Abstract
Since April 2018, the U.S. government headed by U.S. President Trump has adopted trade protection measures, and the Sino-U.S. trade war broke out. This lasting event has attracted widespread attention from domestic and foreign media, and the attitudes and opinions presented by various reports are different. In order to explore more in-depth information behind news reports, we analyze the Sino-U.S. trade war news based on the collected corpora. By combining corpus analysis and Fairclough's three-dimensional analysis framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and collecting 15 news reports on the websites of China Daily and The Wall Street Journal respectively from January 2019 to January 2020, this study explores the focuses of Sino-U.S. reports and their attitudes towards Sino-U.S. trade issues, and further reveals the national images of the two countries constructed by the media. It is found that the Wall Street Journal reports focus on the tariff policies and the economic impact of the Sino-U.S. trade war on its own country. While China Daily reports focus on response to trade war. For building a national image, The Wall Street Journal uses more positive words to construct the United States as an image of strong and just. China Daily builds China as an image of a big country that actively responded to challenges and actively promoted global free trade and peaceful coexistence. This study provides some empirical evidence for the critical discourse analysis of news discourse, deepens our understanding of the ideology hidden behind the news discourse, and has a certain enlightening role for discourse analysis of different genres.
Highlights
China and the United States are the two largest economies in the world, and the top two trading powers in the world in terms of trade volume
Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis can take advantage of combining quantitative and qualitative research to reduce the impact of researchers' subjective bias on research and enhance the objectivity of research
This paper makes a Critical Discourse Analysis of the Sino-U.S trade war reported by China Daily and The Wall Street Journal, to explore the similarities and differences between the focuses on the Sino-U.S trade war reports from different media and the construction of discourse subjects, and compare the ideologies behind the news, so as to better understand the position and differences of Sino-U.S news reports
Summary
China and the United States are the two largest economies in the world, and the top two trading powers in the world in terms of trade volume. Government, led by U.S President Trump, has insisted on adopting trade protection measures, and launched a trade war against China This protracted war has attracted widespread attention from domestic and foreign media. Discourse Analysis is an effective way to analyze news texts, which can explore the relationship and role between discourse, power relations and ideology from the superficial language form. This paper makes a Critical Discourse Analysis of the Sino-U.S trade war reported by China Daily and The Wall Street Journal, to explore the similarities and differences between the focuses on the Sino-U.S trade war reports from different media and the construction of discourse subjects, and compare the ideologies behind the news, so as to better understand the position and differences of Sino-U.S news reports
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