Heterogeneous discursive representations of the Chinese Dream in international media: a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis

Abstract

The study focuses on the heterogeneous discursive representations of the Chinese Dream in three international newspapers from different geopolitical regions between 2012 and 2022. To this end, a combined method that uses the discourse-historical approach and corpus-assisted analysis was adopted. In the analysis, it identifies three salient discursive strategies (namely, nomination, perspectivisation and argumentation) that are employed to reconstruct/represent the national Dream differently in the three media. The findings suggest that the Chinese Dream is a floating discourse in media, and its portrayals strongly depend on the news institutions and their ideologies, stances and socio-political systems in which they are based and that the objective presentation of media is fragmented or an illusion, at least in the case of the mediatised Chinese Dream. The heterogeneous representations also show the features of discourse power struggle and ideological divergence in the media based in different geopolitical regions. The study contributes to the critical understanding of the Chinese Dream in the discursive world constructed by news media.