Heterogeneous discursive representations of the Chinese Dream in international media: a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis

AbstractThe study focuses on the heterogeneous discursive representations of the Chinese Dream in three international newspapers from different geopolitical regions between 2012 and 2022. To this end, a combined method that uses the discourse-historical approach and corpus-assisted analysis was adopted. In the analysis, it identifies three salient discursive strategies (namely, nomination, perspectivisation and argumentation) that are employed to reconstruct/represent the national Dream differently in the three media. The findings suggest that the Chinese Dream is a floating discourse in media, and its portrayals strongly depend on the news institutions and their ideologies, stances and socio-political systems in which they are based and that the objective presentation of media is fragmented or an illusion, at least in the case of the mediatised Chinese Dream. The heterogeneous representations also show the features of discourse power struggle and ideological divergence in the media based in different geopolitical regions. The study contributes to the critical understanding of the Chinese Dream in the discursive world constructed by news media.Keywords: Corpus-assisted critical discourse analysisdiscourse-historical approachdiscursive strategymediatisationthe Chinese Dream AcknowledgementsThe authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments on an earlier version of this paper.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1 SCMP was acquired by Mainland China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba Group in 2016. Although SCMP is now owned by Alibaba and people concern that the newspaper would become a mouthpiece of the Chinese government, Alibaba’s vice chairman confirmed that the newspaper’s editorial independence would not change (Editorial, Citation2015).Additional informationNotes on contributorsJunchen ZhangJunchen Zhang received his doctoral degree in applied linguistics from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests include critical discourse studies, corpus linguistics, and social semiotics.Yating YuYating Yu is a research assistant professor at the Department of Communication, University of Macau. Her research interests are in gender studies, corpus linguistics, and critical discourse analysis. She has previously published in SSCI-indexed journals such as Social Semiotics, Gender and Language, and Feminist Media Studies.