Media images, migrant reality : a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of the representation of migrant workers in English newspapers in China

As one of the most vivid symbols of the dramatic changes in China for the last three decades or so, migrant workers have been a special labour force serving as a fuel to propel China from a traditional country into the world‟s third largest economy today. Since the reform and opening-up in the late 1970s, millions of farmers have left their villages and farms to take advantage of the work opportunities offered by the urban areas. The world‟s largest mass of migrants has furnished the muscle for China‟s economic development as well as the backbone for the country‟s urbanization and industrialization. At the same time, however, they have brought challenges to urban governments as they have to cope with this huge unsettled, flowing population. Due to their special social status and potential economic and social impact on Chinese society, migrant workers have abundantly been studied in different fields in academy, such as sociology and economics. However, few studies have been done in the sociolinguistic field to examine the media language and news image of migrant workers in China. This study aims to fill this gap and to investigate how migrant workers are discursively represented in English news media in China. Taking a synergetic methodology of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, the study analyzed a special 0.6-million- word corpus of news articles collected from the websites of two official English newspapers, China Daily and Global Times. The analysis was carried out on two levels. The first was a transitivity analysis of the syntactic structure of clauses to detect the role allocation to migrant workers. The second component was a colligation analysis at the lexicogrammatical level to detect linguistic patterns of the representation. The results reveal that migrant workers are predominantly represented as passive and beneficiary participants rather than active contributors in the processes. The dissertation concludes that an imbalanced media representation is detrimental to migrant workers and the leading official newspapers should strive to improve their language of reporting and achieve a balanced and fair portrayal of migrant workers.