Contrastive Analysis of Discursive Constructions in Terrorist Attack Reports between Chinese and British Newspapers: Case Study of Reports on Beijing and Barcelona Terrorist Attacks

Abstract

ABSTRACT Chinese and British mainstream English newspaper’s reports on two terrorist attacks, Beijing 10 · 28 event in 2013 and Barcelona 8 · 17 event in 2017 were used as data. Corpus approaches and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) were combined to compare the discursive constructions of terrorist attacks between Chinese and British presses. The findings demonstrate that the western media set the double standards when reporting terrorist events in China and Spain. Although with the same standard, China not only seeks to reveal the true nature of Beijing terrorist attack but also weaves a network of ideological allies. The differences in discursive constructions in Beijing terrorist attack exhibit the different ideologies between China and western countries and reveal the predominance of western countries in controlling the discourse power in the world.