Chinese News Discourse

As a country in transition, Chinese news discourse has quite distinctive characteristics, and more so given the power of state media in society. With China’s engagement in world affairs and its massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) now in place, Western media coverage of China has dramatically increased. Against this backdrop, news dissemination and discourse demonstrate a need for academia to give perspectives with interdisciplinary approaches. Chinese News Discourse presents original research from academics in China and the West, showing theoretical, methodological and practical dimensions between news media and discourse. The book focuses on Chinese news discourse by examining what new modern features it demonstrates in contrast and comparison to news discourses in other countries in the coverage of such hot topics as the BRI or the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China, just to name a few. This book is a useful resource for scholars and students of discourse, language, media and communication studies, as well as translation studies.

A Discourse Analysis of News Translation in China offers hitherto underexplored inroads into Chinese media through insider perspectives on a unique Chinese newspaper, Cankao Xiaoxia which not only is the largest circulating newspaper in China but is also unique in that its news consists entirely of stories translated from foreign news sources. The size of the publication, the unique nature of the publication, and the view from the inside of such an organization gathered through interviews with its employees give this proposed book a highly unique perspective that will inform our understanding of the workings of Chinese media in important ways.

News Framing Through English-Chinese Translation provides a useful tool to depict how Chinese news translation can be examined in the era of globalization. The author has integrated framing theory in journalism studies with translation studies and developed a new theoretical model/framework named Transframing. This interdisciplinary model is pioneering and will make theoretical and conceptual contributions to translation studies. This book aims to reveal ideological, sociocultural and linguistic factors creating media discourse by examining Chinese media discourse, in comparison to its counterpart in English. Through the analysis of both quantitative and qualitative methods, it is concluded that the transframing model can be applied to interpreting, describing, explaining as well as predicting the practice of news translation.

Aspirational and expanding, this book examines contemporary Chinese language and discourse across a spectrum of linguistic layers and genres in diverse social contexts. Addressing issues ranging from the usual focus on language per se, or language use in reaction to the immediate settings, to the connections between properties of texts and social practices (ideologies, stancetaking, power relations, etc.), the updated and exemplary research projects presented in the volume demonstrates a developing trajectory of research in Chinese language and discourse. With its empirical focus and stress on the role of language and discourse in social practice, this important new book discusses various language features as well as gender, stancetaking, and identity in Chinese discourse. This is a vital discussion for anyone interested in contemporary Chinese language and discourse studies. In examination of different layers of language (i.e. from lexical items and sentence structures to discourse features and discursive practices) across different genres of texts, the research projects have drawn on a variety of linguistic approaches and methodologies, including functional linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and various approaches to discourse analysis. Researchers and students of Chinese linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse studies, translation studies, and China studies in general will find this volume an indispensable reference and an enjoyable read.

Reported speech is a universal form across human languages. However, previous studies have tended to be limited because they mostly emphasize on the form and authenticity of reported speech, while its discourse and pragmatic functions have largely been ignored. Meanwhile, the studies mainly focus on English, with a comparative perspective with other languages largely missing. Acknowledging these limitations, this book analyzes the textual and pragmatic functions of reported speech in Chinese and English. The authors build a corpus comprising of twelve Chinese and English newspapers, including China Daily and The New York Times. They examine the classification and distribution of reported speech, the form and function in different news genres and contexts, and the socio-pragmatic interpretation of reported speech in news and other issues. This title can enrich comparative linguistic research, verify the feasibility of combining critical linguistics and corpus technology, and help improve the production and understanding of news reports. Students and scholars of critical discourse analysis, comparative linguistics, corpus linguistics, as well as communication studies will find this to be an essential guide.

Chinese Discourse Studies presents an innovative and systematic approach to discourse and communication in contemporary China. Incorporating Chinese philosophy and theory, it offers not only a distinct cultural paradigm in the field, but also a culturally sensitive and effective tool for studying Chinese discourses.

Despite the U.S. and China’s shared economic and political interests, distrust between the nations persists. How does the United States rhetorically navigate its relationship with China in the midst of continued distrust? This book pursues this question by rhetorically analyzing U.S. news and political discourse concerning the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the 2010 U.S. midterm elections, the 2012 U.S. presidential election, and the 2014-2015 Chinese cyber espionage controversy. It finds that memory frames of China as the yellow peril and the red menace have combined to construct China as a threatening red peril. Red peril characterizations revive and revise yellow peril tropes of China as a moral, political, economic and military threat by imbuing them with anti-communist ideology. Tracing the origins, functions, and implications of the red peril, this study illustrates how historical representations of the Chinese threat continue to limit understanding of U.S.-Sino relations by keeping the nations’ relationship mired in the past.

Adopting a multi-perspective ontological approach to language in social life, this book investigates the concept of journalistic stance, defining it as a nexus of social practice rather than simply linguistic realizations. It focuses on the discursive aspect of journalistic stance in news texts to analyse the ways journalistic stances are enacted in Chinese and Australian print-media, hard-news reporting. Further, using the appraisal framework, it identifies stance markers in news texts and examines the social-institutional and (inter)personal aspects of journalistic stance on the basis of insights gained from participant observation in news institutions in order to understand news-production processes. It also highlights the articulation of news values and the exercise of symbolic power in each news-production context. This book appeals to a wide range of researchers, such as discourse analysts in the field of news discourse and other scholars whose research is relevant to stance/evaluation, and those engaged in corpus-informed studies, along with those in the field journalism and communication.