The Construction of Shanghai’s Cultural Image under Overseas Media Reports

Abstract

This paper adopts a text analysis method based on media reports. The corpus comes from relevant reports on Shanghai of Google News from 2016 to 2020. There are a total of 64 relevant reports, of which 25, we believe, can deeply reflect overseas media’s perception of Shanghai image. We classify, analyze, and select some typical sentences in an appropriate manner. Zhou Ning (2011) believes that “from the perspective of knowledge and imagination, the image of China contains three layers of meanings: first, western cognition and imagination of the reality of China to a certain extent; second, western self-recognition, anxiety and expectation of Sino-Western relations; third, the metaphorical expression of self-identity concerning Western culture”. This kind of imagination is based on reflecting facts and is a kind of cognition of the objective world. At the same time, it requires people’s mental intelligence to fill in the image with which is “absent” from reality (Belleretal, 1994). Due to the individual’s subjective initiative, this understanding will inevitably lead to an impression that is deviated from the original image. When analyzing the reports of Shanghai by foreign media, we use fact-based informational descriptions as a supplement, and turn our perspective to foreign media’s evaluation of Shanghai as a city and its urban culture for the aim of exploring the cultural image of Shanghai in the eyes of foreign media. The study will examine which of the reports reflect the western views and evaluations on the image of Shanghai, and which ones are a reflection of the image of Shanghai integrated with that of western countries. Based on the above, we divide the corpus of the Western media reports on Shanghai into two categories for study: overseas media’s cognition of Shanghai’s cultural image and the reflection of the image of Shanghai integrated with that of western countries western culture and their self-identity.