TITLE:
A Diachronic Study of the Image of Rural China in American Mainstream Media
AUTHORS:
Yeying Pan
KEYWORDS:
Rural China, The New York Times, Image, Change
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.12 No.10,
October
30,
2024
ABSTRACT: Rural revitalization is an important strategy for promoting China’s modernization process and is key to the country’s future development. As a significant part of national image, understanding how Western media shapes the image of rural China is crucial for addressing Western media’s misunderstandings and for objectively promoting rural China. This paper combines corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to explore and analyze the construction and diachronic changes of the image of rural China in The New York Times. It categorizes the coverage of rural China from 1980 to 2024 into three phases and establishes three corpora. Through a diachronic analysis of the keywords, collocations and concordance lines, the study finds that The New York Times focuses on issues such as disease, women’s status, backward economic conditions, etc., thereby constructing an image of rural areas as impoverished, underdeveloped, and fraught with problems. This image has remained consistent across the three historical phases without significant changes.