My PhD student, Dr Yingjie Wang, successfully defended her dissertation on December 7 2023. Supervised together with Prof Gisela Redeker, Dr Wang defended expertly!
Abstract. “Made in China” (MIC) is a country-of-origin label attached to the products manufactured in the People’s Republic of China. It has come to symbolize global trade dominance and China’s rapidly expanding economy in the past decades. This dissertation focuses on the representation of MIC in major Chinese English-language and US newspapers between 2006 and 2018. It presents four studies. The first two studies used a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze relevant articles in the Chinese and US newspapers. Using the software tools #LancsBox and MAXQDA, I categorized topics and attitudes related to MIC from wordlists and collocates. I also applied the three-dimensional framework of the Discourse-Historical Approach to demonstrate the discursive strategies and linguistic devices involved in the representation. The third study compared the representations of MIC based on the quantitative results in the previous two studies. It revealed the similarities and differences in language patterns and the underlying ideologies that are dependent on socio-political contexts. The events of Chinese product scandals in 2007 and the US-China trade conflict in 2018 significantly influenced the news discourse. Guided by the findings of the corpus-based studies, the fourth study used framing theory and CDA to qualitatively analyze the representation of MIC in the 2007 Mattel toy recalls. In general, the findings reveal significant differences in representing MIC. They substantiate and expand the previous studies regarding the consistently negative representation of MIC in US news reporting, and contribute to our understanding of the ideological underpinnings of US-Chinese trade relations.
You can read the dissertation here.