Abstract
This study examines the discursive construction of South China Sea dispute in China Daily and The New York Times from April 2016 to December 2017. Drawing on Van Dijk’s account of critical discourse analysis and the linguistic framework of Appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005), this study investigates how three social actors in the dispute, namely China, United States, Philippines, are differently constructed with the strategic use of attitude resources in the two newspapers. The corpus analyzed consists of 45 newspaper texts from China Daily and 49 newspaper texts from The New York Times. The analysis reveals competing discursive construction of social actors that constitute positive us-representation and negative other-representation in the two newspapers. For example, China Daily constructs China as a peace-loving country, insisting on the peaceful means and the cooperation with ASEAN and other claimant countries to resolve the dispute, whereas The New York Times depicts China as threat, hegemony and provocation. Such competing discursive construction not only reflects the ideological stance of two newspapers, but also functions to legitimize their countries’ policies and decisions in the South China Sea dispute.
Highlights
The South China Sea dispute is “one of the most complicated geopolitical issues of the twenty-first century” (Freeman, 2017, p. 1)
In the analysis of attitude resources used by newspapers to construct different social actors, that is China, United States and Philippines, a corpus-based analysis with manual text analysis will be adopted in this study, since the attitude is realized ranging from words to sentences to paragraphs
In the analysis of the distribution of attitude resources and how they are realized in the two corpora, two questions will be addressed: 1) How are social actors constructed differently in the media discourse? 2) What are the similarities and differences in the discursive construction of social actors in CD and NYT?
Summary
The South China Sea dispute is “one of the most complicated geopolitical issues of the twenty-first century” (Freeman, 2017, p. 1). The United States, without any claims to South China Sea, is involved to the dispute due to the concern of freedom of navigation, historical presence and alliance with other countries This hot issue has been extensively reported in the international media to such an extent that the media coverage has an effect on the audiences’ awareness and attitude as well as governments’ policies (Freeman, 2017). This study intends to fill this gap by comparing American and Chinese media coverage of South China Sea dispute following Van Dijk’s approach to critical discourse analysis, with a focus on their attitude and ideologies in the discursive construction of different social actors, including China, United States and Philippines
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