Presentation of the texts for China

The data sources for China‘s perspective are also derived from two main sources: the print media, the China Daily and speeches by China‘s state leaders, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan. The China Daily, which was established on June 1, 1981, is the only national English-language newspaper in China circulated to both

126 China and abroad in more than 150 countries and regions. It is not only the most widely circulated Chinese newspaper among the majority of Western readers but also the most frequently quoted Chinese newspaper by international news media. According to its website (See also, Li, 2009), the China Daily is regarded as one of the country's most authoritative English media outlets and an important source of information on Chinese politic, economy, society and culture.

The China Daily is committed to helping the world know more about China and the country's integration with the international community. According to its website source, the newspaper is often called the ―Voice of China" or "Window to China‖. This is so, because the China Daily ―has been the most influential English language national newspaper in China since its first publication in 1981. Its language use provides a direct comparison with that in its American counterpart– the Washington Post‖ (Li, 2009, p. 87). For a basic reason, the China Daily is chosen because it ―plays an important role in creating China‘s national images and articulating the Chinese government‘s politics and foreign policy concerns and priorities to the international community‖ (Li, 2009, p. 87). Most important of all, the China Daily is chosen because it is a special newspaper for the production of Chinese nationalist ideologies (Stone, 1994).

The text sources for global economy from China‘s perspectives were retrieved from http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ and the China government‘s English website http://www.english.gov.cn/. The same key words were used for searching the data sources on global economy from China‘s perspective. (See Appendix B for data sources on global economy from China‘s perspectives). As with the U.S. sources of data, all these particular texts were selected because they are typical in their treatment of the subject of economic globalization. The analyst chooses the speeches of Prime Minister Wen Jiaboa and Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan, because it is Wen Jiaboa and Zeng Peiyan,

127 not other leaders of China, who often represent China in most of international economic agendas, for example at the World Economic Forum Annual Meetings and state visitations to foreign countries for the negotiation and cooperation of economic relations.

For the sake of systematic organization, one important factor needs reiteration in this section. In Chapter 1 the analyst has pointed out that the current study has three objectives to explore and six research questions to answer. The major questions include how the discourse of economic globalization is constructed in the texts, what ideology is naturalized in the texts on global economy, and how the populous countries such as the USA and China according to the two types of genres construct the discourse of global economy in texts. Using the theoretical framework we developed in Chapter 2 and its accompanying review of literature in Chapter 3 and the proposed analytical ‗tool box‘ we discussed above, we shall attempt to examine these questions in the following chapters.

The study will analyze the texts through a dialogue between disciplines, which is supported by the analytical tools and the CDA principles in connection to the signification and role of global economic discourse in society. The choice of the text extracts is based on its relevance to the objective of the study and the research questions. The extracts are in the form of sentences, clauses, phrases, words or larger linguistic constituents, paragraphs which construct ideas, enact social relation and embody beliefs, values and attitudes pertinent to economic discourse of globalization. The analyst describes and explains the extracts after careful and critical reading of each text. The extracts are verified in accordance with the rationale of study, the theoretical framework, and the developed analytical tools. To uncover the social and ideological

128 dimension, the analyst relies on the propositional analysis of the discourse which is supported by the textual analysis.

4.6 Chapter conclusion

Concluding the chapter, the analyst has discussed a number of principles in CDA research and proposed a set of analytical tools that he will use as the research perspective and guidelines for analyzing the discourse of global economy. The principles include the notion that discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory and that discourse analysis is a form of social action. The analytical tools include argumentation and vocabulary.

The analyst would like to restate that transdisciplinary CDA is basically aimed at enabling analysts to have access to the ontological and epistemological assumptions of social problems embedded in texts. By revealing the hidden motivations behind a social reality, in the form of texts, and making them explicit, the analyst is capable of viewing the problems from a higher stance and awareness. The accomplished objectives together with the political stance of the study are expected to be able to uncover a current social change.

The analyst anticipates that the principles, methods, and procedures explained above can direct the process of analysis including description, interpretation and explanation of the texts. As we have seen, the quasi-qualitative methods used by a discourse analyst to generate and collect empirical material share an important set of family resemblances with historical, ethnographic and anthropological forms of research. Critical discourse analysts thus gather primary data from a range of possible sources, which include surveys of newspapers, magazine articles, speeches, official reports, unofficial documents such as pamphlets, organizational minutes and agendas, personal

129 biographies and media representations such as television documentaries and films. For the purpose of this study, the research is concerned only with some of these sources.

It needs to be borne in mind that what the analyst has discussed in Section 4.3 above is not a ‗blue print‘ of analytical tools, since there is no standard way of doing CDA (van Dijk, 1993). Rather, what the analyst has attempted to propose is a set of analytical tools generated from a number of works in (critical) discourse analysis, which can support the exploration of what is at issue in this thesis.

CHAPTER 5