Media Reports on China’s Economy: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Today, the news reports by the mainstream media in Britain and the United States play an important role in the international arena. As a research area of critical discourse analysis, news discourse has attracted much attention. This study selected research materials from a series of reports by The Economist, a well-known international business and finance magazine, on China’s economic development. The appraisal theory and its three subsystems are used as the analysis framework. The study explores the discourse resource choices and the characteristics of the magazine’s evaluation resources in its economic reports on China. By analyzing and understanding the evaluation resources of foreign media on China’s economy reports, the study attempts to demonstrate the implicit messages behind the discourse resources so as to help the readers better understand the evaluation of foreign media on China’s economy, and analyze the channels for their realization, so as to improve readers’ critical reading ability.