The strategic ritual of emotionality in Chinese and Australian hard news: a corpus-based study

This article, based on the appraisal framework, investigates the ways in which Chinese and Australian journalists strategically mobilize and mediate emotions in hard news reporting on risk events that disturb social order. Drawing on a newly built comparable corpus of Chinese and Australian hard news reporting on risk events, the study found that both Chinese and Australian journalists endeavour to reconstruct social order in the face of risk events mainly through building a shared feeling community. However, Chinese and Australian journalists strategically communicate emotions to construct different centres of social values. In Australian hard news, the centre of social values holding the nation together is construed through ordinary citizens, whereas in the Chinese context the centre is construed through power elites. The article argues that such different strategic rituals of emotionality are conditioned by the press conditions (e.g. tightening media budget, increasing press competition, and rising broadloidization), and that they reflect divergent stances undertaken by Chinese and Australian journalists.