Title: Discursive Construction of Digital Economy in Chinese and Western Media Discourses: A Contrastive Study

Abstract: Based on the lexical model of Extended Units of Meaning and the category of keyword, this study explores how the digital economy is constructed in Chinese and Western media discourses. It finds that: 1) both Chinese and Western media support the development of the digital economy through their policies, and Chinese media represents the digital economy in a more macroscopic way, while Western media focuses more on certain specific aspects; 2) the topic of Chinese media is usually on the development of the digital economy in developing countries, but much of Western media’s attention is directed at countries with large population and power like China and India; 3) American media is more concerned with Asian countries, thinking that China’s rapid development in digital economy is a threat to its economic position; and 4) Western media discourses focus on different aspects of the digital economy, reflecting the respective development priorities of these countries. By merging corpus-driven textual analysis with critical discourse analysis, this study offers a viable approach to corpus discourse studies.

Keywords: digital economy, media discourse, corpora

Authors: Ruihua Zhang, Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Tianjin University of Science and Technology, Tianjin, China; Zerui Liu, School of Foreign Languages, Tianjin University of Science and Technology, Tianjin, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2022.03.014