{"title":"Fighting terrorism, fighting the West: Them versus Us appraisal in Chinese media’s discursive war on terror","authors":"Hailing Yu, Jinhua Yue, Ye Yan","doi":"10.1515/text-2021-0013","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract While discourses on terror by the United States and its allies have been the focus of most previous studies, this article investigates discourses produced in the Chinese context. 247 news articles from China Daily and People’s Daily were analyzed according to a revised system of attitude within the appraisal framework in systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The findings reveal a correlation between polarity, types of attitude, and social actors being evaluated. Two Them groups, terrorism/terrorists in Xinjiang and Western media and governments, are overwhelmingly evaluated in terms of negative propriety of their behaviors and negative valuation of their things. Two Us groups, China and its people and non-Western countries supporting China, tend to be evaluated through positive valuation of their things, their positive capability, and positive and negative feelings (affect). The West is put in the same category as terrorism, quite contrary to what is commonly seen in the discourses produced by Western media. The attitudinal construction of Them and Us reflects not only the ideological square of negative other-presentation and positive self-presentation, but also the motivations of maintaining domestic stability and proper international relations behind China’s war on terror.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2022-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Text & Talk","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2021-0013","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract While discourses on terror by the United States and its allies have been the focus of most previous studies, this article investigates discourses produced in the Chinese context. 247 news articles from China Daily and People’s Daily were analyzed according to a revised system of attitude within the appraisal framework in systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The findings reveal a correlation between polarity, types of attitude, and social actors being evaluated. Two Them groups, terrorism/terrorists in Xinjiang and Western media and governments, are overwhelmingly evaluated in terms of negative propriety of their behaviors and negative valuation of their things. Two Us groups, China and its people and non-Western countries supporting China, tend to be evaluated through positive valuation of their things, their positive capability, and positive and negative feelings (affect). The West is put in the same category as terrorism, quite contrary to what is commonly seen in the discourses produced by Western media. The attitudinal construction of Them and Us reflects not only the ideological square of negative other-presentation and positive self-presentation, but also the motivations of maintaining domestic stability and proper international relations behind China’s war on terror.
期刊介绍:
Text & Talk (founded as TEXT in 1981) is an internationally recognized forum for interdisciplinary research in language, discourse, and communication studies, focusing, among other things, on the situational and historical nature of text/talk production; the cognitive and sociocultural processes of language practice/action; and participant-based structures of meaning negotiation and multimodal alignment. Text & Talk encourages critical debates on these and other relevant issues, spanning not only the theoretical and methodological dimensions of discourse but also their practical and socially relevant outcomes.