Abstract
The Belt and Road Initiative reflects China’s ascendance in the world arena. Since its inception, this initiative has received great attention from Chinese and American media. This study applies the critical discourse analysis (CDA) method to investigate the mainstream media construction of the Belt and Road Initiative. Based on the “Lexis Advance” database, a sample of news reports dated between January, 2017 and November, 2018 were selected to build two corpora of China Daily (368 reports with 232 550 words) and The New York Times (154 reports with 106 401 words). Assisted by the two self-built corpora and the corpus software AntConc 3.2.4, the study probes into the similarities and differences between Chinese and American reports in terms of high-frequency words, collocation networks, concordance lines and concordance plots. The findings are (1) both the Chinese and American media pay great attention to the contribution of this initiative to the world economy. (2) Chinese media emphasize the concrete measures of this initiative, while American media focus on its political influence. (3) Chinese media use explicit positive vocabulary to appraise the achievement of this initiative, while American media use explicit negative vocabulary to express Trump administration’s skepticism about this initiative. (4) American government’s attitudes towards this initiative have gradually changed since Trump came to power. Though negative comments still exist, the positive voice has increased.
Highlights
In September and October of 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping raised the initiative of building the “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” in his speeches delivered in Kazakhstan and Indonesia, marking the beginning of the “Belt and Road Initiative”
This study applies the critical discourse analysis (CDA) method to explore the meaning construction of the Belt and Road Initiative based on the corpus of China Daily and The New York Times, which are drawn from “Lexis Advance”
Major findings are as follows: First, both the Chinese and American media have acknowledged that the Belt and Road Initiative involves many countries and brings opportunities for the development of the world economy
Summary
In September and October of 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping raised the initiative of building the “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” in his speeches delivered in Kazakhstan and Indonesia, marking the beginning of the “Belt and Road Initiative”. Borrowing the historical symbol of the ancient Silk Road, the initiative aims to promote infrastructure development of the countries along the Belt and Road and contribute to regional economic cooperation. In China, researches on the Belt and Road Initiative are on the rise, mainly focusing on the underlying philosophy, cultural dissemination and international cooperation against the background of this initiative. As for the underlying philosophy, researchers state that the idea of building a community of shared future for mankind put forward by the initiative contains the traditional Daoist philosophy of “the unity of heaven and man” (Muhammad & Ling, 2018) and the ethical values of Confucianism, i.e., justice, harmony and benevolence (Li, 2015). Hao, Lu and Guy (2018) conduct a quantitative analysis on the cultural distances in genre preference between China and other countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative based on 2016 box‐ office data. As for traditional Chinese culture, Yang et al (2017, p. 343) investigate the spreading of acupuncture in countries along the Belt and Road, claiming that this initiative could enhance “China’s soft ijel.ccsenet.org
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