China’s International Discourse Construction: A Case Study of News Reports on China’s Poverty Alleviation

To cite this article: SHI Xiaomei & ZHOU Yuxi. (2021). China’s international discourse construction: A case study of news reports on China’s poverty alleviation. Asia-Pacific Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 01:2,068-077, DOI:10.53789/j.1653-0465.2021.0102.007

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.53789/j.1653-0465.2021.0102.007

Abstract: Taking the news reports on poverty alleviation extracted from China Daily, the mainstream English media in China, as an example, this paper analyzes how China constructs its international discourse and presents its bright future to the world. This paper collected the news reports on poverty alleviation extracted from China Daily from 1st January, 2020 to 31st December, 2020 and built a small corpus with these reports. With the help of the corpus software “Antconc.3.5.7” and under the framework of critical discourse analysis, this paper intends to analyze the ideational meaning and interpersonal meaning in the reports to expose China's international discourse construction system and mechanism behind these reports. The findings have shown that in the process of constructing poverty alleviation discourse system, China Daily adopts various ways of discourse construction such as the repetition of key words, the use of semantic prosodies as well as the use of modal words to construct a positive image of Chinese poverty alleviation. The paper will shed much light for Chinese English media on how to construct international discourse system, which is significant for the worldwide spread of China’s discourse and its international image construction.

Keywords: poverty alleviation; corpus; critical discourse analysis; international discourse construction

SHI Xiaomei & ZHOU Yuxi Number 2 APJHSS.pdf