A Study Of The Discursive Construction Of Huawei’s Corporate Image By Major American News Media

With the continuous development of economic globalization,the strategy of “Go Global” has become an inevitable choice for Chinese enterprises to accelerate development.A good corporate image is an important condition for an enterprise to gain a solid foundation in the intensely competitive overseas market.In recent years,more and more companies are committed to going abroad to seek more development opportunities.Although achieving notable achievements,Chinese enterprises also faced many challenges,which lead to a negative impact on the corporate image.Therefore,in order to better ensure the healthy development of Chinese enterprises in global market,it is imperative to improve the enterprises’ overseas image.News media,with the assistance of discourse,provides an important platform for the construction and dissemination of corporate image.Since the U.S.has a strong right to speak in the world,its news media would have a profound impact on the construction and dissemination of the image of Chinese enterprises.The study takes Huawei,an outstanding representative of international company,as an example to examine the discursive construction of its corporate image by major American news media and hopes to provide reference for the improvement and overseas communication of Huawei’s corporate image.In this study,the news reports from two mainstream American news media,namely The Washington Post and The New York Times are selected as samples for analysis.Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics,these samples are analyzed from three dimensions: text,discursive practice and social practice.First,with the assistance of corpus analytical tool,the study describes and analyzes the discursive methods used to construct Huawei’s corporate image from the perspective of vocabulary and grammar,and discuss what kinds of Huawei’s corporate image are constructed by mainstream American news media.Next,the study explores how discourse is produced and disseminated in terms of news sources and reporting modes.Finally,the discursive construction under different contexts is explored.The results show that,through the use of lexical classification,metaphor and modality,the news media describe Huawei as “a spy for the Chinese government”,“a great threat to America’s national security”,“a competitor in developing 5G communications technology” and “a bargain chip in Sino-US technology war”.In terms of intertextuality,The Washington Post and The New York Times,as two mainstream American news media,use a large number of specified sources to strengthen authority.Besides,through extensive use of indirect speech,the reporters skillfully integrate their ideologies and attitudes into the discourse,which further consolidates the negative image of Huawei.Meanwhile,through social practice analysis,it can be found that such construction of Huawei’s image is deeply influenced by political factors,technological factors,social factors,etc.By an analysis of the corporate image of Huawei in American mainstream news media discourse,the present study can help understand the challenges that Huawei has faced in the process of going global,and then provide some enlightenment for the improvement and promotion of Huawei’s own corporate image.