A contrastive critical discourse analysis of news reports on Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in China Daily and The Washington Post

Abstract

China and the United States have been engaged in a period of intense rivalry and strategic competition in the last decade (Heath, 2021). Taiwan, as the most sensitive powder keg in the Asia-Pacific and the redline issue in China-US relations, has long been the front line of China-US tensions. Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the US House of Representatives, paid a high-profile visit to Taiwan on August 2, 2022. Her controversial visit stirred up a new wave of geo-political tensions across the Taiwan Straits and received extensive media coverage, especially by Chinese and American newspapers. To understand how the event is evaluated by news media, editorials and op-ed articles serve as good channels for the editorial board and columnists to evaluate news events and convey dominant ideologies (van Dijk, 1996, 1998c). Utilizing the three-dimensional CDA model, the present study intends to explore the legitimization strategies (Reyes, 2011) deployed by China Daily and The Washington Post through use of the Appraisal resources (Martin & White, 2005), and to reveal the dominant ideologies which these legitimization strategies further construct and reproduce. Quantitative and qualitative analyses suggest that both CD and WaPo deployed a wide range of Appraisal resources to (de)legitimize the visit through a hypothetical future, emotions and rationality. Legitimization through the past, a new type of strategy, was also identified in the present study. As for dominant ideologies, CD constructed an aggressive and assertive variant of nationalism – state-led popular nationalism, focusing on mobilizing public sentiments and construing an extremely negative image of the US, while WaPo expressed liberal internationalism, which emphasizes the universal values of liberal democracies and also has a strong element of interventionism on the Taiwan issue.