Understanding National Identity Construction in China-ASEAN Business Discourse

Abstract

Few studies have investigated national identity construction in a diachronic and holistic manner. To address this gap, in applying constructivist views of international relations and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper analyzes business news titles of Chinese and ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations) country mainstream media to reveal identities that both parties construct of one another and relationships between discourse and identity construction. Findings suggest that ASEAN identities constructed by Chinese media are positive and complimentary, demonstrating its adherence to foreign policies of neighborliness and friendship. However, ASEAN countries develop a range of contradictory identities toward China. This paper concludes that such discourse manifests and constructs national identities and shapes international relations. The paper also proposes that in facing passive identities constructed by ASEAN countries China must construct a clear discourse theory to make its voice heard, project China’s stance on the international stage, respond actively to skepticism, and construct images of peace, development, and friendship.

A corpus-based discourse analysis of China’s national image constructed by environmental news in The New York Times

“…When researching the construction of image discourse, some scholars utilize analyzing tools and approaches such as the discourse-semantic systems in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory, the discourse-historical approach in (CDA), and conceptual metaphors theory, combined with in-depth interviews and small focus groups, to investigate how China's national image and identity is discursively constructed and promoted externally to an international audience (Shao, 2017;Liu and Chang, 2021;Ban and Pan, 2020;Yuan et al, 2022;Zhang, 2022). To gain a comprehensive and diachronic understanding of China's national image, scholars (Kim, 2014;Zhang and Wu, 2017;Yuan et al, 2022;Zhang, 2022) often employ a corpus-based CDA approach to identify universal and frequent characteristics of China's image across the entire corpus by examining collocational and other recurrent patterns associated with specific lexical items. Meanwhile, a critical discourse analysis-informed approach is deemed most suitable for scrutinizing specific stretches of text to locate the typical and recurrent linguistic patterns in the context.…”

Research hotspots and frontiers of ethnic cultural identity——based on analysis of “web of science” database

“…Cultural identity is an individual’s recognition of a group’s attitudes, feelings, degree of belonging ( Berry et al, 1989 ), ideals and values ( Schwartz et al, 2006 ), and other social identities such as class, nationality and race, which is of enormous importance to a culture’s unity, consensus and self-confidence ( Villarroya, 2012 ; Över, 2016 ; C. Zhang et al, 2019 ; Zhang et al, 2021 ; Azada-Palacios, 2022 ). It is the foundation of cultural self-confidence, national stability and unity for a country to enhance its cultural identity ( Schwartz et al, 2006 ; Li et al, 2015 ; Waechter, 2015 ; Yuan et al, 2022 ). However, numerous studies have shown that it is not easy to construct cultural identity ( Minnaert, 2014 ; Van Der Zwet, 2016 ; Grajzl et al, 2018 ; Chitima, 2022 ).…”