美国报刊“一带一路”报道中的中国形象建构

论文总字数：46910字

摘 要

中国国家主席习近平在2013年年末提出了“一带一路”的经济合作发展倡议，自此，中国对于一带一路政策的推行引起了全球媒体的报道和关注。本文将以纽约时报及华盛顿邮报官方网站提供的新闻报道为语料来源，从中筛选出2013年至2019年与中国一带一路相关的报道，利用免费词频搜索软件Antconc辅助建立有关“一带一路”的语料库，并通过《评价语言-英语的评价系统》中的评价理论，积极与消极话语分析等研究方法来对新闻报道进行定量和定性分析，考察美国媒体在报道一带一路中对于话语的建构方式，情感变化以及当中所表现出的中国形象。研究发现，美国对于“一带一路”持反对立场，在意识形态上表现出了霸权主义的思维，认为中方侵犯了他国的利益，自身的地位受到了“威胁”。在报道中刻画出了中国的消极负面形象，一方面认为中国是具有野心的“挑战者”，另一方面对于中国所做出的行为表示“怀疑”。这一研究将为我国推行一带一路政策所面临的一些舆论压力提供实证参考，有助于我国针对性地改善国家形象，解决一带一路所面临的困境，从而进一步提升我国在国际舞台上的话语权和国际影响力。

关键词：“一带一路”倡议；美国新闻报；语篇分析；评价理论；中国形象

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 4

Abstract 5

摘要 5

Table of Contents 7

List of Tables and Figures 8

Chapter One: Introduction 9

1.1 Background of the study 9

1.2 Significance of the study 10

Chapter Two: Literature Review 12

Chapter Three: Research Methods 13

3.1 Theoretical Framework 13

3.2 Data Collection 14

3.3 Data Analysis 14

3.4 Research procedures 17

Chapter Four: Findings and Discussion 20

4.1 General findings 20

4.2 Positive appraisal analysis 21

4.3 Negative appraisal analysis 24

4.4 The use of adversative relations. 25

4.5 Image of China revealed from American newspaper reports 27

Chapter Five: Conclusion 29

5.1 Major Findings 29

5.2 Limitation 30

References 31

Appendix 32

List of Tables and Figures

Figure 1 Subject words with high frequency 14

Figure 2 The Collocates of search word “Belt and Road” 16

Figure 3 The English Expression of “Belt and Road” in two newspapers 18

Figure 4 The symbols refer to “Belt and Road” 18

Figure 5 The Attitude Resources in Belt and Road reports 20

Table 1 Charts of Percentage 20

Chapter One: Introduction

1.1 Background of the study

Nowadays, our world is experiencing great and complicate changes. After the crisis of international finance become increasingly serious, the world economy is reviving slowly with multiple runs of international cooperation and investment being put on the negotiation table. Still, countries are met and somehow united to face the severe problems of development. For recent years, China’s newly implemented strategy named “one belt, one road” has raised a lot of attention across the world. The initiative focuses on improving policy coordination, connectivity of infrastructure and facilities, unimpeded trade, financial integration with the goal of bringing benefits to all. Belt and Road initiative was an idea introduced by President Xi during his visits to Central and Southeast Asia in September and October 2013, holding the basic values of regional cooperation which aimed at economic growth and a more concrete ground of political relations. By the end of 2016, international and regional organizations in over 100 countries had shown a great interest in participating Belt and Road initiative, and more than 40 countries had signed cooperation agreements with China.

Halliday, the famous linguistic father of the book “System-Functional Linguistics” argues that language is a social fact, social practice, and social symbol that reflects people’s beliefs and values (Yuan, 2018, 1). So, any kinds of critical discourse analysis would aim at revealing the inter relationship of the language, ideology and rights under the surface of its linguistic form. Based on the former studies given by Halliday (1994), J R Martin (2005) and other scholars, its practical to made a linguistic analysis and further interpretation of “Belt and Road” news discourse.

This study took Washington Post and The New York Times as the study object. Washington Post and The New York Times, two mainstream newspaper companies in America, are both authoritative in local area, and are enjoyed by large group of readers from the public to the elites of the society and government officers. Washington Post was found in 1877 with more than 130 years of history. It enjoys a lot of world fame and had won Pulitzer 47 times, which represents the highest honor in US news. The purpose of Washington post is to “focus on facts and reliable information, and report objectively and faithfully”. (Yang, 2015, 3) The New York Times was found in 1851. As another great newspaper company in America, it focuses on the quality of news, and has been playing an extremely important role in the political, economic, and social fields of the United States. For a long time, the New York Times has been on the lead in broadcasting news in China. From July to December in 2015, The New York Times specially introduce the "China Factor" series of special reports, which deeply analyzed China's influence on the world. (Shan, 2017, 1)

1.2 Significance of the study

The national image is one of the most important components of country's soft power. It can reflect the comprehensive strength and influence of a country. (Wang, Xin, 2019, 1) Therefore, the building and dissemination of the national image is highly valued by governments. Since media discourse plays an important role in shaping the image of the country, in recent years, many academic circles have paid more and more attention to the study of the construction of Chinese image by foreign media, and the research on Chinese image has gradually turned to discourse.

With the rapid development, china has come to the center of focus in western media. Our links with the world community are becoming increasingly close with the advancement of our international standing. American, on the other hand, are the most powerful and influential country in the world, and has the great importance in the world political and economic system. American’s international status has determined its strong voice in public discourse. Since China began to forward the "One Belt, One Road" strategic concept, the United States began to comment on this plan in the social media. On one hand, it turns out many western countries still have stereotype about china. On the other hand, studying it help the Chinese government to make a reference while adjusting the foreign policy. As Chinese Scholar Li Xiguang once pointed out: “there is no room for Chinese voice. It must be delivered through the voice of western media. The image of China is the image depicted from American media.” (Yang, 2015) Therefore, investigate into the voice of American can delivered us a very useful message. Through the reports of The New York Times and Washington Post, we can take a glimpse of the image of china via the context aspects, their use of language identifiers, sources and preferences, and also get better understanding of the US views and attitudes on the “Belt and Road” initiative. This research would provide us an empirical basis for the accurate dissemination of national policy. It also helps China to effectively respond to foreign grievances, further enhance the discourse power and influence of "One Belt, One Road" strategy, and thereby facilitate its pace of implementation overseas.

Chapter Two: Literature Review

Nowadays, many scholars have studied the news from the discourse representation it revealed, to the political implication it conveys. The appraisal theory, as a common field in language study, has often been used in analyzing the news discourse.

However, there are few studies about the image construction.

For example, Sun (2015) thinks that when referring to ‘Belt and Road’ the international world has appeared multiple views and voices. He had made a clear glance through his professional data base and found 2500 English news reports related overseas from Sept.2013 to Feb.2015. Another scholar Gong (2015) has tried to analyze American as a great influence has what kind of public opinion, and pointed out the sophisticated impacts that American academy, politics and public media have on the promotion of ‘Belt and Road’ strategy. These studies has viewed the discourse representation in news discourse from different aspects, and provided enough support in statistics findings about the reports of Belt and Road.

To proceed my research on Belt and Road, I make a reference to A Comparative Study of the Discourse Representation of "One Belt, One Road" in Foreign Media. In this article, Shi (2018) respectively analyze news reports from 3 countries, and made a in depth study about newspaper’s ideology through multi-modal analysis and Appraisal theory. In her study, the image of china has been revealed through her appraisal analysis. Contradict to her study, my study would be more focus on American Local newspaper, to provide more details from the reports.

Therefore, my research was taking America newspaper as an example, to study the discourse representation in the news reports of ‘Belt and Road’ that picked up from the American newspaper Washington Post and The New York Times, to review the texts on the basis of Appraisal theory and in the end to dig the deep image of China behind it.

Chapter Three: Research Methods

3.1 Theoretical Framework

Appraisal Theory reveals various attitudes and emotional intensity in the discourse, and shows how these attitudes are formed. According to “The language of evaluation”, the Appraisal theory consists of three sub-systems: attitude, engagement and graduation. (Martin, 2005, 35) The main content of the Appraisal theory is the attitude system, which can be further divided into three subsystems: Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. Affect Resource refers to the various emotional tendencies or reactions of the speaker based on his personal preferences. Affect Resource are the language resources that most straightly express the attitude of the news reporter. Judgement means that language users make their own evaluations of certain behaviors according to specific social norms, including social obligations and social esteem. Appreciation means the speaker evaluate things and behaviors based on aesthetic standards.

In all three subsystems, Affects, involves in evaluating the positive or negative emotion of the subjects like happy or grief, satisfied or unsatisfied and so on. Judgement involves in commenting the behavior of the subject, like admiration or critics, praise or condemnation. The Appreciation system is assessment of subject’s value. (Wang, 2019, 80) With materials collected, we would find out how appraisal theory presented itself in foreign newspapers.

The use of language is inseparable from the context. When judging whether a vocabulary is evaluative, word category is not the only criterion. We should also keep our eye on the whole context. By exposing the context, the corpus index can provide strong support for the judgment of the word category and text analysis. This study started from analyzing the subject words. By observing the subject words, I picked up the related lines, made an analysis of its context, and then from it extracted the attitude resource words that described the them. Here, I am going to introduce AntConc3.5.7 as our main research tool, a helpful corpus application for text analysis. The methods would be a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis. While analyzing the texts, this study take the clause as the observe objects, categorize the theme words according to the appraisal theory, and then make the judgement.

3.2 Data Collection

All the data was collected from the official website of New York Times and Washington Post. The target News reports are based on the topic terms of “Belt and Road”, and the starting year was set at 2013, when the idea of Belt and Road first be mentioned officially. The study aimed to set up a corpus of approximately 20,000 letters to analyze, that was an estimated of 50 reports. However, difficulties are met for there are limited reports that related to Belt and Road initiative. I have only found 13 in The New York Times and 16 in Washington Post, which in the end contributed 29 reports from the two newspaper companies. It could be noticed that Belt and Road are not yet heatedly discussed in foreign media, or received heavy attention. Due to the limited reports, the study was started from collecting the subject words and collocation of Belt and Road as a reference.

3.3 Data Analysis

According to the result of Antconc, the list of subject words and collocations were made.

Subject words are the words with high frequency appeared in single or multiple texts. Analyzing the subject words can do a lot of help when analyzing the theme of the texts. Here, a table of the subject words was created by Antconc 3.5.7. to inspect all 29 texts. All the functional words were deliberately screened and those in high accordance with the topic had been picked up. Refer it in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Subject words with high frequency

Since President Xi had given the proposal of Belt and Road initiative from late 2013, the regional cooperation strategy it suggest has received a lot of positive response from many countries. With the improvement of this idea, Belt and Road initiative generally become welcomed in the international society, more and more countries are willing to join in this national project. As is shown in the table, China are accelerating its pace in forwarding the “Belt and Road” initiative, and forging its cooperation with the nearby countries. The high frequency of the subject terms “Development” (55 times), “Belt” (166 times), “Projects” (181 times) shows that “Belt and Road” is an important strategy to build a relationship belt with the countries alongside. Moreover, the terms “Economic” (118 times), “Billion” (90 times), “Projects” (181 times) also enjoys high frequency, which means that foreign media concerns about the scale of the new policy and its great national support. In all the report texts, regional words like “Asia” (79 times), “European (44 times)” constantly appeared. To be specific, there are “Turkey” (45 times), “Kazakhstan” (61 times), “Pakistan” (117 times), “Russia” (47 times) that indicate China’s close relationship with countries nearby and oversea. Meanwhile, the high frequency of United States (103) deliver a message that American is receiving a potential impact from Belt and Road initiative. Besides, terms like “World” (83), “International” (57 times), “Global” (56 times) are saying that Belt and Road is an international strategy, and its influence are getting stronger in the world. Overview, commercial terms takes up the majority, like “Companies” (52 times), “Investment” (47 times) and so on. That means media mainly focus on the economic benefits Belt and Road may bring instead of the cooperation core. Since China are promoting its new policy and the implement of Belt and Road initiative are still on its way, the news reports have used many constructive words like “infrastructure” (68 times), “construction” (47 times), “investment” (47 times) to indicate its progress.

Next is an example of collocates made from Antconc. In the practice, I respectively searched the collocates of the term “Belt and Road”, “One Belt, One Road” and “Economic belt” in a L5-R5 range. The table 2 shows 20 of those most representative results ranked by stat.

Figure 2 The Collocates of search word “Belt and Road”

From the table, we find that most of the collocates related to Belt and Road initiative are negative, like “warning”, “perdition”, “militants”, “backlash”. Moreover, we could also see that American newspaper’s attitude towards China is skeptical and cautious. The trace can be found in words like “unknown”,” scrutinized”, “ponders”, “intention”, which internally conveys a sense uncertainty. Other words like “undue”, “extensively”, “victims”, “vanity” are showing their distrust and strong resistance to the Belt and Road initiative.

However, this limited resource of statistics is not convincible in defining the image of China in American newspaper. The subject words and collocations of Belt and Road helps us to define the basic tune of all the news reports, and shows an overview of the data. To support our idea, we need to enlarge our research scale to the context.

3.4 Research procedures

The research was closely follow the appraisal theory “The Language of Evaluation” written by J. R. Martin, to categorize and analyze the appraisal words given by the search results of Antconc. According to Martin, the attitude system can be further divided into three subsystems: Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. (Martin, 35) The corpus built by Antconc has provided sufficient information related to attitude resources.

To reveal the corpus from multiple aspects, the study started from analyzing the English expression and its reference to the Belt and Road. In this way, it can help in the later chapter to determine which keywords to pinpoint in all the texts, and also reveal the symbolic meaning from its topic. With the help of Antconc, this study use belt w/5 road as a search term to inspect the expression through all the related texts in Washington Post and The New York Times. The Expression of Belt and Road altogether appeared 155 times, and is differ from its use. According to it, a table is made for illustration.

Figure 3 The English Expression of “Belt and Road” in two newspapers

From table 3, we could see that are altogether 3 kinds of expressions in two newspapers when describing Chinese Belt and Road. They are, “Belt and Road” “One Belt, One Road” and “Silk Road Economic Belt”. Three of them are similarly used in two newspapers, and “Belt and Road” are the most frequent one. According to findings, “One Belt, One Road” and “Silk Road Economic Belt” are mostly used in the early news reports, that divergence may due to the fact that newspapers at that time didn’t have a common agreement on its name. However, the formal expression was fixed after the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation being held in Beijing in May 2017, when Chinese government officially announce the standard English expression is “the Belt and Road Initiative”.

Figure 4 The symbols refer to “Belt and Road”

From table 4, we could also see a lot of symbols being used in describing “Belt and Road”. (This data was collected by highlighting the following word of the phrase “Belt and Road” with the use of Antconc). The symbolic representation is in variety, include both general and concrete words and is rich in connotation. They are initiative, project, plan, B.R.I, China’s foreign policy, program, strategy, push, scheme, link. The most popular one is the official one “Initiative” (31). It can be learnt that both Washington Post and The New York Times are giving much attention to the initiative, in other words, their attitudes toward this is proactive.

All in all, Table 3 and Table 4 has provided the target words that are needed to pinpoint the lines and phrases that related to Belt and Road initiative.

So, the research steps were as follows. First, the expression of Belt and Road and the target word in Table 3 and Table 4 were used as search words. Then, Antconc were used to locate the lines, judge the appraisals in the context. In the last step, the index lines were carefully inspected, appraisal resources were collected and categorized according to Martin’s system. All the analysis were strictly focused on the given resources. Take the word “Initiative” in Table 4 as an example, there are 80 results appeared in the corpus and 72 of them are useful. Then, extracted the word and phrases in its index lines that describes the Belt and Road and have appraisal features. Finally, statistics had been built up accordingly, and a chart was made for the attitude resource of Belt and Road.

Chapter Four: Findings and Discussion

4.1 General findings

In table 5, the words with appraisal features are categorized into 3 sections according to Martin’s theory, that is: Affect, Judgement, Appreciation.

Figure 5 The Attitude Resources in Belt and Road reports

Overall, in reporting the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, the use of Affect words is comparatively low, which takes up 20% of the resources. On the other hand, words of Judgement take up the most percentage of 48%. It could be revealed from both The New York Times and Washington Post that while discussing about the topic they had tried hard to mild the personal attitude and stay objective. Words of Appreciation also takes considerable amount, but the descriptions are more of negative meanings.

Table 1 Charts of Percentage

As a result, I have found altogether 105 words and phrases that appraise the Belt and Road initiative in all the texts. In the findings, the number of appraisal words and phrases that characterized with positive attitudes are 27, representatives are helping, win-win, cure-all, peaceful. The number of appraisals with negative attitudes are 78, the representatives are luring, skeptical, coercive, unsustainable. In defining the attitudes, the negative ones are far outnumbered the positive ones, with the rate of 3 to 1. It could be concluded that though there are some of the positive attitudes, American newspapers in general holds negative feelings towards Chinese Belt and Road initiative. Next, the study has defined the appraisal resources from positive to negative, which helped to find out how the newspaper put forward their attitudes.

4.2 Positive appraisal analysis

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