confucius Institute for offering them funds and chance to promote international cooperation.In the second place,three strategies are unevenly adopted in the discourse so as to convey political intentions.The spatial proximization takes up a larger proportion in the reports while temporal proximization and axiological proximization are relatively less used.The spatial proximization is used to force American people to realize the approaching of threats.The temporal proximization is used to highlight the emergency of the existed or incoming threats aroused by the Confucius Institute.And the axiological proximization is the core.By stressing ideological conflicts,these reports intensify the probability of the conflicts between US and Chinese and successfully achieve political intentions. |
