Fighting terrorism, fighting the West: Them versus Us appraisal in Chinese media’s discursive war on terror

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.