A Study On The Stigmatization Of China In COVID-19 Related Reports In BBC And CNN From The Perspective Of Proximization Theory

The outbreak of the Corona Virus Disease 2019(known as COVID-19)in December 2019 has caused certain influences and received widespread coverage at home and abroad.With the development of the public health emergency,the Chinese government has been responding to it actively and responsibly and took good control of the domestic situation in three months,while some media in Britain and the United States have launched several rounds of fierce public opinion attacks to stigmatize China and legitimize their actions.BBC,which stands out as the most authoritative and influential news media in the UK,and CNN,which is known as the world’s news leader,have great impacts on the crisis events construction and dissemination.However,their reports on China’s COVID-19 situation have distorted the facts and denigrated China.In this context,the current study selects reports on China’s COVID-19 from the official website of BBC and CNN from January to June 2020 as research data and sets up two self-built corpora.As a discursive strategy which advocates the discourse analysis from spatial,temporal,and axiological dimensions by a series of lexicogrammatical items,the proximization theory has the increasing explanatory power in the new cross-research field,critical cognitive linguistics.Based on the proximization theory and the formation mechanism of stigma,the thesis aims to explore the adoption of the spatial,temporal,and axiological proximization strategies used by the reports in stigmatizing China,compare the differences in different periods of epidemic development,and explain the underlying reasons behind them.It aims to address three research questions:(1)What are the general features of proximization strategies adopted by BBC and CNN to stigmatize China in terms of category and frequency?(2)What are the differences in stigmatization of China in terms of proximization strategies adopted by BBC and CNN in their coverage of COVID-19 with the development of the epidemic?(3)What are the underlying reasons behind the differences?The main findings of this study are as follows.First,the three proximization strategies are all used by both BBC and CNN in operating the discourse.Both tend to most frequently use spatial proximization strategies in the stigmatization of China,followed by the axiological proximization strategies and the temporal proximization strategies.More importantly,by specifically using the three proximization strategies to construe the virus and the Chinese government as the negative ODCs which constantly invade IDCs,they try to activate the stigmatization through labeling,the negative stereotype,distort public cognition to further arouse group anxiety and guide the readers to show hostility to China for the legitimation of their criticism against the Chinese government.The constructed STA models provide a visualized perspective in taking on the stigmatization of China and gives explanations.Second,it presents different characteristics of the stigmatization in different periods of the epidemic development by the different uses of proximization strategies.The differences in lexico-grammatical items and the frequency indicate that the stigmatization gradually changes from the early stimulation of group anxiety and fear of the severity of the virus and Chinese to the later stress of the virus origin theory,China’s inaction and failure in epidemic prevention and control for rationalizing their political attack against China.Third,for the reasons behind the differences,in the first phase when the epidemic mainly happened and attacked China,it shows that both tend to guide readers to separate “good we” from “bad others” to signal differences and call for the cognition and emotional alert,and stress their own positive actions in the epidemic prevention and control to gain the trust of the public.What’s more,they devote themselves to demonstrating the severity and harm of the epidemic,implying China’s inaction,the unfree press speech because there was lots of unknown news about the virus,which stimulated fear,suspicion,and rumors of disinformation in the countries’ political game.However,in the second phase with the situation being more serious in both the UK and the US,the British side pays more attention to constructing the threatening ODCs,stresses more about China’s inaction and failure to further distort public cognition,guides the IDCs to show hostility to the Chinese government and thus transfers the domestic conflict.While the Trump administration tends to decrease the construction to emphasize their efforts and control but they still make China the “culprit” of the virus to win more support and trust in the re-election and transfer the domestic conflict by focusing more on the virus origin theory to conduct stigmatization.This thesis is expected to expand the explanatory power of the proximization theory by focusing on the study of the global public health discourse,COVID-19 news reports.In addition,the contrastive analysis of the stigmatization characteristics in two different stages of the epidemic are explored and the underlying reasons behind them are revealed to help readers recognize discursive strategies used to stigmatize China,critically understand the relevant media reports and promote the proposal of strategies of anti-stigmatization of China.