A Corpus-Based Analysis of Chinese and Western Newspaper Discourse on Xinjiang Cotton: A Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective ()
1. Introduction
Xinjiang Cotton Event of 2021, also known as Xinjiang Cotton Wave and Xinjiang Cotton Storm, is a domestic boycott movement that began in March 2021. It began with the controversy over a statement issued by Swedish fashion company H & M on March 24, 2021, in response to Western media reports and allegations of “forced labor” of Uyghurs, stating that it would not work with any garment manufacturing factories in Xinjiang and would not source products or raw materials from the region. Many apparel companies have issued statements not to use raw materials or products from Xinjiang for similar reasons, and this has led to a unanimous mobilization from the official media and private sector in China to support Xinjiang cotton and boycott companies that abandon it. The incident caused a number of mainland Chinese companies to withdraw from the Better Cotton Institute (BCI), which became a Chinese boycott of foreign goods, the largest boycott since 2012.
Xinjiang’s cotton output accounts for 87.3% of China’s cotton output, which is the important component of China’s textile industry. Xinjiang cotton was boycotted, foreign brands can use the upstream competitive position to prohibit the use of Xinjiang cotton products, so as to curb Xinjiang cotton production capacity. As a result, China’s textile industry chain will fracture and will be controlled by others because raw materials rely on imports. The incident will not only seriously affect the economic development of the Xinjiang region, but also seriously threaten the social development and stability of the Xinjiang region of China. Xinjiang Cotton Event is a premeditated attack against our country’s export trade and the unity of the whole nation. Xinjiang Cotton Event detonated by H & M has gone far beyond its brand’s own behavior to the level of national diplomacy. Xinjiang Cotton Event seems to be a commercial crisis, but the deep political view behind it and the contention with the international discourse power is the focus that cannot be ignored.
In any society, there is a link between ideology and the discourse structure of the media, and the mass media (newspapers) are the tools of ideological communication in society because they take different positions according to their respective interests when facing the same issue (Ghassemi & Hemmatgosha, 2019) . Given the important influence of the news media in shaping the mindset of the people in society, it is of great practical importance to study Xinjiang cotton news between China and western countries. This study is to peer into how Xinjiang Cotton Event, which has become a wide-spread controversial issue and aroused public’s deep concern, was portrayed in Chinese and western news report by exploring the following three questions: 1) How do the mainstream newspapers in China and western countries argue for the justification of their respective side’s own behavior in Xinjiang Cotton Event? 2) How do the mainstream newspapers in China and western countries depict both sides in Xinjiang cotton news? 3) What are the ideological roots reflected in the news of Xinjiang Cotton Event in the mainstream newspapers of China and western countries?
2. Corpus-Based Approaches to Critical Discourse Analysis
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is “a research framework devoted to the relationship among language, power, and ideology” (Fairclough, 2005) , which reveals the dialectical relationship between social reality and discursive practices. CDA differs from other discourse analyses in that, in addition to describing discourse itself, it emphasizes linking language and society and exposing the ideology behind it through discourse features (Li & Zhang, 2015) . The corpus-based CDA combines quantitative analysis with qualitative description by incorporating the advantages of corpus linguistics and CDA, consequently reducing the influence of researchers on the research results due to subjective factors, and improving the objectivity of the research (Hu & Li, 2015) . In addition, through a large amount of authentic, valid and reliable materials in the corpus and in-depth analysis of textual data, researchers are able to uncover discourse phenomena and discourse features that are easily overlooked. Baker (2006) provided a landmark overview of corpus approaches in discourse research with case studies. Subsequently, Baker et al. (2008, 2013) proposed a corpus-based discourse analysis framework after a large number of empirical studies, marking the maturity of this approach.
The news media influence the society at large through news coverage, manipulating and influencing people’s thoughts and beliefs, such as their patterns of thinking about specific events, or their perceptions, attitudes and ideologies about important social events; indirectly, the aim is to control people’s behavior, so that they act according to such emotional beliefs (e.g., voting, buying, marching and struggling, etc.) (Van Dijk, 2017) . Van Dijk (2011) points out that one of the main strategies for ideological discursive control in discourse is the visualization of group relations in the ideological schema, how “I” and “the other” are depicted in discourse, and thus the model of “ideological square” is proposed. It is formulated in four ways: 1) emphasizing the strengths of “I”; 2) emphasizing the weaknesses of “the other”; 3) weakening the weaknesses of “I”; and 4) weakening the strengths of “the other”. In “ideological square”, “I” tend to glorify themselves and vilify “the other” (opponents, competitors, or dissenters).
Based on Fairclough’s and Van Dijk’s CDA theory, combined with corpus-based linguistic approach, this study aims to analyze the socio-cultural and ideological roots behind the different discourse characteristics of the public opinion war of Xinjiang cotton between China and western countries through a comparative analysis of the linguistic features of China and western countries. The news coverage of Xinjiang cotton by the mainstream newspapers in China and western countries will be influenced by the economic and political environment of their respective countries, which affects how they report on “I” and “the other” in the opinion war, which in turn affects the public perception of “I” and “the other” in both sides, and even the normalization of economic and political relations between China and western countries.
3. Research Design
3.1. Data Collection
Western newspapers in this study were obtained from Google news report. “Xinjiang cotton” was used as the keyword to search the news reports limited exclusively from September, 2020 to May, 2023. Finally, 29 English-language news articles from several western mainstream newspapers including New York Times (12 articles), BBC (10 articles), the Guardian (5 articles), Financial Times (2 articles) were chosen to construct a self-built Xinjiang cotton subcorpus (XjCS) of western newspapers with 26,104 tokens. Likewise, 48 articles for XjCS of Chinese newspapers for this study were sourced from the websites of Chinese mainstream newspapers like Global Times (21 articles), China Daily (12 articles), Xinhuanet (8 articles), and CGTN (7 articles), with “Xinjiang cotton” being the search keyword. In order to reduce the size difference of the two subcorpora, XjCS of Chinese newspapers consisted of 48 English-language news articles of 27,303 tokens.
3.2. Research Methods
Corpus linguistic techniques can identify discourse strategies that are repeatedly used in news discourse to construct and perpetuate news value ideologies. This study uses a qualitative and quantitative approach with the help of the corpus analysis tool Wordsmith Tools 7 to explore how the Chinese and western newspapers justify their respective behaviors through statistical analysis of key words and key clusters, and then explore how the newspapers of China and western countries describe the two sides in Xinjiang Cotton Event by analyzing the words that go together with China and US to reveal the socio-cultural and ideological differences reflected behind them. Finally, we explore the ideological roots of the differences between China and western countries.
First, the BNC (English National Corpus) was used as a reference corpus to generate a list of keywords and a list of key clusters for Xinjiang cotton news in Chinese and western newspapers respectively. The keywords are the words that appear more frequently when comparing the text and the word list. Identifying words with high, low and statistically significant frequencies helps to identify and explore linguistic ideologies in the corpus. Key clusters are wordlists of cluster of words, rather than single words. Keywords and key clusters with high frequency of occurrence are important components of the messages that news media want to disseminate to the public, and they can reflect the focus and ideological characteristics behind the respective concerns of the Chinese and western news media. Second, we used Wordsmith Tools 7 software to search for the concordance of “China is, China, China’s” and “US, U.S., western”, and then counted the subsequent epithets. We also analyzed how the media in both sides portrayed “the other” in the context of the “ideological square” model. Finally, the ideological roots behind the different discursive strategies of Chinese and western newspapers are explored.
4. Result and Discussion
4.1. Comparative Analysis of Keywords
Public opinion is the battlefield. In the course of Xinjiang Cotton Event between China and western countries, the newspapers of both sides use various discourse strategies in their news reports to propagate public opinion and to gain public support. How do the newspapers in China and western countries argue for the justification of their own initiatives in Xinjiang Cotton Event respectively? By examining the “keywords” of Xinjiang cotton news in both sides, we can understand what many Xinjiang cotton stories in both sides emphasize to the public and what kind of perceptions and attitudes they want to shape.
A “keyword” is a word that has a significantly higher frequency compared to a certain standard, and the degree of the higher frequency is the “keyness” of the keyword. According to this definition, the target corpus is compared with a reference corpus, and the words with high frequency in the target corpus are the keywords of the target corpus, and the measurement of keyword’s keyness is also based on the statistics of the reference corpus. Extracting keywords from a large amount of information can help us unravel the complicated surface to dig out the essence of the problem effectively. By using certain words repeatedly and frequently, the news media often allows these words to influence and shape the audience’s perception of an issue. In this paper, we analyze the meaning of keywords to explore the political and ideological meaning behind the Xinjiang cotton discourse in Chinese and western newspapers.
According to Scott (1997) , keyword lists tend to turn up three categories of words: proper nouns, “aboutness” keywords, and grammatical words. In other words, a keyword analysis and an examination of the relationships between the keywords can be used to characterize the corpora’s overall aboutness. Concordance lines will be used in this article to facilitate the investigation of the keywords. Our goal in employing keyword analysis is to evaluate the aboutness of XjCS of western and Chinese newspapers.
By adopting WordSmith Tools 7, 332 keywords from XjCS of western newspapers and 391 keywords from XjCS of Chinese newspapers were extracted by comparing these two self-built subcorpora with the British National Corpus (BNC) in turn. The keywords lists were compared in order to uncover the main issues discussed in the western press and China’s press regarding Xinjiang cotton from September, 2020 to May, 2023. This required more in-depth qualitative analyses of individual keywords via providing concordance lines in order to determine why they occur in the XjCS of western and Chinese newspapers respectively. The focus of keywords analysis in this study will be on the proper nouns and lexical words, which are more significant. 25 most frequent keywords occurred in these two subcorpora are listed in Table 1.
As shown in Table 1, the first column (N) simply number the keywords in the order that they are presented (they are ordered here in terms of keyword strength). The second and fifth columns list each keyword in XjCS of western and Chinese newspapers. The third and sixth columns (Freq.) give the frequencies of each keyword as it occurred in the XjCS of western and Chinese
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Table 1. Keywords list of two XjCSs when P < 0.000001.
newspapers. The fourth and seventh columns assign a keyness value to each word; the higher the score, the stronger the keyness of that word, whereas the final column gives the P value of each word in these two subcorpora. Nearly every number in this column is 0.000000 since P is set so low here. In light of this, the keyness value provides a more gradable representation of the strength of each word in the table. Keywords in two subcorpora can be categorized into following three groups as shown in Table 2.
Obviously, Table 2 shows that the first group is the common keywords that shared in XjCS of western and Chinese newspapers: Xinjiang, cotton, labor, Chinese, China, forced, brands, Uyghur (Uygur), apparel, China’s, global, products and region. Theses common keywords indicate that both subcorpora focus their attention on forced labor of Uyghur in Xinjiang cotton industry of China in both western and Chinese newspapers. There is no doubt that on behalf of China and US, the western and Chinese media are disputing with each other on whether or not Uyghurs are used as forced labor in the process of cotton plantation and picking in Xinjiang region.
While a keyword, brands, appears in both corpora with a significant difference in frequency-119 times in western newspapers and 52 times in Chinese newspapers. Further investigation reveals that western newspapers devote a large portion of the coverage to how and why some well-known international apparel brands, like H & M, Nike, and Adidas, took a stance to support the exclusion of cotton produced in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region amid widespread concerns about the use of forced labor in Xinjiang, and how they struggled to ensure their supply chains are free of raw material from Xinjiang or how they have been forced to perform to ensure they are not complicit with human rights abuses in Xinjiang while maintaining a commercial presence in China, embellishing the report with stories about how these international brands and companies made themselves a target of widespread condemnation by Chinese consumers, influencers, celebrities and governments, and how Chinese governments led the boycott campaign against these brands and how other government-backed groups and state news outlets fanned the flames. For this reason, such keywords as Nike, chains, rights, supply, companies, ban, suppliers, Adidas, Esquel, Uyghurs, said, and Uighurs were found in the XjCS of western newspapers.
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Table 2. Classification of keywords in XjCS of western and Chinese newspapers.
From the keywords in Chinese newspapers, percent, Xinjiang’s, textile, US, Mu, autonomous, Yuan, mechanization, planting, industry, prefecture, and domestic, it makes clear that Chinese newspapers provide the public with abundant reports on large-scale mechanization of cotton production and continuous mechanization services from spring sowing to harvest in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, personal experiences of cotton growers and workers from the textile and garment industry in the Region, and cotton-related enterprises in the region expressing confidence in the development of local cotton textile industry as they have recorded improving businesses, because Mu, units for measuring an area of land, are used to calculate cotton yield per Mu, and combined with Yuan to measure the earning and income of farmers per Mu; percent is use to inform the degree of mechanization in Xinjiang, the rate of Xinjiang textile company’s revenue increase and farmers’ income increase, share of Xinjiang cotton output in the world, etc. Therefore, based on facts, reasons and evidence, Chinese newspapers have successfully debunked and dispelled allegations of “forced labor” in the region and denounce groundless sanctions imposed by some western countries led by US, presenting a thriving Xinjiang with great political, economic and social achievements in these decades to the public, disclosing the fact that although western brands claim to have no political affiliation, in reality they have been used as a political tool by the US and western countries to intimidate them into leaving Xinjiang and attempt to forcibly exclude Xinjiang from the global supply chain.
4.2. Comparative Analysis of Key Clusters
In news reports, in order to emphasize their own position, some words in the news will appear frequently, causing some fixed impression retention to the audience. Intentional voice use and selective content presentation can guide the audience to produce different views. Using Wordsmith Tools 7, it is possible to derive wordlists of clusters of words, rather than single words. Word clusters refer to multiple word units that occur continuously in a text. By looking at word clusters, researchers can identify both words that frequently co-occur with nodal words and clusters of words that recur in the text, which helps researchers better reveal the attitudes and ideologies behind the words. 26 most frequent key clusters occurred in these two subcorpora are listed in Table 3.
Table 3 shows that the top concerns for western newspapers are forced labor, Xinjiang cotton, supply chains. The issue is crystal evident at this point. A number of anti-China organizations from the US and the West are launching a broad, all-encompassing “coercion campaign” in response to the alleged using Uyghur forced labor in Xinjiang cotton industry. Such key clusters as rights violations, Uyghur forced, Uyghur labor, right abuses, rights groups, Muslim minorities, and minority groups occurring so frequently in western media, reveal that some western countries use their habitual “human rights”, “religion” and other words to attempt to cause a series of chain reactions with the Xinjiang
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Table 3. Key clusters list of two XjCSs.
Cotton Event, transferring their own crisis and interfering with China’s internal affairs. From the accounts of western newspapers, especially the frequent use of key clusters, like United States, Xinjiang region, Chinese government, Chinese consumers, UK government, and Trump administration, indicates that we can see Xinjiang cotton public opinion war as the political and economic game between China and the United States, especially between US and Chinese government. Through above discourse analysis combined with key clusters like apparel brands, clothing brands, and raw material, the common points existing in the selected foreign newspapers can be summarized: mainly for the frustration of the brands in the Chinese market and the behavior of the Chinese government and the media. This shows the impact of the foreign media’s attempts to attribute the lost popularity of some brands to the Chinese government and media propaganda behavior, highlighting the state control rather than the independent choice of Chinese consumers.
Facing the western newspapers’ smear, in particular allegations of “forced labor” in Xinjiang region and groundless sanctions of western newspapers, Chinese newspapers uses above key clusters to effectively make following points, firstly using key clusters like China’s Xinjiang, China’s autonomous, China’s region, China’s Uygur, and Northwest China’s to swear China’s sovereignty over Xinjiang region, secondly using Autonomous region, Uygur autonomous, and China’s autonomous to emphasize that Xinjiang is an autonomous region where Uyghurs are the master of the land, thirdly using cotton fields, cotton production, textile industry, cotton output, cotton industry, and million tons to provide the public with hard evidence of facts and statistics about the development and achievements of cotton industry in Xinjiang region which can convince the public of no use of so-called forced labor at all in Xinjiang cotton industry. Xinjiang isn’t in the midst of a so-called “genocide”, but a historically unprecedented socio-economic revolution for the purpose of sustainable development. Starting from the whole, Chinese newspapers use the latest official statistics to directly show the economic and social development and achievements of Xinjiang in recent years, in the hope that the audience can draw the same conclusion as their own. In their reports, they use factual evidence, films and data related to Xinjiang’s development achievements in the last decade to strongly counter Western newspapers’ unsubstantiated reports and groundless slanders, in particular US newspapers.
4.3. How to Describe Each Other of the Two Sides
From Table 1 and Table 2, it can be found that China is a keyword both in XjCS of Chinese and western newspapers, while US is a keyword particular for XjCS of Chinese newspapers. Moreover, Xinjiang cotton public opinion war is the game between China and the United States, therefore the news coverage of Xinjiang cotton in the Chinese and western newspapers mainly revolves around US accusation of the forced labor in Xinjiang against China, and applies language strategies that are in line with their own interests to portray the other side of the accusation. How do the mainstream newspapers in China and western countries portray the other side of Xinjiang Cotton Event and how do they construct the image of the other side to influence the perception of the public? To find the answer to this question, we need to compare the newspapers’ portrayal of “the other” and compare the language strategies used by both sides. Therefore, the following is an analysis of what words are used to describe “the other” and what linguistic strategies are used by the western and Chinese mainstream newspapers.
4.3.1. Collocation Analysis of “China is, China, China’s”
In this study, we take “China is, China, China’s” and “US, U.S., western” as nodes, and use the Concordance function of Wordsmith Tools 7 to extract the words appearing before and after the aforementioned nodes to analyze how the Chinese and western newspapers portray the two sides in Xinjiang Cotton Event. By observing the content on the left and right side of the node words, we can understand the attitude tendency shown by the semantic prosody of the discourse, and analyze the attitude of the two sides’ newspapers toward each other and the ideological roots behind. Firstly, we take “China is, China, China’s” as the node, select the Concordance function in Wordsmith Tools 7, and classify the contents appearing to the left and right of “China is, China, China’s” in western newspapers, shown as Table 4.
In western newspapers, the words “China is, China, China’s” occur 10 times, 172 times, and 30 times respectively, due to the space limit, the concordance lines of “China is, China, China’s” are extracted as shown in Table 4, it can be concluded from the above lines, the words and phrases highlighted in bold type in particular, that China is depicted as a leading producer of cotton, the source of nearly half of cotton fabric exported around the world, an important marketplace for a lot of internal brands, and an export colossus (lines 1 - 11), as being implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, forced labor and high-technology surveillance against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups (lines 12, 13, 25 - 32), as the causation of the loss of international apparel companies and the enemies behind the scene who launch Chinese customers’ boycott of international apparel brands (lines 14 - 20); as someone who stands in the way of foreigners to visit Xinjiang (lines 21 - 24).
To sum up, prior to exploiting their discourse power to speak with “unanimous voices” in Western and US public opinion, western newspapers initially made assertions about “forced labor” and “genocide” in Xinjiang. They created the “political correctness” surrounding the Xinjiang issue under the guise of “human rights”. By taking advantage of so-called “political correctness”, they were able to pressure international public figures who supported an unbiased and fair stance on the Xinjiang-related issue as well as multinational corporations that insisted on conducting regular business with Xinjiang, resulting in a “chilling effect” on the general public and the business community. The essence of the Xinjiang cotton public opinion war is an economic and political war, and a political and economic game between China and the United States.
4.3.2. Collocation Analysis of “US, U.S., Western”
Secondly, we take “US, U.S., western” as the node, select the Concordance function in Wordsmith Tools 7, and classify the contents appearing to the left and right of “US, U.S., western” in Chinese newspapers, shown in Table 5.
In Chinese newspapers, the words “US, U.S., western” occur 184 times, 26 times and 52 times respectively. By analyzing the concordance lines in Table 5,
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Table 4. The role of China’s identity in western newspapers.
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Table 5. The role of US’s identity in Chinese newspapers.
it can be summarized as follows: Firstly, US’ and some western countries’ accusation of using forced labor in Xinjiang cotton industry and sanctions against China lack a factual basis and is unsubstantiated, disinformation, pure fabrication and groundless slandering (lines 1 - 5). US is described as a country which colludes with western countries and companies to strangle cotton businesses (line 17, 18, 30), to smear, curb, and destabilize China, suffocate the economy of the Xinjiang region, contain China’s development and attempt specific U.S. transgressions into China’s matters of strict sovereign interest (lines 15, 31 - 32), to mislead the U.S. and the whole world rhetoric against China (line 16). U.S is also depicted as a country which suppresses foreign entities by abuse of “long-arm jurisdiction” as a hegemonic tool, interferes in other countries’ internal affairs and subverts other countries’ legitimate governments, even makes Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights an agent and accomplice of the U.S. and its allies, aiming to hijacking world bodies to advance its own agenda and protect its hegemony (lines 19 - 21), resulting in being strongly condemned by China, hitting the US apparel industry, disrupting the global supply chains, and dealing a strong blow to the US supply chains and the world economy (lines 22 - 26). Meanwhile, US itself is turning a deaf ear to the fact that forced labor exists in the US (lines 27 - 29), and what western groups did to China is double-dealing, blind decision and wrong (lines 33 - 35).
From the analysis of above words that go together with “US, U.S., western”, it can be summarized that Chinese newspapers show a strong condemnation, present a strong concept of the enemy and the self, distinguish between each other, emphasize their positions, draw the red lines and allow no compromise, and use strong and fierce language to demonstrate that there is no room for negotiation nor compromise on the issue of Xinjiang.
4.4. The Ideological Roots of Chinese and Western Newspaper Discourse on Xinjiang Cotton
4.4.1. The Appearance of the Xinjiang Cotton Public Opinion War
On the surface, the fuse or the focus of the public opinion war is mainly centered on the two levels under the leadership of one organization. The group, BCI, suspended licenses to cotton farmers in Xinjiang in 2020 on allegations of alleged “human rights violations”, and the erroneous decision affected the actions of its fellow members. The first of two levels is Swedish clothing brand H & M, which is the eye of the storm of public opinion, became the target of public criticism. In this public opinion war, our resistance to H & M is the biggest. On the basis of the public criticism of H & M, major domestic e-commerce companies removed their products and map App removed its location, the public opinion quickly spread from the new media field to the consumer field. The second level is the international footwear and apparel brands other than H & M that are involved with the BCI organization, which are among those affected by the BCI and H & M and have been subject to different degrees of denunciation and boycott.
4.4.2. The Backstage Manipulator behind the Xinjiang Cotton Public Opinion War
BCI, one of the centers of the controversy, declared on its website as a global nonprofit organization and the world’s largest cotton sustainable development project, committed to “better benefit the environment for cotton growth and the future of the cotton industry.” But is it really so simple? First, the BCI members must conform to the cotton professional standards set by the BCI. Data show that as of May 2020, the number of BCI members has reached 1,953, involving cotton and cotton yarn retailers, suppliers, manufacturers, growers’ organizations, technology companies and related social organizations, basically monopolized the whole chain of cotton production.
Second, the USAID (United States Agency for International Development) is among the funding partners listed on the BCI’s official website. USAID is a federal government agency responsible for US non-military assistance to the foreign countries. Under the banner of providing support to people in need of improving living standards, post-disaster reconstruction and getting rid of poverty, it essentially promotes US foreign policy and values around the world. According to media reports, the agency has been repeatedly accused of interfering in other countries’ internal affairs. Under the framework of the US global strategic layout, it has aroused anti-government sentiment against some countries and regions which are non-US allies. The essence of the agency is a tool to safeguard the world hegemony of the United States. Accordingly, it can be basically inferred that the BCI in this Xinjiang Cotton Storm was a pawn only controlled by the United States.
4.4.3. Economic Dark War: Why Cotton?
Firstly, cotton is an important crop second only to grain, but also a material related to national strategy and livelihood, both as a living and industrial raw material with properties of dual production material. In the global context, China’s and India’s cotton production floating in the first and second position, the United States is generally in the third place, at the same time, China is also the world’s largest consumer of cotton. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics show that Xinjiang has ranked first in the country for 26 consecutive years in terms of total cotton production, yields, planted area and commodity allocation. “Chinese cotton” and “Xinjiang cotton” in the global cotton production and consumption chain occupies a pivotal position, which seriously threatened the interests of the United States in the cotton industry chain.
Secondly, from the perspective of cotton as a financial product, cotton is a bulk commodity in the spot and futures market, and it is an important investment product. The international pricing power of cotton was earlier in the hands of the United States. Since more than 80% of the cotton in the United States is exported, it is crucial for the United States to facilitate cotton export and control the cotton industry chain. And China’s cotton production, cotton consumption, cotton imports and cotton textile production are all one of the best in the world. Since 2000, China has taken a series of measures to win the cotton pricing power, and increasingly have a voice in the international cotton pricing power, which is something the United States is afraid to see.
4.4.4. Political Game: Why Xinjiang?
First of all, in the face of the two major events in the Hong Kong riots and the COVID-19 epidemic, the Chinese government has coordinated the overall situation, achieved a decisive victory in the handling of the above two events, and gradually calmed down the situation. This leaves the US side, which has arbitrarily intervened and deliberately smeared China, silent. The current public opinion related to Xinjiang is another public opinion topic that the United States has provoked and framed China after Hong Kong public opinion and COVID-19 public opinion have subsided.
Second, issues such as minorities and religious disputes have long been sensitive topics that the vast majority of the world cannot properly handle. In the United States, African minorities such as Latinos and Asian are long-term victims of racial discrimination. In China, Xinjiang was plagued by terrorism, religious extremism and ethnic separatist forces, many of which were controlled or directed by foreign black hands. However, after unremitting struggle, Xinjiang has now realized the social stability and harmony by basically eliminating the above three forces. The Western countries represented by the United States do not want to believe that China has properly resolved the minority and religious disputes that they have not been well handled for a long time. Therefore, they have deliberately slandered the status of human rights in Xinjiang, maliciously attacked the Chinese government’s policy of governing Xinjiang, and violently interfered in China’s internal affairs.
Therefore, the topic of Xinjiang cotton is clearly one subject for discussion carefully chosen by western countries, led by the United States. By reversing black and white in China and exaggerating, the U.S. tries to provoke domestic disputes, undermine China’s stability and development, and achieve the purpose of maintaining the global political and economic hegemony.
5. Conclusion
Based on the corpus approach, using Wordsmith Tools’ keywords and key clusters list function, we examined the focus of the newspapers in China and some western countries, and the results show that both China and western countries focused on forced labor of Uyghurs in Xinjiang cotton industry, with the difference that the keywords and key clusters in the western newspapers also include words that they initially used to make assertions about “forced labor” and “genocide” in Xinjiang. They created the “political correctness” surrounding the Xinjiang issue under the guise of “human rights”, and words for the frustration of the brands in the Chinese market and the actions of the Chinese government and the newspapers’ attempts to attribute the lost popularity of some brands to the Chinese government and media propaganda behavior, highlighting the state control in this case rather than the independent choice of Chinese consumers. While the Chinese newspapers were mainly trying to debunk and dispel western newspapers’ allegation on the one hand, unfold the authenticity of Xinjiang cotton industry’s status quo and introduce the development and achievements of Xinjiang cotton industry from the perspective of mechanization, cotton production, and farmers’ income on the other hand. Using the concordance function of Wordsmith Tools 7 software, this paper examined the collocations of “China is, China, China’s” and “US, U.S., western” and found that the Chinese and western newspapers adopted different discourse strategies when describing the two sides. The western newspapers clearly demeaned “the other” and portrayed China as the “enemy” of the U.S., while the Chinese newspapers aimed to disclose the true nature of Xinjiang Cotton Event and unfold the real status quo of Xinjiang cotton industry, meanwhile presenting a strong condemnation and using strong and fierce language to express that there is no room for negotiation or compromise on the issue of Xinjiang. Due to the space constraints, adopting corpus-based CDA theoretical framework, this study has mainly taken a holistic view to analyze Xinjiang cotton news reports in Chinese and western newspapers under the approach of the discursive practice, power and ideology. The author plans to take an micro-narrative approach in future studies to focus on lexicogrammatical patterns of stance markers, nominalization, metaphor, intertextuality, transitivity, etc.
The Xinjiang Cotton Event is a representative war of public opinion. Western countries use the common attributes in their historical and cultural attribution to mobilize public opinion with words such as “forced labor” and “racial struggle”. With non-governmental organizations as the perpetrators of their speech, through the information power and values and other soft power category to attack, it will have a real impact on China’s politics and economy. Although the weight of Chinese culture in the world cultural pattern is increasing, compared with the United States, China still has shortcomings in the cultural industry, international communication capacity and cultural innovation, and its own potential of rich cultural resources has not been fully tapped.
Xinjiang is the starting point of China’s Belt and Road initiative and an important part of China’s territory. In this Xinjiang Cotton Event, western countries have used their power to create “standards” and “truth” to provoke China’s interests. It should be vigilant that the western discourse has a “domestication” effect. The dilemma of China’s external publicity is not that China has no ability to find out and inform the audience of the facts and truth, nor is the audience trapped in their own positions and emotions. The fundamental problem is that the West has long constructed issues for various international events, which subtly makes the recipients agree with their statements, thus causing inertia and obedience.
In order to shift from a manufacturing country to a manufacturing power, China attaches great importance to technology, meanwhile China also need to solve the problem of standard identification. In this Xinjiang Cotton Event, Good Cotton Development Association in Switzerland uses its non-quantitative industry standards to determine Xinjiang Cotton does not conform to the industry norms, and the western countries behind it once again borrow the incident of “Xinjiang cotton” to spread to the outside of “forced labor” in Xinjiang, trying to use the discourse of “nation” and “human rights” with western value to interfere in China’s internal affairs. Therefore, from Xinjiang Cotton Event, we should clearly see the underlying issue of discourse power. We should take the initiative in international discourse, instead of being a “firefighter” when international public opinion is ignited in western countries, but rather build our discourse power in the international public opinion.
China has always assumed the responsibility of a major country in its own development, However, the actual lack of international discourse power makes China still in the passive situation of “the other” molding to some extent, leading to the gap between China’s international objective image and subjective impression. Therefore, it is necessary to further establish China’s discourse power in the international public opinion field, break the discourse order system established by the West, and ensure the balance of the international public opinion field. Only by ensuring that the truth and facts are heard and respected can we cope with the potential opportunities and challenges arising in our future development with a real image of a great country.