How US and Chinese Media Cover the US-China Trade Conflict: A Case Study of War and Peace Journalism Practice and the Foreign Policy Equilibrium Hypothesis (original) (raw)
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Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research
In recent years, the trade war between China and the United States (US) has become increasingly intense, attracting the attention of the global news media. Different news reports contain a variety of standpoints and opinions, which often affect readers' thoughts and judgments. This paper intends to analyse and compare the linguistic features between the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and China Daily (CD) in regard to the US-China trade war. Based on Halliday's Systematic Functional Linguistic (SFL) theory, this paper conducts qualitative and quantitative analysis in respect of the 46 selected news reports from the WSJ and CD, from the perspective of ideational function. The news reports were divided into 1777 clauses and classified according to transitivity analysis. By analysing the distribution and wording of transitivity processes in 2 news agencies, it is found that both the WSJ and CD were objective in their coverage of the trade war. However, their bias toward their countries is difficult to hide. The WSJ highlighted that the action of the US is legitimate and justifiable. CD stressed China's intention to prosper and follow its own development path. One reason for this difference is that news reporting undeniably serves the government. Moreover, in the report of international news events, the cultural factors of each country also play a decisive role. Through the discourse analysis of news reports, this paper seeks to explore the cultural factors behind the language differences and help improve readers' critical reading awareness of news.
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The South China Sea disputes involve both island and maritime claims among several sovereign states within the region, namely China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam and Taiwan. Framing an analysis of international news and diplomatic relations allows researchers to examine how news organisations provide their audiences with context regarding news stories through content promotion and exclusion. This study examined how the Malaysian and Chinese newspapers reported about the South China Sea disputes and Malaysia–China bilateral relations. The findings indicated that the newspapers reported the topics with different intensity and prominence, while different news sources were employed. It was also found that conflict was a salient frame used by the various newspapers. In addition, this study found that the Malaysian and Chinese newspapers exhibited different valence in reporting the South China Sea disputes. Among the Malaysian newspapers under examination in this study, Sin ...
World Journal of English Language
The media has discursively represented China, the Philippines, and the United States as states involved in territorial disputes in the South China Sea. These discursive representations ultimately pervade the media and public spheres. This study aimed to unravel these media representations by employing Halliday’s transitivity analysis and van Djik’s notion of ideological squares in analyzing news articles of the dispute from leading international news media. The analyses uncovered that China, the Philippines, and the United States are depicted to be actively involved in the dispute. The articles depict China’s assertive and aggressive measures in the disputed waters and against the United States. China is likewise portrayed to be favoring efforts to forward diplomatic resolutions in the region. The United States is depicted as aggressive towards China while maintaining a projection of power and intimidation in the region as the security guarantor. The Philippines, moreover, is portra...
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In its search for media influences in violent conflict, most existing scholarship has investigated the coverage of specific, salient conflict events. Media have been shown to focus on violence, sidelining concerns of reconciliation and disengaging rapidly as time proceeds. Studies have documented ethnocentric bias and self-reinforcing media hypes, which have been linked to escalation and radicalization. However, based on the existing studies, it remains hard to gauge if the unearthed patterns of media coverage are generally pervasive or limited to a few salient moments, specific conflicts or contexts. Likewise, we cannot say if different kinds of media apply similar styles of conflict coverage, or if their coverage is subject to specific contextual or outlet-specific factors. In this article, the authors compare the contents of both domestic and foreign opinion-leading media coverage across six selected conflicts over a time range of 4 to 10 years. They conduct a diachronic, comparative analysis of 3,700 semantic concepts raised in almost 900,000 news texts from 66 different news media. Based on this analysis, they trace when and to what extent each outlet focuses its attention on the conflict, highlights specific aspects (notably, violence and suffering, negotiations and peaceful solutions), and presents relevant in-and out-groups, applying different kinds of evaluation. The analysis generally corroborates the media's tendency to cover conflict in an event-oriented, violence-focused and ethnocentric manner, both during routine periods and-exacerbated merely by degrees-during major escalation. At the same time, the analysis highlights important differences in the strength and appearance of these patterns, and points to recurrent contingencies that can be tied to the specific contextual factors and general journalistic logics shaping the coverage.
The practice of reported speech in Chinese news reporting of China-USA trade disputes
The China-U.S. trade dispute over Chinese tires in 2009 is conceptualized as an activity in which journalistic discourses (from both China and the U.S.) are seen as mediations for both parties to engage in this dispute. This study focuses on the practice of reported speech in Chinese journalistic discourse. Informed by Grounded Practical Theory (GPT), the author aims to qualitatively investigate how reported speech is utilized by Chinese journalists to cope with the "discursive war" of this trade dispute and further to uncover the underlying assumptions about the nature of this dispute, the relationship between the two nations and, Chinese journalistic practice.