`Riots' and Demonstrations in the Chinese Press: A Case Study of Language and Ideology

Abstract

This paper examines some of the rhetorical strategies employed by Renmin Ribao (People's Daily) in reports of `riots' and demonstrations, specifically incidents in which the police or the authorities took action against the `rioters' and demonstrators. The corpus included news articles (between 1980 and 1991) which dealt with the following two categories of countries: (1) governments considered hostile by the People's Republic of China (PRC), e.g. South Africa and Israel; (2) governments with which the PRC has always maintained cordial relations, e.g. Chile, Venezuela, Argentina, Nepal and Algeria. It is hypothesized that the coverage of events in these two categories of countries will be different because of the ideological framework in which the mass media operate. It is expected that the labels given to the event and the syntactic structures used in the reports will provide a frame of reference that is congruent with the views of policy-makers in the PRC. The findings here lend support to the theory that lexical choices and syntactic options are not arbitrary. The ideological position assumed by the People's Daily may be manifested in the aforementioned structures in the news reports.