Author(s)

Lin Zhu

Department of College English, Zhejiang Yuexiu University, Shaoxing, China.

Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional and Van Dijk’s “ideological square” model of Critical Discourse Analysis, this study is aimed to analyze a self-built corpus which is comprised of 29 news reports extracted from western newspapers and 48 news reports from Chinese newspapers under the approach of the discursive practice, power and ideology. To that end, the analysis is conducted from the comparative analysis of keywords and key clusters lists, and collocations of “China is, China, China’s” and “US, U.S., western” portrayed in selected Chinese and western newspapers discourse. The findings demonstrate that both Chinese and western newspapers focused on Uyghur forced labor in Xinjiang cotton industry, with the exception that the keywords and key clusters in the western newspapers also include terms that were initially used to make claims about “forced labor” and “genocide” in Xinjiang. Under the guise of “human rights,” they fabricated the “political correctness” surrounding the Xinjiang issue and words to express the frustration of the brands in the Chinese market with the government’s actions and the newspapers’ attempts to blame the government and media for some brands’ decline in popularity, highlighting the state control in this case rather than the free choice of Chinese consumers. While the Chinese newspapers were mainly trying to debunk and dispel western countries’ and newspapers’ allegation of so-called “forced labor” on the one hand, find out and inform the audience of the facts and truth in Xinjiang cotton industry on the other hand. Adopting different discourse strategies when describing the two sides, the western newspapers clearly demeaned “the other” and portrayed China as the “enemy” of the U.S., while the Chinese newspapers sought to reveal the role of the U.S. and the true nature of Xinjiang Cotton Event, meanwhile presenting a strong condemnation and explicitly stating that there is no room for negotiation or compromise on the issue of Xinjiang.

Xinjiang Cotton, Corpus-Based, Newspaper Discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis

Zhu, L. (2023) A Corpus-Based Analysis of Chinese and Western Newspaper Discourse on Xinjiang Cotton: A Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 13, 451-469. doi: 10.4236/ojml.2023.133028.