A Discourse Analysis of the Wall Street Journal’s and China Daily’s News Reports on the Trade War Between the United States and China

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.220504.184How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Discourse Analysis; Transitivity Process; the US-China trade war; the Wall Street Journal; China Daily

Abstract

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.

Copyright

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Silei Wu
AU  - Sorabud Rungrojsuwan
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/06/01
TI  - A Discourse Analysis of the Wall Street Journal’s and China Daily’s News Reports on the Trade War Between the United States and China
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 8th International Conference on Humanities and Social Science Research (ICHSSR 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1014
EP  - 1021
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220504.184
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.220504.184
ID  - Wu2022
ER  -