“China’s Foreign Aid” and “China’s National Image” in the Eyes of Foreign Media: A Corpus-Based Discourse-Historical Analysis

Chinas foreign aid implements the concept of a community with a shared future for mankind and promotes the common progress of China and developing countries. News about Chinas foreign aid released by foreign media is quite significant for overseas audiences to perceive Chinas image. This study adopts Ruth Wodaks discourse-historical approach and corpus-based method to interpret foreign news reports on Chinas foreign aid. The macro-level news themes, meso-level discourse strategies and national images, as well as micro-level discourse features are explained with examples. Research shows that news themes reveal the objects, fields and methods of Chinas foreign aid. Foreign media widely adopt discourse strategies of nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivation, intensification and mitigation to shape China as a friendly international donor. A few characteristics of news discourse indicate that several media misunderstand or smear Chinas foreign aid, which has a negative impact on Chinas international public opinion environment. Therefore, building an effective external voice platform to convey Chinas international responsibilities and contributions is necessary, which helps establish a favorable international public opinion environment for Chinas development and call on other countries to make efforts to reduce human poverty.