Since its debut in 2013, “The Belt and Road Initiative” (hereafter BRI) has drawn great attention at home and abroad. Nevertheless, there have been few studies pertaining to the image of BRI in the eyes of western media. Based on the English news collected from LexisNexis news database, this paper builds the “The Belt and Road Initiative Corpus” (hereafter BRIC) and attempts to investigate how BRI is represented in the western media. Concordance analysis is used to reveal the overall attitudes of western countries towards BRI and cluster analysis scrutinizes each individual attitude towards BRI and clusters the media with similar attitudes in the same category. In addition, keyword analysis explores different focuses on BRI from British, American, German, Australian, and New Zealand's media. It finds that (1) while a few western media intentionally misinterpret BRI and deem it as a manifestation of China's ambition to dominate the world, most of them hold positive attitudes towards BRI; (2) media of America and some countries of the British Commonwealth, such as Australia and Canada, sometimes have negative view towards BRI. On the contrary, those countries along the route, especially central and eastern European countries, are inclined to have positive view; (3) western countries vary in their focus on BRI based on their national and economic interest and ideology respectively.
SHAO Bin, CAI Yingying, YU Xiaoyan
. A Corpus-based Study on the Representation of “The Belt and Road Initiative” in the Western Media[J]. Contemporary Foreign Languages Studies, 2018
, 18(04)
: 40
-48
.
DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.1674-8921.2018.04.003
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