The construction of the Chinese image from the perspective of others in the post-truth era——A Frame and Semiotic analysis of BBC’s reports of the Beijing Winter Olympics

Abstract

News reports are significant for constructing a country’s image in the international community. The frame analysis of Western media coverage of China is quite popular. With the arrival of the Beijing Winter Olympics, which stands as another historical moment in the processing of China’s external image, disputed issues in China have surfaced again in the Western media. In the context of the new media, there still exists a research gap on the new characteristics of Western media when reporting China and the resulting recent changes in China's image. To fill this gap in the literature, based on the semiotic theory and framing theory, this dissertation has selected the 16 reports and their corresponding Twitter comments on the Beijing Winter Olympics which were published by the British news agency BBC in January - February 2022. By utilizing the AntConc to establish corpus and text analysis, it shall investigate from the perspective of others the discourse construction characteristics of Western media and the Chinese image from the three components of communication theme, text content, and audience feedback. The research results have presented that the Western media represented by the BBC cannot eliminate ideological stereotypes in the discourse construction of the "other" (China). The intention of the report is tendentious. Its reporting news frame is based on inherent prejudice and the opinion tendency to incite Public Opinion. Thus, it has resulted in the formation of a Chinese image of “high-pressure coercion” and “ignoring human rights” from the perspective of the other. Therefore, this dissertation adopts China as an example to propose the media cross-cultural international communication strategy of expanding the discourse subject, updating the symbol system and absorbing the folk discourse.