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Representation of Social Actors in Financial times Report on China’s Panda Diplomacy

Received: 27 February 2020     Accepted: 10 March 2020     Published: 15 May 2020
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Abstract

Communicators have a range of referential options to represent individuals and groups, who in Critical Discourse Analysis are often termed “social actors” or “participants”. These choices allow communicators to place people in the social world and highlight certain aspects of their identity while downplaying others. Choosing one social category instead of another means foregrounding certain features and backgrounding others, leading to different views and interpretations of the persons represented. This paper takes a quantitative study of the social actors represented in Jamil Anderlini’s article on China’s panda diplomacy published in the Financial Times, identifying and analyzing referential strategies adopted in representing participants involved in the social practice, mainly focusing on the discussion of such representation means as inclusion/exclusion, assimilation/ individualization, association/dissociation and their indications for the revelation of the writer’s attitudes, beliefs and political stance. The study reveals that the writer’s representation of participants tends to be bi-polarized, holding sharply different attitudes towards the main social actors—China, foreign countries and zoos, researchers and FT, depicting China as a crafty, deceptive, and intimidating manipulator of panda diplomacy while other countries as innocent, ignorant and helpless victims. This difference can be partly explained by Teun van Dijk’s “ideological square” in which China is a typical out-group, emphasized as a communist, authoritarian country in opposition to the democratic West to which the writer belongs.

Published in International Journal of Literature and Arts (Volume 8, Issue 4)
DOI 10.11648/j.ijla.20200804.14
Page(s) 196-205
Creative Commons

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.

Copyright

Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Science Publishing Group

Keywords

Representation, Social Actors, Ideology, Panda Diplomacy, Critical Discourse Analysis

References
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[3] Shambaugh, David. (2013, March 5). China Is 'Obsessed' with Soft Power [Video]. Retrieved fromhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucn33Lgkrow.
[4] Nye, Joseph S. (2016, April 28). Is China’s soft power strategy working? [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6nkFbQ_3LY.
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[6] Hubbert, Jennifer. (2014, February 28). The Globalization of Chinese Soft Power [Video]. Retrieved fromhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-ha6sOUIEY.
[7] Fenby, Jonathan. (2017, November 29). China’s chances of global dominance. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/28/chinas-chances-of-global-dominance.
[8] Jeffrey, Simon. (2005, February 23). China's growing soft power. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2005/feb/23/chinasgrowing.
[9] Ford, Liz. (2013, April 30). China: soft power and hard cash in Africa, plus the real value of aid. The Guardian. Retrieved fromhttps://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/apr/30/china-soft-power-hard-cash-africa.
[10] Financial Times series— China: the soft superpower. Financial Times. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/china-soft-superpower.
[11] Anderlini, Jamil. (2017, November 2). How the panda became China’s diplomatic weapon of choice. Financial Times. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/8a04a532-be92-11e7-9836-b25f8adaa111.
[12] Reisigl, Martin and Wodak, Ruth, Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of racism and antisemitism. London and New York: Routledge, 2011, p. 49.
[13] Van Leeuwen, T., “The Representation of Social Actors,” in Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard Eds. London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 32-70.
[14] Van Leeuwen, T. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 23-54.
[15] Yan Qilin and Li Yongzhong. (2017). The Recontextualization of News Discourse. Foreign Language Research, 197: 63-67.
[16] Zhang Hui and Zhang Bo. (2019). The Representation of Social Actors in the Online News Articles Regarding Trump-Kim 2018 Summit in Singapore: A Critical Discourse Analysis. Journal of Yancheng Institute of Technology, 32: 71-76.
[17] Chaemsaithong, Krisda. (2019a). Names and Identities in Courtroom Narratives. Names, 67: 185-198.
[18] Chaemsaithong, Krisda. (2019b). Deconstructing Competing Courtroom Narratives: Representation of Social Actors. Social Semiotics, 29: 240–260.
[19] Fairclough, Norman, “CDA as a Dialectical Reasoning,” in The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson Eds. London and New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 13-25.
[20] Machin, David and Mayr, Andrea, How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction. London: Sage publications Ltd., 2012, p. 84.
[21] Van Dijk, Teun A, “Discourse as Interaction in Society,” in Discourse as Social Interaction, Teun A. Van Dijk Ed. London: Sage Publications, 1998, pp. 181-205.
[22] Richardson, John E, Analyzing Newspapers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 80.
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Cite This Article
  • APA Style

    Peng Na. (2020). Representation of Social Actors in Financial times Report on China’s Panda Diplomacy. International Journal of Literature and Arts, 8(4), 196-205. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijla.20200804.14

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    ACS Style

    Peng Na. Representation of Social Actors in Financial times Report on China’s Panda Diplomacy. Int. J. Lit. Arts 2020, 8(4), 196-205. doi: 10.11648/j.ijla.20200804.14

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    AMA Style

    Peng Na. Representation of Social Actors in Financial times Report on China’s Panda Diplomacy. Int J Lit Arts. 2020;8(4):196-205. doi: 10.11648/j.ijla.20200804.14

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  • @article{10.11648/j.ijla.20200804.14,
      author = {Peng Na},
      title = {Representation of Social Actors in Financial times Report on China’s Panda Diplomacy},
      journal = {International Journal of Literature and Arts},
      volume = {8},
      number = {4},
      pages = {196-205},
      doi = {10.11648/j.ijla.20200804.14},
      url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijla.20200804.14},
      eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ijla.20200804.14},
      abstract = {Communicators have a range of referential options to represent individuals and groups, who in Critical Discourse Analysis are often termed “social actors” or “participants”. These choices allow communicators to place people in the social world and highlight certain aspects of their identity while downplaying others. Choosing one social category instead of another means foregrounding certain features and backgrounding others, leading to different views and interpretations of the persons represented. This paper takes a quantitative study of the social actors represented in Jamil Anderlini’s article on China’s panda diplomacy published in the Financial Times, identifying and analyzing referential strategies adopted in representing participants involved in the social practice, mainly focusing on the discussion of such representation means as inclusion/exclusion, assimilation/ individualization, association/dissociation and their indications for the revelation of the writer’s attitudes, beliefs and political stance. The study reveals that the writer’s representation of participants tends to be bi-polarized, holding sharply different attitudes towards the main social actors—China, foreign countries and zoos, researchers and FT, depicting China as a crafty, deceptive, and intimidating manipulator of panda diplomacy while other countries as innocent, ignorant and helpless victims. This difference can be partly explained by Teun van Dijk’s “ideological square” in which China is a typical out-group, emphasized as a communist, authoritarian country in opposition to the democratic West to which the writer belongs.},
     year = {2020}
    }
    

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    AB  - Communicators have a range of referential options to represent individuals and groups, who in Critical Discourse Analysis are often termed “social actors” or “participants”. These choices allow communicators to place people in the social world and highlight certain aspects of their identity while downplaying others. Choosing one social category instead of another means foregrounding certain features and backgrounding others, leading to different views and interpretations of the persons represented. This paper takes a quantitative study of the social actors represented in Jamil Anderlini’s article on China’s panda diplomacy published in the Financial Times, identifying and analyzing referential strategies adopted in representing participants involved in the social practice, mainly focusing on the discussion of such representation means as inclusion/exclusion, assimilation/ individualization, association/dissociation and their indications for the revelation of the writer’s attitudes, beliefs and political stance. The study reveals that the writer’s representation of participants tends to be bi-polarized, holding sharply different attitudes towards the main social actors—China, foreign countries and zoos, researchers and FT, depicting China as a crafty, deceptive, and intimidating manipulator of panda diplomacy while other countries as innocent, ignorant and helpless victims. This difference can be partly explained by Teun van Dijk’s “ideological square” in which China is a typical out-group, emphasized as a communist, authoritarian country in opposition to the democratic West to which the writer belongs.
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Author Information
  • School of English for International Business, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China

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