Chinese News Discourse: From Perspectives of Communication, Linguistics and Pedagogy 2020054542, 2020054543

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CHINESE NEWS DISCOURSE

As a country in transition, Chinese news discourse has quite distinctive characteristics, and more so given the power of state media in society. With China’s engagement in world affairs and its massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) now in place, Western media coverage of China has dramatically increased. Against this backdrop, news dissemination and discourse demonstrate a need for academia to give perspectives with interdisciplinary approaches. Chinese News Discourse presents original research from academics in China and the West, showing theoretical, methodological and practical dimensions between news media and discourse. The book focuses on Chinese news discourse by examining what new modern features it demonstrates in contrast and comparison to news discourses in other countries in the coverage of such hot topics as the BRI or the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China, just to name a few. This book is a useful resource for scholars and students of discourse, language, media and communication studies, as well as translation studies. Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, PhD, is Associate Professor of Translation Studies in the School of Education and English at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. She holds a PhD in International Communications from the University of Nottingham and an MA in Interpreting and Translation from the University of Newcastle. She has published extensively in translation, media, mobile and cultural studies, and pedagogy. Candace Veecock, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics /​ELT in the School of Education and English at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France. Her research interests focus on interdisciplinary and cross-​linguistic agency, semiotics and multimodality. Shixin Ivy Zhang, PhD, is Associate Professor in Journalism Studies in the School of International Communications at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Her research focuses on journalism studies, media management, media globalization, and media and conflict. She is the author of three research monographs.

Routledge Studies in Chinese Discourse Analysis Series Editor: Chris Shei Swansea University, UK

This series aims to examine Chinese discourse from a variety of angles, including: linguistic, semiotic, philosophical, sociocultural, literary, political, technological, psychological and neurocognitive perspectives. News Framing through English-​Chinese Translation A Comparative Study of Chinese and English Media Discourse Nancy Xiuzhi Liu Taiwan Manipulation of Ideology and Struggle for Identity Edited by Chris Shei China’s Contemporary Image and Rhetoric Practice Edited by Weixiao Wei Chinese News Discourse From Perspectives of Communication, Linguistics and Pedagogy Edited by Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Candace Veecock and Shixin Ivy Zhang For more information about this series, please visit: https://​www.routledge.com/​ Routledge-​Studies-​in-​Chinese-​Discourse-​Analysis/​book-​series/​RSCDA

CHINESE NEWS DISCOURSE From Perspectives of Communication, Linguistics and Pedagogy

Edited by Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Candace Veecock and Shixin Ivy Zhang

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Candace Veecock and Shixin Ivy Zhang; individual chapters, the contributors. The right of Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Candace Veecock and Shixin Ivy Zhang to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Liu, Nancy (Nancy Xiuzhi), editor. | Veecock, Candace, editor. | Zhang, Shixin Ivy, 1970– editor. Title: Chinese news discourse: from perspectives of communication, linguistics and pedagogy / edited by Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Candace Veecock, Shixin Ivy Zhang. Description: London; New York: Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge studies in Chinese discourse analysis | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020054542 (print) | LCCN 2020054543 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Chinese language–Indirect discourse. | Newspapers–China–Style. | Press and politics–China. | Translating and interpreting–Study and teaching–China. | Translators–Training of–China. Classification: LCC PL1273.5 .C55 2021 (print) | LCC PL1273.5 (ebook) | DDC 495.1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054542 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054543 ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​47037-​1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​47038-​8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​03298-​4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

CONTENTS

List of figures  List of tables  List of contributors  Introduction  Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Candace Veecock and Shixin Ivy Zhang

vii viii ix 1

PART I

Generating news in China 

7

1 Sustaining state legitimacy in the punch of political scandals: a case study of local newspapers in China  Xianwen Kuang

9

2 Public diplomacy strategies represented domestically through ports along the twenty-​first century Maritime Silk Road: a case study of Ningbo Zhoushan Port  Nancy Xiuzhi Liu,Yi Wang and Dan Shi 3 A survey of Chinese photojournalists: identities, work conditions and attitudes in the digital age  Shixin Ivy Zhang and Adrian Hadland

23

43

vi Contents

PART II

Chinese news discourse  4 Recontextualizing political metaphor in news discourse: a case study of the Chinese president’s metaphors in English reports  Li Pan and Chuxin Huang

63

65

5 What newspapers and people say about #China70: news discourse and framing through social media  Zhen Troy Chen

84

6 China Daily infographics: metaphor, multimodality and the multi-​layering of news discourse  Candace Veecock

103

PART III

News translation pedagogy 

127

7 News translation strategies adopted by novice and expert translators: implications for translation pedagogy  Wan Hu

129

8 A social constructivist approach to acquiring international news translation norms in China: empowering students in a restrained environment  Emma Huizhen Du

148

9 Developing translation competence: a curricular study of teaching of news translation  Zirui Xiong

168

Index 

187

FIGURES

2 .1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 5 .1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

Supercluster 1 in the home page of NZP  Supercluster 2 in the home page of NZP  Supercluster 3 in the home page of NZP  Percentage of photojournalists in China and the world in terms of types of employment (N=275 for China; N=1,991 for the world)  Photographers’ description of their current financial situation (N=275 for China; N=1,991 for the world)  Chinese and world-​wide photographers’ attitudes towards amateur/​ citizen photography (N=275 for China; N=1,991 for the world)  Modelling recontextualization of political metaphors in news discourse  Analysing recontextualization of political metaphors in news discourse  Articles volume across time  Articles with negative keywords  Top media and their distribution destinations  China and US in Google trend: 2004–​2020  Word cloud generated based on Twitter feeds: #China70  Main types of infographics  Types of data visualizations  Examples of multimodal metaphor  Directional arrows as semiotic resources  Data visualizations in the series of 70th Anniversary infographics 

31 32 33 51 52 53 68 70 92 92 93 96 98 108 108 111 115 116

TABLES

1.1 Number of sampled news stories on Bo Xilai from local newspapers in Chongqing between October 2011 and November 2012  2.1 Themes and codes of Xi Thought  2.2 Themes and codes from interviews  3.1 Demographics of Chinese photojournalists by gender, age, education level, and training in photography over two years from 2015 to 2016 (N=275)  4.1 Headlines and sources of the Anglo-​American media reports  4.2 Headlines and sources of the Chinese media reports  4.3 English versions of the Chinese metaphor quoted in the reports  4.4 Reporting verbs for the English quotes of metaphors  5.1 A review of salient frames used in portrayals of China  5.2 Themes and frame emerging from the coverage of #China70  6.1 Labels of the two components of metaphor  6.2 Graphic visualizations in China Daily infographics covering the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China  6.3 Examples of multimodal metaphor in the infographic “China’s economic achievements over 70 years”  7.1 Participants’ profile  7.2 The texts that are selected as data for analysis  8.1 The key principles of social constructivist approach  9.1 Profile of University A and University B  9.2 Profile of Course A and Course B  9.3 Learning objectives of Course A and Course B  9.4 Teaching and learning activities of Course A and Course B  9.5 Assessment scheme of Course A and Course B  9.6 An integrated competence model for a qualified news translator 

15 28 36 50 71 72 73 75 89 94 110 113 117 131 145 152 173 173 174 177 179 181

CONTRIBUTORS

Zhen Troy Chen, PhD, FHEA, Assistant Professor in Media, Communication and

Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo China and an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Griffith Centre for Design & Innovation Research, Australia. His interdisciplinary research interests are in Digital Media, Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs), Cultural and Media Policy (copyright and privacy law), Journalism and Experience Design. His research articles have appeared in prestigious journals, such as Journal of Consumer Culture, Ethics and Information Technology and Social Semiotics. Emma Huizhen Du, PhD, Associate Professor at School of Journalism &

Communication and research fellow at Translation & Communication Center, School of Interpreting & Translation Studies, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. Her teaching focuses on international news translation, international communication, and comparative study of Chinese journalism and western journalism. Her research interests are news translation, international journalism, comparative journalism and media regulation. Adrian Hadland, PhD, Professor, Chair of Journalism and Media Studies at the

University of Stirling, one of the top-​ranked journalism schools in the UK. Adrian is a former political journalist and policy advisor who has now published 20 books on a variety of topics including journalism scholarship and political biographies. Born in Hong Kong, Adrian was previously Head of the Division of International Communications at the University of Nottingham Ningbo in China. Wan (Victoria) Hu, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Translation and

Interpreting at Xi’an Jiaotong-​Liverpool University. She did her postgraduate study at the University of Nottingham, gaining a MA in Chinese/​English Translation and

x Contributors

Interpreting and a PhD in Translation Studies. Dr Hu is the author of Education, Translation and Global Market Pressures, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. She has also published extensively in international peer-​reviewed journal articles, book chapters and textbooks revolving around translator and interpreter training, specialized news translation, as well as higher education policy. Currently, she is the Principal Investigator for a research project supported by the National Social Science Fund of China. Chuxin Huang, MA student in Translation Studies at Guangdong University of

Foreign Studies. Her research interests include media translation, political discourse analysis and translation. Xianwen Kuang, PhD, Associate Professor at the Department of Media and

Communication, Xi’an Jiaotong-​Liverpool University, China. His research interests include news production, media framing and collective action in China. He has published articles in international peer-​ reviewed journals, including Journalism, The China Quarterly, SAGE Open, Global Media and China, Chinese Political Science Review and MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research. Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, PhD, Associate Professor of Translation Studies in the School

of Education and English at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC). She holds a PhD in International Communications from the University of Nottingham and MA in Interpreting and Translation from the University of Newcastle. Her research interest mainly focuses on sociocultural meanings of translation, media translation studies in particular. She has published extensively in areas such as translation, media, mobile and cultural studies. In addition, she is also interested in didactic research into translation and interpreting and is a practitioner in translation and conference interpreting. Li Pan, PhD, Professor in Translation Studies at Guangdong University of Foreign

Studies (GDUFS), the director of the Center for Translation and Communication of GDUFS, a member of the editorial board of the refereed journal Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice (SSCI), a visiting academic scholar of the University of Manchester and a researcher at the Center for Translation Studies of GDUFS. Most of her academic papers are published in refereed SSCI journals of Translation Studies. She has been serving as a reviewer for nearly ten SSCI journals for years. Dan Shi, PhD, Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics from the School of

Education and English at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. She is working with Multimodality, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Genre-​based Pedagogy and Sociological Theory of Education in her research. Her research interests also include learning styles and scaffolding within L2 educational contexts, and exploring second language learners’ engagements with texts from different perspectives.

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Contributors  xi

Candace Veecock, PhD, Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics/​ ELT in the

School of Education and English at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) She has double areas of specialization in French Linguistics and English Applied Linguistics. She holds a PhD in Linguistics and an MA in English Studies from the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France as well as an MA and Specialized Honours BA in French Studies, magna cum laude, from York University, Canada. Her research interests focus on interdisciplinary and cross-​linguistic agency, discourse analysis, semiotics and multimodality. Yi Wang, PhD, Assistant Professor in Marketing and Tourism, from Faculty of

Business at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. She has published in the area of rural tourism, tourism planning, destination marketing as well as children in tourism. Her research interests cover range from tourism marketing, planning, policy making to urban and rural development. Zirui Xiong currently works at the School of Foreign Languages, Hubei University

in Wuhan. She obtained her BA in English from Zhongnan University of Economics and Law and MA in Translation from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include: translation studies and translator and interpreter training. Besides teaching and research, she is also a practitioner in both translation and interpreting. Shixin Ivy Zhang, PhD, Associate Professor in Journalism Studies, School of

International Communications, University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Her research focuses on journalism studies, media management, media globalization, and media and conflict. She is the author of three research monographs entitled Impact of Globalization on the Local Press in China (Lexington Books, 2014), Chinese War Correspondents: Covering Wars and Conflicts in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Media and Conflict in the Social Media Era in China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Her articles have appeared in a number of high-​quality international peer-​ reviewed journals such as Journalism, Journalism Studies, Digital Journalism, Media,War and Conflict, Chinese Journal of Communication, Asian Journal of Communication and Journal of Mass Media Ethics.

INTRODUCTION Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Candace Veecock and Shixin Ivy Zhang

In the context of globalization or localization, news discourse plays an indispensable role by disseminating meaning that is manufactured, constructed or negotiated by news workers over the course of presentation or representation. With the new era featuring “smart things” on various fronts, the amount of data to be processed has increased exponentially. Characterized by highly interactive and customized news stories, this new era further enforces changes in the way news discourse is perceived and consumed. Furthermore, translation has facilitated the instantaneity of news flow around the world by simultaneously addressing members of different linguistic and cultural communities through the Internet and through mobile devices. It will undoubtedly serve to intensify, reduce or mediate the interaction and sometimes opposition between the global and the local. China being a country in transition, Chinese news discourse exhibits distinctive characteristics and even more so given the authoritativeness of the state media plus various stakeholders within the society. With China’s multi-​dimensional engagement in various world affairs and its massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in place, Western media coverage of China has dramatically increased. Against this backdrop, news dissemination manifested in news discourse calls for investigations from academia from more perspectives and with more interdisciplinary approaches. Therefore, the primary aim of this book is to collate and publish research works within theoretical, methodological and practical perspectives in the intersections between news media, discourse, language, culture and communication, as well as translation pedagogy. The book will focus on Chinese news discourse by examining, in particular, what new features it demonstrates in contrast and comparison to news discourses in other countries in covering such hot topics as the BRI and the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China among many more.

2  Nancy Xiuzhi Liu et al.

Four perspectives to study news discourse News is socially constructed, thus news discourse is “a practice”, which involves the social construction of reality rather than reflecting social reality (Fowler, 1991, p. 2). The study of journalistic discourse has made significant advancement in the past few decades, due to the development of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Carvalho, 2008). There are four main perspectives to study news discourse.

The sociological perspective In this research strand, scholars such as Pan and Kosicki (1993) take news discourse as a sociocognitive process involving three actors: sources, journalists and audience members on the basis of their socially defined roles. In this sociological approach, discourses are considered as “structured and structuring structures” that shape social practices of enunciation (Keller, 2005). Unlike Foucauldian approaches, this form of discourse analysis recognizes the importance of socially constituted actors in the social production and circulation of knowledge (Keller, 2005). News framing analysis is a social constructivist approach to examine news discourse, which is considered as “an initial step toward analysing the news discourse process as a whole” (Pan & Kosicki, 1993). Framing is about the way news reports emphasizes some aspects of an issue and make them salient to promote certain interpretations or public perceptions of events (Entman, 1993, 2004). As a dynamic process, framing involves frame-​building and frame-​setting (de Vreese, 2005). The frames are manifest within audience members, news organizations, news sources, and news texts. “Frames are powerful units of discourse” (Kuypers & D’Angelo, 2009, p. 2).

The constructivist perspective: CDA Emerged in the late 1980s, CDA, as a multilevel and multilayered approach to study text in context, has become the single most authoritative line of research regarding the study of media discourse (Carvalho, 2008; Wodak, 2011; Coelho, Carvalho & Seixas, 2019). Power and ideology in the news are the central focus of this approach. News carries a unique signifying power, a power to represent events in particular ways (Fairclough, 1995; Joye, 2010). Viewing discourse as social practice, CDA stresses “patterns of domination whereby one social group is dominated by another” (Phillips, 2006, p. 288). Meanwhile, ideological standpoints are the most fundamental in shaping influence of a text (Carvalho, 2008).While Fairclough (1995) looks for ideological mechanisms embedded in the text, van Dijk (1995) focuses on semantic structures of discourse that expresses ideological opinions. However, CDA has not been able to account for the full cycle of news discourse (Philo, 2007). Three aspects remain under-​researched: the time plane in discourse analysis, the discursive strategies of social actors, and the extra-​and supra-​textual effects of mediated discourse (Carvalho, 2008).

Introduction  3

The sociolinguistic perspective Examination of language (the vocabulary and the writing style) in news within social setting is the focus of this line of research. According to Fowler (1991, p. 4), “news is a representation of the world in language”, which bears structure of social and economic values. Linguistic analyses of journalistic texts pay close attention to issues of pragmatics, semantics and syntax in discourse (Fowler, 1991; Carvalho, 2008). As both a linguist and a journalist, Allan Bell (1991) studied news discourse of different actors including news sources, news professionals and audiences. He puts forward that “ultimate control lies not with news professionals but with owners whose interest is efficiency and profit” (Bell, 1991, p. 38). Today, scholars such as Caple and Bednarek (2016) have drawn on both linguistic and social semiotic theories and put forward a new “discursive perspective” to study news values beyond language.

The interactive perspective Driven by the advancement of digital and social media technologies, scholars have proposed new interactive perspective to study news discourse on the digital media platforms. For instance, Coelho, Carvalho and Seixas (2019) combined CDA and discourse analysis on positioning and stance-​taking to analyse the interaction between news texts and readers’ comments. As Gan (2020, pp. 22–​23) noted, “social media have facilitated new discursive practices” in the digital age. The interactive nature of social media has blurred the dividing line between news producer and receiver. Discourse on social media channels is mainly manifest through the interaction between posts and comments. In a word, an interactive perspective to study news discourse in the digital age is emerging and developing.

News discourse in China In China, most news media outlets are state-​owned and they are under political pressures and strict censorship. Over the past 40 years, the Party State has shifted its media policy from state-​subsidized model to strategic marketization and to a government-​paid news media. Chinese journalism is witnessing a new paradigm in which the Chinese government funds digital media projects to report on /​propagandize China at home and abroad (Deng, 2018). Indeed, since the early 2000s, China has intensified its focus on its foreign image and cultivated consent for the country’s peaceful rise. The complexity and hybridity of the Chinese media system are mirrored in its offline journalistic practices (Fu & Lee, 2016). While analysing Chinese journalists’ offline practices, Pan and Lu (2003) identified four news discourses: The Party-​ press discourse that promotes the Party loyalty and propaganda, professional discourse that focuses on objectivity and autonomy, market-​economy discourse that is meant to appeal to the market, and Confucian discourse that teaches the public

4  Nancy Xiuzhi Liu et al.

to recognize their own and the nation’s interests. Regarding online news discourse, Fu and Lee (2016) found that Chinese journalists normalize their Weibo practices based on their existing offline journalistic discourses.Their Weibo discourses exhibit political caution, professionalism deviation, marketing commitment and Confucian intellectual expression. They concluded that Chinese journalists enjoy increased journalistic autonomy and freedom in China’s web 2.0 media environment, but the Party-​press paradigm remains dominant in China (Fu & Lee, 2016).

About this volume This edited volume will include contributions from active researchers in the field who will look into topics related to the theme of news discourse in official and social media, as well as news translation pedagogy in the Chinese context. Each chapter will report original research related to the three themes set out in the introduction chapter described below. This chapter lays the groundwork of the research context and introduces the coming chapters that compose the volume, which is organized into three sections with differentiated themes. In the first section under Part I Generating news in China, three chapters contribute to the study of news discourse with a focus on news production. Chapter 1 addresses how the local newspapers in China promote the image of local governments and sustain the state legitimacy in the time of crisis and scandals. Through the case of Bo Xilai’s political scandal, the author reveals the tension between the local and the central governments that is manifested in the discourses of denouncement and condemnation. Chapter 2 examines the portrayal of China in both domestic and Western media surrounding the national event of celebrating 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China. The author finds overtly positive coverage of China and the Chinese Communist Party’s achievements within domestic media, but significantly one-​sided, negative and sometimes hostile portrayal of China in Western media. Chapter 3 focuses on Chinese photojournalists who are the producers of visual news discourse. Based on an international questionnaire survey, the two authors find that Chinese photojournalists enjoy a high employment rate but they see the “failure of company” and “failure to keep up the technology” as the biggest risks. In general, they are positive towards citizen photography and the future. The second theme under Part II Chinese news discourse in Chapters 5 to 7, investigates representations of China in news discourses from both outside and within China. In particular, these chapters examine Chinese news from the perspective of linguistics, and specifically in terms of lexical choices, metaphor and multimodality as well as how these and more linguistic aspects contribute to news framing. Chapter 5 focuses on frequently quoted Chinese political metaphors in English news reports on China’s anti-​corruption campaigns.With a view to explore the usually invisible link and interaction between politics, media, and translation, this study investigates the varied ways metaphors in Chinese political speeches are contextualized, translated into English, and circulated in news both Chinese and

Introduction  5

Anglo-​American media. Chapter 6 examines contrasting and often competing and contradictory news framing across Western and Chinese mainstream digital news outlets as well as social media against the backdrop of the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China. Chapter 7 examines how a series of infographics commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China mobilize metaphor and multimodality as well as different data visualization techniques all functioning as a multi-​layering of news discourse. How multiple modes of meaning combine, and reinforce each other makes infographics an efficient way to package news discourse. The third theme under Part III News translation pedagogy in Chapters 8 to 10 sets out to investigate news translator training under different contexts including mainland China and Hong Kong, where ideological awareness can have influences on the process of teaching and learning. Chapter 8 aims to explore features of translation strategies used by professional trans-​editors and student translators when they are translating or trans-​editing finance and economic news. While students are mostly loyal to the original text by paying particular attention to details, professional trans-​editors adopt much more of a response-​based approach, focusing on readers’ expectations and translation quality. The study also reveals that each individual’s academic backgrounds, practical translation experience, learning motivations and learning methods have an impact on their problem-​solving activities in translation. The findings are very conducive to translator training whereby students are more motivated to expand their extralinguistic knowledge. Chapter 9 is based on the author’s practitioner/​teacher experience in teaching to undergraduate and postgraduate students in translation and interpretation studies. The author investigates her teaching under the guidance of “action theory” through examining her own classes, which have been carefully designed. Not just the skills of news discourse per se, but such complex and sensitive topics such as censorship and ideology are introduced to students through practice with the view to develop in students a nuanced understanding of self-​censorship as part of professional norms in news translation. Chapter 10 examines, from a curricular aspect, the professional and market orientation of news translation teaching at undergraduate level between two universities in Mainland China and in Hong Kong from the perspective of translation competence. Through her empirical data, it has been found that although translation programmes in two institutions manifest a number of differences in curriculum design and course delivery, both seem to be effective in setting teaching objectives, in developing students’ translation competence and in assessing trainees’ competence development. All in all, the themes elaborated in this volume will advance the existing literature on news discourse study and translator training by contributing to the construction of theoretical and methodological frameworks in understanding news discourse and translation in global contexts. The themes in this volume offer insights into the effectiveness of Chinese news discourse, and provide a critical “entry point” to understanding the broader socio-​political, economic and cultural implications of Chinese news discourse and beyond.

6  Nancy Xiuzhi Liu et al.

References Bell, A. (1991). The language of news media. Oxford: Blackwell. Caple, H. & Bednarek, M. (2016). Rethinking news values: What a discursive approach can tell us about the construction of news discourse and news photography. Journalism, 17(4), 435–​455. Carvalho, A. (2008). Media(ted) discourse and society. Journalism Studies, 9(2), 161–​177. Coelho, Z. P., Carvalho, A., Seixas, E. C. (2019). News discourse and readers’ comments: Expanding the range of citizenship positions? Journalism, 20(6), 733–​751. Deng, J. (2018). The Paper Janus: How exceptionalism based on regaining influence and doing new media help a Chinese mobile news app negotiate censorship for better journalism. Communication and the Public, 3(2) 113–​133. de Vreese CH (2005). News framing: Theory and typology. Information Design Journal + Document Design, 13(1), 51–​61. Entman RM (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43, 51–​58. Entman RM (2004). Projections of power: Framing news, public opinion and US foreign policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fairclough, N. (1995.) Media discourse. London: Edward Arnold. Fowler, R. (1991). Language in the news: Discourse and ideology in the press. London: Taylor & Francis Group. Fu, J. S. & Lee, A.Y. L. (2016). Chinese journalists’ discursive weibo practices in an extended journalistic sphere. Journalism Studies, 17(1), 80–​99. Gan, C. (2020). Discourse on Europe’s migrant crisis in Chinese social media: Recontextualising Nationalism and defending perceived homogeneity. China Report, 56(1), 19–​38. Joye, S. (2010). News discourses on distant suffering: A critical discourse analysis of the 2003 SARS outbreak. Discourse & Society, 21(5), 586–​601. Keller, R. (2005). Analysing discourse. An approach from the sociology of knowledge, forum. Qualitative Social Research, 6(3), Art. 32, http://​nbn-​resolving.de/​urn:nbn:de:0114fqs0503327. Kuypers, J. A. & D’Angelo, P. (2009). Introduction. In J. A. Kuypers & P. D’Angelo, (Ed.), Doing news framing analysis: Empirical and theoretical perspectives (pp. 1–​13). New York:Taylor & Francis. Pan, Z. & Kosicki, G. M. (1993). Framing analysis: An approach to news discourse. Political Communication, 10, 55–​75. Pan, Z., and Lu, Y. (2003) Localizing professionalism: Discursive practices in China’s media reforms. In C.-​ C. Lee (Ed.), Chinese Media, Global Context (pp. 210–​ 231). London: Routledge. Phillips, L. (2006) Doing discourse analysis: A brief introduction to the field. In N. Carpentier et al. (Ed.), Media technologies and democracy in an enlarged Europe (pp. 285–​294).Tartu:Tartu University Press. Philo, G. (2007). Can discourse analysis successfully explain the content of media and journalistic practice? Journalism Studies, 8(2), 175–​196. Van Dijk, T. (1995). Discourse semantics and ideology. Discourse and Society, 6(2), 243–​289. Wodak, R. (2011). Complex texts: Analysing, understanding, explaining and interpreting meanings. Discourse Studies, 13(5), 623–​633.

PART I

Generating news in China

1 SUSTAINING STATE LEGITIMACY IN THE PUNCH OF POLITICAL SCANDALS A case study of local newspapers in China Xianwen Kuang

Introduction Many studies on news media control in authoritarian states indicate that the bottom line of government control over the media is to safeguard state legitimacy (see e.g. Kuang, 2018). This is true for both national and local news organizations, though another important mission of the latter is to sustain the image of local government and political leaders who have immense influence on the running of the news organizations in their territory of governance (Fewsmith and Gao, 2014). Most studies investigate these important issues by examining what media content was being censored and what not. While this is indeed an effective way to study it, an alternative is to compare how news media content has changed following a critical event that is detrimental to both state legitimacy and local government image, e.g. the fall of a political leader who received consistently positive media coverage before the scandal. This chapter examines how the local news newspapers in Chongqing depicted the image of Bo Xilai –​the former governor of the city –​before and after his dismissal from office following the exposure of political scandals that he was involved in. It aims to investigate how the state-​led local newspapers in China serve to build up the image of local governments and local government cadres in normal periods of time but sustain state legitimacy in the aftermath of local political scandals. The findings of the chapter are expected to further our understandings of how local news organizations respond to the control from both the national and local levels of government on the reporting of crisis and scandals.

News media control, censorship and state legitimacy Since the opening up and reform of China, government control of the news media in the country has been transiting from direct control to indirect control (Ken’ichi,

10  Xianwen Kuang

2011, p. 187). While the news media were the tool to spread propaganda in the past, they are now driven by the necessity to accommodate the needs of audiences, advertisers and sponsors (Ken’ichi, 2011, p. 187). Despite this change, the bottom line of news media control in China is the safeguarding of legitimacy (Kuang, 2018). There are three major approaches for the government to control and censor the news media, namely political, economic and legal. With the political approach, the government has developed a sophisticated system that encompasses the set-​up of governmental agencies such as the Central Propaganda Department (CPD), the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) and the Internet Information Management Bureau (IIMB) to control the news media content and conduct news censorship. At the nationwide macroscale level, the CPD, through its directly supervised propaganda departments at lower administrative levels including provincial, municipal and district, monitors, instructs and censors all of the news organizations within the country (Luo, 2015, p. 54). At the corporate administration level, the central regulatory bodies, including the CPD, can influence the appointment of local political leaders who could further influence the selection of local media managers (Nhan, 2008, p. 43).These managers, while serving the commercial needs of the news company to produce more favourable content for the audiences, are also expected to censor news information that is considered unfavourable to the government (Nhan, 2008, p. 43). Meanwhile, another key person in the news organization, i.e. the Party branch secretary, is responsible for implementing the Party’s tasks within the news organization (Luo, 2015). In addition, the government has indirect control over the news media through its power of licensing. The SAPPRFT, for example, has used the licensing system for the newspaper sector to ensure the Party’s control over the press (Zhao, 2004, p.189). Moreover, the government could influence the news content through the control of new sources. For example, the local levels of government could influence the media both by developing information dissemination strategies and by banning some particular types of reporting (Tong & Sparks, 2009, p. 341). While some journalists find it easy to get access to some information, others find it extremely difficult to gain access to interviews with relevant sources in the government. Journalists who had published sensitive or “inaccurate” reports for example, were usually banned from future interviews with the government sources (Kuang, 2017). As for the economic approach, the state has great influence over the news content through its ownership and sponsorship of news organizations. For example, with its ownership of the Xinhua News Agency, the Party State has effective control of the newsfeed of most news outlets in China as most of them are required to secure their news sources through Xinhua (Nhan, 2008, p. 42). Another means of press control is through news media conglomeration. In order to consolidate the political leadership of the news media industry, news organizations (e.g. newspapers at different levels including city, provincial and central) were reorganized into media conglomerates (Nhan, 2008, pp. 45–​46). As Tan (2008) indicates, the principal purpose of press conglomeration “was to ensure the better fulfilment of the Party’s

Sustaining state legitimacy  11

propaganda objectives”. This could be achieved by simplifying the appointment of media managers and reducing competition between news outlets for advertisement revenue, which make the news organizations more willing to comply with the Party’s directives over content (Nhan, 2008). As Piotroski, Wong and Zhang (2017, p. 181) point out, with only one editorial board and one management team, the news media group can coordinate the activities of each news organization within the group well and can manage the political risks. Besides, with the non-​Party news organizations subsidizing the Party ones, media conglomerates significantly strengthen the ability of the Party news organizations to serve as the mouthpieces of the government (Piotroski, Wong & Zhang, 2017, p. 181). One last method of the economic approach for the government to control the news media is the use of monetary incentives. It is clear that journalists who have done controversial and sensitive news reports before would not receive their pay or bonuses (Nhan, 2008, p. 46). This method has effectively led to self-​censorship by individual journalists to avoid monetary losses (Nhan, 2008, p. 46). Besides the political and economic approaches, the Party State has also adopted the legal approach to influence news production. While there are no laws and regulations referring to specific legislation for journalism (Zhang & Wang, 2019, p. 437), the constitution articles, e.g. Article 53, which requires all Chinese citizens to “protect state secrets, cherish public assets, respect public order and social morals”, and Article 54, which prohibits citizens to reject their duty to protect the “security, honor and interests of the motherland”, are used to suppress politically unsavoury information (Nhan, 2008, pp. 40–​41). Although the constitution claims to protect people’s right of free speech, according to Zhao (2004), a whole series of laws, regulations as well as rules from Party State agencies serve to limit this right (pp. 180–​181). The Party State is considered to have used all the three political, economic and legal approaches to safeguard state legitimacy. Hearns-​Branaman (2009, p. 122) states that the Chinese Party State has used the media to perform all the three functions of the media simultaneously, including authoritarian, paternal and commercial, in order to legitimate their rule, guide the population and sell consumer products, respectively. The state considers the news media a powerful propaganda tool that is governed by the “Party principle” (Nhan, 2008, p. 38). Under these guiding principles, the news media are requested to reflect the Party’s guiding ideology, to disseminate the Party’s programmes, policies and directives as well as to subscribe to the Party’s organizational principles and press policies and accept the Party’s leadership (Zhao, 1998). These components are highly relevant to the safeguard of state legitimacy. In their discussion about the political role of the Chinese media that is called “Mass Line”, both Qin, Strömberg and Wu (2018, pp. 2447–​2248) and Kuang (2018) have made it clear that not all negative news like corruption and wrongdoings of lower-​level Party officials and government agencies are censored because the reporting of such news could enable the Party and its top leaders to acquire intelligence about the performance of bureaucrats and public sentiment, helping them to bolster the legitimate ruling of the Party State.

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Safeguarding sate legitimacy and maintaining the image of local governments While news organizations in China are all requested to safeguard state legitimacy, those at the lower levels including the provincial and municipal are also expected to maintain the image of the local governments following the administrative decentralization of the state. However, when state legitimacy and the image of local governments can work hand in hand most of the time, there could be conflicts as well, especially when the local governments want to keep silent its wrongdoings at the local level. It is believed that the conflict between the central and local government is a result of repeated decentralization and re-​centralization. Li (2010, p. 178) saw the acute tension between the central and local Party committees and governments following the cycles of administrative decentralization and re-​centralization in China before 1970s.Though the provincial leaders have gained enhanced delegated powers, resources and autonomy following the administrative decentralization since the reform and opening up of China in the late 1970s, the conflicts between the central and provincial and lower-​level governments remain as they have been competing for direct control and regulatory powers over various resources including the news media (Li, 2010, p. 180). It is also believed that there is divergence of interests between the central and local governments. Fewsmith and Gao (2014, p. 173) considered that most of the interests of central and local governments overlapped but the local governments do pursue their interests in their own way, which could contradict with what the Central Government would want it to be. These conflicts of interests between the two could become acute when the Central Government moves beyond economic development to new pursuits like anti-​corruption and environment protection (Fewsmith & Gao, 2014, p. 173). In other words, the Central Government has a greater interest in safeguarding state legitimacy while the local governments are concerned more about task fulfilment like maintaining social stability and a positive image of themselves and thus legitimacy is not their primary concern (Cai, 2008; and Kuang, 2018). With the conflicts the Central Government has been making efforts to control the local governments. Landry (2008) argues that the Central Government has developed the promotion mechanism to control the local cadres while at the same time achieve rapid economic development. Alongside the promotion mechanism is the cadre management system, which holds the five levels of government in China including central, provincial, municipal (prefectural), county and township together through a hierarchical arrangement in which each higher level of government would appoint and evaluate the performance of cadres at the level below (Fewsmith & Gao, 2014, p. 172). For example, the Organization Department of the Central Committee would assess and manage all cadres appointed at the ministry/​ provincial and sub-​provincial levels (Yang, 2014, p. 257) while the Organization Department of the Provincial Committee would do that for all officials at the

Sustaining state legitimacy  13

Department and sub-​Department levels. Here, the news media, which could disseminate good or bad stories about the local governments, can play an important role in influencing the appraisal of the higher-​level leaders for the local cadres.That is also why the local leaders would exert tight control over the news organizations at the same level with their governments. The news media have also become an investigative instrument of the Central Government to manage and discipline the local cadres. Since the local news organizations are in tight control of the corresponding levels of governments following the decentralization of the state, the news organizations at higher level would more often play the role of monitoring. The Central Government has typically relied on several instruments like the Xinhua News Agency, the New China News Agency, People’s Daily, CCTV and etc. to serve the special information needs of the central Party and government, including the wrongdoings of local governments and cadres (Chung, 2011, p. 305). Most of the time, such information is transmitted to Beijing through the internal reference (neibu cankao, 内部参考) series with the help of the local branches of these central level news organizations though the less sensitive cases could be directly reported to the public. Yet the exposure of these scandals originating from the local levels of government could be challenging with the strengthened power of the local government following the decentralization of the state. Yang (2014, p. 257) has seen a growing tendency toward local protectionism starting from the early 1990s as the local governments increasingly became stakeholders. While it is not uncommon that the local people’s congresses reject the candidates recommended by the Central Government for some local posts (Yang, 2014, p. 257), the same could happen that the local governments are more in favour of local candidates for the manager and Party secretary posts in the news groups. The control of the local governments over the local news organizations for the building of their positive image and the occasional exposure of their wrongdoings by the higher levels of news media have led to the decreasing trust of Chinese citizens in the local governments but more in the Central Government. The hierarchical trust, i.e. the central trust and local distrust, is clearly recognized in many existing studies, e.g. Chen (2017) and Li (2016). It is believed that the Central Government has intentionally allowed news criticism of the local governments and utilized the negative local image constructed by the higher levels of news media to cultivate local distrust and central trust. The Central Government find that blaming local governments is, in fact, a safe strategy to release public anger and gain regime support (Tanner, 2004). By shifting criticism to the local governments, the Central Government frames itself as a “good cop” that is there to “safeguard public interest” by denouncing the local “bad cop” (Bae, 2018).

Methods and data The discussion above indicates that the central and the local levels of government have diverging aims with the control over news media. While news media control

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of the Central Government aims for the safeguarding of state legitimacy and disciplining local cadres, the local levels of government are keener on using the news media to maintain a positive image of them and their leaders. While the higher-​ level news organizations are free from the control of the local levels of government, the local ones are subject to control from both the central and local authorities. It is thus interesting to study how the local news organizations that are controlled by both the central and local governments sustain both state legitimacy and the image of the local government respectively while covering a massive scandal of the local cadres, which is detrimental to both in nature. To achieve the goal, the author has conducted a critical discourse analysis of the news reports of four newspapers in Chongqing, China, on the massive scandal of the former high-​profile Chongqing political leader, i.e. Bo Xilai, before and after Bo was removed from office. The Bo Xilai Scandal led to the downfall of the former Party Secretary of Chongqing after Bo’s political chief, Wang Lijun, sought political asylum at the American General Consulate in Chengdu. Wang Lijun later revealed the murder of a British citizen, Neil Heywood, by Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai. The scandal is considered as highly sensitive and the reporting of it was tightly controlled by the central propaganda authority after Bo was removed from office. The author collected news articles about the issue from the four major daily newspapers in Chongqing including Chongqing Daily (重庆日报), Chongqing Morning Post (重庆晨报) Chongqing Times (重庆时报) and The Three Gorges Metropolis Daily (三峡都市报) on the Wisers.com database that includes all news content published by the major newspapers in China. Among the four newspapers, one of them, i.e. Chongqing Daily, is a Party newspaper while the other three are non-​Party newspapers. Using the key words “Bo Xilai”, the author searched news reports in the four papers between mid-​October 2011 and mid-​November 2012, a period that covers several months before and after Bo Xilai was removed from office on 15 March 2012. After a review of over 1,000 news articles that contained the key word “Bo Xilai”, the author selected 62 news articles altogether that have largely depicted the image of Bo Xilai. These stories include 37 and 25 stories that were published before and after Bo was dismissed respectively (see Table 1.1). With a glance at the number of sampled stories, it is noticeable that the Party newspaper, i.e. Chongqing Daily, produced more stories (N=21) with regards to the depiction of Bo Xilai’s image before his dismissal than the total number of other three non-​Party newspapers (N=16). Typically, the Three Gorges Metropolis Daily only had one story. Such a difference could be a result of the distinction between Party and non-​Party newspapers in China. According to Huang (2001) and Kuang (2020), the major difference between Party and non-​Party newspapers in China is that the former serve more as the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its governments, whereas the latter are more market-​oriented and would seek profits to support the running of the newspaper conglomerate though both of them are owned by the Party State. It is thus likely that the non-​Party newspapers were less motivated to produce news stories on the positive image of Bo while the

Sustaining state legitimacy  15 TABLE 1.1  Number of sampled news stories on Bo Xilai from local newspapers in

Chongqing between October 2011 and November 2012 Title of newspaper

Party or non-​party

No. of stories

No. before Bo’s dismissal

No. after Bo’s dismissal

Chongqing Daily Chongqing Morning Post Chongqing Times The Three Gorges Metropolis Daily Total no. of news stories

Party Non-​party Non-​party Non-​party

26 15 10 11 62

21 9 6 1 37

5 6 4 10 25

Party one had to. However, this changed after Bo was dismissed from office as both Party and non-​Party newspapers had a similar number of news articles focusing on Bo. This could reflect the fact that the newspapers in Chongqing, and even across China in general, were highly controlled by the propaganda authorities on their reporting on Bo and they were normally requested to use the news reports on Bo by the Xinhua News Agency only as indicated by Kuang and Wei (2018). The Three Gorges Metropolis Daily had a slightly bigger number (N=10) of news articles on Bo. This could also be explained by the fact that despite non-​Party newspapers being controlled by the propaganda authorities on the reporting of nationally sensitive issues, they would try their best to report more on them as they are appealing to the market/​audiences (Kuang, 2020). Following the close reading of the 62 news stories and coding of each paragraph, the author summarized several themes on how Bo Xilai was depicted. He then connected these themes with the theoretical discussions on the power relations between the central and local governments and the local news organizations to analyse the discourses of such depictions.

Local news organizations under both local and Central Government control The analysis indicates that the control of both central and local governments over the local news organizations in Chongqing before and after the Bo Xilai Scandal was strong. By comparing the news content from the four newspapers on Bo before and after he was removed from office, we can see how the control over the news media discourses was achieved to serve the goals of the controlling powers. Before Bo was removed from office, we can see that the local news media in Chongqing have effectively fulfilled their responsibilities as the agencies of both the Central Government and local levels of government. In this period, the local news media’s responsibilities of sustaining the state legitimacy and the positive image of Bo as the governor of the Chongqing are not conflicting and so their news discourses were reflecting the symbiosis of both. After his dismissal, the local news organizations in Chongqing were in tight control of both the central authorities

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and the new government and the tones and discourses of the news reports on Bo were in a 180-​degree turn. Using the local news media to denounce Bo became the tool for the Central Government and the new local government to maintain or even boost the state legitimacy and positive image of the local government.

Before the dismissal On 15 March 2012 Beijing announced that Bo Xilai was discharged from office. All the news reports by the local newspapers in Chongqing had depicted Bo in a very positive way even after the police chief in his government was revealed to have entered the American General Consulate in Chengdu and sought political asylum on 9 February 2012. This indicates that the Wang Lijun Incident did not have impacts on how the local newspapers reported on Bo Xilai. Even during the Two Sessions, i.e. the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), that were held between 3 and 14 March 2012, there were no negative news stories about him and his government. There were only three pieces of news that mentioned the “rumours” about him and one of the three was actually his responses and refutation to the “rumours”. All the three stories expressed trust in his governance, especially trust and recognition from the outside world. An analysis of these news reports shows that there are a few ways for the local newspapers in Chongqing to shape the positive image of Bo. First, by quoting his speeches massively, especially his talks on his understanding of the theories and achievements of various construction works in Chongqing, the news reports have depicted him as a responsible and capable leader. Among the 37 news articles focusing on Bo before his dismissal, 13 of them used this theme. For example, in a story published by Chongqing Daily on October 23, 2011, Bo was quoted as follows: The Party’s Sixth Plenary Session of the 17th Central Committee has made overall arrangements on the further promotion of cultural reform and development. It emphasized the accelerated reform of the cultural institutions and deepened reform of state-​own cultural enterprises as well as the establishment of a comprehensive modern cultural market system. We should understand these deeply and seize the very opportunities (arising from these initiatives) … In the past few years, Chongqing has actively promoted the construction of culture. The flourishing Singing, Reading, Narrating and Communicating Campaign has greatly boosted the spirit of the public and strengthened their cohesiveness. It has received wide popularity among the masses. Theis quote clearly depicts Bo and his government as active builders and propellants of the socialist culture. In another report on the Awarding Ceremony of the “Auditing Chongqing’s Most Beautiful Neighbourhood Activity” published by the Chongqing Morning Post on 28 October 2011, Bo was quoted:

Sustaining state legitimacy  17

Chongqing has made a few explorations in the areas of economy, culture and society. Many of the moves were the discreet decisions made by the Municipal Party Committee and the Municipal Government following their serious research and waves of rumination. All these aimed for a better living and the common prosperity. This quote indicates Bo and his government’s contribution to the construction and development of Chongqing’s neighbourhoods. It also exhibits his sense of responsibility, which helped to shape his image as a good and responsible governor of Chongqing. Moreover, while quoting Bo’s speeches, the news reports often highlight his citations of the ideas and thoughts of some important Chinese leaders as well as recognition of the political campaigns to build an image of Bo as an official who was loyal to the Party’s leadership and guidelines and who could execute these guidelines effectively. An example of such campaigns is the “changhong dahei” (唱红打黑, singing red, striking black) that mobilized the grassroots in Chongqing to sing patriotic and revolutionary songs from the Mao era to support the Chongqing government’s effort to crack down the black societies or the mafia gangs in the city. Third, quite a few news reports depicted Bo as a friendly and loving political leader by reporting his interactions with the masses. For example, in the reports that involved children, the appellation for him was usually “Grandpa Bo”, which produced the sense of intimacy. Among these reports, one published by the Chongqing Times on 26 November 2011 described how Bo expressed his concerns to the orphaned and disable children when he participated in the opening ceremony of the Chongqing Love Manor: Bo Xilai picked up the two-​year-​old Lulu and played with her chubby hands. The little one was a bit shy with the stranger but she soon grinned and showed a sweet smile. Everyone else also laughed. Another report by the Three Gorges Metropolis Daily on 29 January 2012, told the story that Bo received an enthusiastic response from a left-​behind girl whose parents have to migrate to other cities for better paid jobs after Bo sent her some New Year gifts. When she received the gifts including an encyclopaedia, a pair of gloves and a quilted jacket, the girl was very happy and said “When I was making my New Year wishes, I did not even expect that these could be realized. I thank Grandpa Bo for helping me achieve these New Year wishes”. Fourth, by adopting the appraisals of political and social elites as well as the ordinary masses and netizens for Bo and his contributions to the construction of Chongqing, the news reports develop an image of a great political leader who has done his best to make huge contributions to the development of Chongqing. One report appeared in Chongqing Daily on 17 November 2011 quoted the highly positive comments of Shen Deyong, the former executive vice-​president of the

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Supreme People’s Court, about Bo’s work on the construction of Chongqing and on the campaign of “striking the black and removing the evil” (打黑除恶): Under the leadership of Party Secretary Xilai, Chongqing has initiated the “Singing Red, Striking Black” campaign, constructed “Five (goals of) Chongqing”, implemented the “10 guidelines on (improving) people’s livelihood” and “12 guidelines on (achieving) common prosperity”, and promoted the “construction of democratic rule”. Each of these important measures has brought benefits to the masses and promoted the scientific, healthy and balanced development of the city’s economy and society, which has been very admirable. The effects and achievements of the campaign against the black and evil are especially great, which truly demonstrated the socialism essence of making people the masters of their own affairs. All civilians have clapped their hands for joy to show their support to the campaign. Although most of the reports used Bo’s speeches and the views of other people to build the positive images of Bo without directly addressing the stances of the news organizations, the discourses of image shaping through the four different ways introduced above were most evident in the newspapers which in fact serve as the agents for the local government.

After the dismissal Soon after the Central Government announced the dismissal of Bo from office following the closure of the Two Sessions on 15 March 2012, the news reports on Bo turned upside down. Totally different from before, all of the four local newspapers in Chongqing published exactly the same pieces of news from Xinhua News Agency on the same days, which indicated that the Central Government took over control of local news organizations and none of the newspapers made any original reports about Bo. For example, on 16 March 2012, all four newspapers used the news report titled “The City launches leading cadre convention: The Central Committee of the CCP decides to adjust the main leaders of the Municipal Party Committee”. Again, on 11 April 2012, all of the four news outlets published the same piece of commentary from the People’s Daily titled “Strongly support the correct decision of the Party Central Committee (on the filing for investigation of Bo’s serious disciplinary violations)”. Most of these news reports emphasized the governing principles of maintaining and sustaining the legitimacy and image of the Party and the Central Government through the discourses of combating corruption and building a clean government as well as running state affairs according to law. An example of this is the report by Chongqing Times on 13 April 2012 titled “Cadres and masses believe that the decision of the Central Committee represents the absolute determination of the Party to combat corruption”. The report considered that the decision has “indicated

Sustaining state legitimacy  19

that the ruling party is highly alert to the risks of governance, aware of the need to prevent corruption and has the consensus of maintaining party discipline and state law”. Apart from this, only a small portion of the news reports addressed Bo himself except in the reports about the case presentations in the hearings of Bo in the court. Moreover, the main messages of the paragraphs evaluating Bo in these news articles were that the former governor of Chongqing had seriously breached the principles and violated the laws, which had caused great losses to the state and people and had created very bad influences. A report appearing in the Three Gorges Metropolis Daily on 11 April 2012 commented: Seeing from the facts that have been revealed up to now, the Wang Lijun Incident is a serious political event which has created adverse impact at home and abroad. The death of Neil Heywood is a serious crime involving family and staff of a Party and State leader. The conduct of Bo Xilai has seriously violated the discipline of the Party, brought losses to the enterprises of the Party and the State and caused great harms to the images of the Party and the State. Another report by the same newspaper on 1 October 2012 quoted similar comments by cadres and masses from different parts of the country: The conduct of Bo Xilai has seriously violated the discipline of the Party and the laws of the State, causing baneful influences at home and abroad. The investigation and disposal of Bo Xilai’s serious discipline violation by the Central Committee has won the heart of civilians and met their expectations. Underneath these lines was the discourse that the Central Government would not tolerate such misconduct. In fact, the major themes and discourses of the news report in the six months following 15 March 2020 when Bo was discharged from office were distinctive in different time periods. Between March and June, 2012, the main themes of the reports were “maintaining the image of the Party and strengthening the national cohesion” following the denouncing of Bo’s serious breach of discipline and law, emphasizing the importance for the Party to rule the country by law. However, in the two months of May and July, 2012, there were no reports on Bo at all. While between August and September 2012, the news articles were mainly about presenting the details of the legal case and the judicial decisions of the court, which were followed by the condemnations of the serious misconduct. Finally, in the last two months of our observations, i.e. October and November 2012, the key theme and discourse of the news articles were that Bo’s law-​breaching case was so serious that it brought massive losses to the state and the people, through which the newspapers emphasized the determination of the state to combat corruptions.

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Further discussion and conclusion This chapter, by comparing the local news reports on Bo Xilai, the former Chinese political leader in Chongqing, before and after his removal from the government following the revelation of his scandals, demonstrates the split of the local news organizations on the themes and discourses they have used to portray the image of the politician. The findings show that before Bo was discharged from the government, he was portrayed as a responsible and capable leader who explicitly expressed loyalty to the Party’s leadership and guidelines and his determination to execute these guidelines effectively. Moreover, he was depicted as a friendly political leader who loved his people and strived to contribute to the development and success of Chongqing. However, in the aftermath of the announcement of his dismissal, Bo was reported as a corrupt official who had seriously breaching the principles and violating the laws, causing great losses to the state and people and created very bad influences. Instead of focusing on the image of Bo, most news reports in this period emphasized on the governing principles of maintaining and sustaining the legitimacy and image of the Party and the Central Government. This was achieved by putting forward the discourses of combating corruption and building a clean government as well as running state affairs according to law. The findings above reflect that the local news organizations are under the tight control of the local government and that during the normal periods have effectively built and maintained a positive image of the local government and its officials. However, soon after the scandal of the political leader in the local government was exposed, the local news organizations, which were in the hands of the new leadership and government appointed by the Central Government, turned their news reports upside down to denounce the political leader in concern. This revealed the effective and successful control of the Party State and the Central Government over the different levels of news organization including the local ones.The effectiveness of the political approach of news media control was evident in the case of Chongqing. Similar to what Luo (2015) finds, the propaganda department in Chongqing had obviously been supervised by the CPD to instruct the local news organizations in their coverage of Bo Xilai. We could see that none of the four newspapers would use original reports to report on Bo but trans-​print the news stories on him by the Xinhua News Agency, the official agency of the Party State. Based on the data in this study, it was unclear whether the CPD had replaced the local media managers. However, even though the management remained unchanged, the Central Government had appointed new leaders in the Chongqing government, which would definitely influence the news reporting of the local newspapers as Nhan (2008) indicated. These further reflect the power relations between the local governments/​cadres and the Central Government. During the normal times, the two levels of government are in a harmonious relationship with the local governments and its cadres using the local news media to express their loyalty to the Party principles and

Sustaining state legitimacy  21

leadership, as well as adherence to sustaining the state legitimacy through building their positive images. This is a period that Fewsmith and Gao (2014) considered as the time when the interests of the central and local governments overlapped. Though safeguarding state legitimacy was not the local government’s primary concern (Cai, 2008; and Kuang, 2018), local cadres’ use of the local news media to develop their positive images was not in conflict with the Central Government’s pursuit to sustain its legitimate ruling. While in the crisis of the political scandals by the local political leaders, the relationship between the local leaders/​governments in question and the Central Government is broken with the latter no longer seeing the officials committing misconduct as its agents. Here the conflicts between the two levels of government for different pursuits emerged (Fewsmith and Gao, 2014).What we could see in the case of Bo Xilai was the discourses of denouncement and condemnation, attributing all the responsibilities to the local cadres for the cause of the huge losses to the Party State without admitting any responsibilities of the state in its management of its local officials. Such systematic fault could have been a side product of the state’s administrative decentralization since the late 1970s (Li, 2010).

Acknowledgement This research was supported by the XJTLU Research Development Funding [RDF-​19-​01-​25].

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Kuang, X. (2018). Central state vs. Local levels of government: Understanding news media censorship in China. Chinese Political Science Review, 3(2), 154–​171. Kuang, X. (2020). Self-​caging or playing with the edge? News selection autonomy in authoritarian China. SAGE Open, April–​June 2020: 1–​11. Kuang, X., & Wei, R. (2018). How framing of nationally and locally sensitive issues varies? A content analysis of news from party and nonparty newspapers in China. Journalism:Theory, Practice, and Criticism, 19(9–​10), 1435–​1451. Landry, P. F. (2008). Decentralized authoritarianism in China:The Communist Party’s control of local elites in the post-​Mao era. New York: Cambridge University Press. Li, L. C. (2010). Central-​local relations in the People’s Republic of China: Trends, processes and impacts for policy implementation. Public Administration and Development, 30, 177–​190. Li, L. (2016). Reassessing trust in the Central Government. The China Quarterly, 225: 100–​121. Luo, A. J. (2015). Media system in China: A Chinese perspective. International Communication of Chinese Culture, 2(1), 49–​67. Nhan,V. L. (2008). Media in China: Methods of state control. The Orator, 3(1), 36–​50. Piotroski, J. D., Wong T. J., & Zhang, T. (2017). Political bias in corporate news: The role of conglomeration reform in China. Journal of Law and Economics, 60, 173–​207. Qin, B., Strömberg, D. & Wu, Y. (2018). Media bias in China. American Economic Review, 108(9), 2442–​2476. Tanner, M. S. (2004). China rethinks unrest. The Washington Quarterly, 27(3): 137–​156. Tong, J. & Sparks, C. (2009). Investigative journalism in China today, Journalism Studies, 10(3), 337–​352. Xu, D. (2015). Online censorship and journalists’ tactics: A Chinese perspective. Journalism Practice, 9(5), 704–​720. Yang, G. (2014). Decentralization and central-​ local relations in reform-​ era China. In K. Lieberthal, C. Li, & K. Yu (Eds.) China’s political development: Chinese and American perspectives. Brookings Institution Press. Zhao,Y. (1998) Media, market, and democracy in China: Between the party line and the bottom line. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Zhao, Y. (2004). The state, the market, and media control in China. In Z. Nain (Eds), Who owns the media?: Global trends and local resistances (pp. 179–​212). New York: Zed Books. Zhang, J., & Wang, W. (2019). On the freedom and control of the press in China. African and Asian Studies, 10, 431–​455.

2 PUBLIC DIPLOMACY STRATEGIES REPRESENTED DOMESTICALLY THROUGH PORTS ALONG THE TWENTY-​FIRST CENTURY MARITIME SILK ROAD A case study of Ningbo Zhoushan Port Nancy Xiuzhi Liu,1 Yi Wang and Dan Shi

Introduction Stanley (2012) very vividly depicted that port studies might be expected to involve the giant skeletal cranes that dominate quayside skylines, terminal logistics, dock-​ road layouts complex as airport runways, and the invisible diverse contents of all those seemingly identical containers differentiated only by their matt reds and blues and their stenciled names: Maersk, Lloyd and so on. Little attention has been paid to “lives” at ports, which will be the focus of this chapter. We will examine “lives” of ports by investigating how ports are represented politically and culturally in the Chinese context as historically port cities were located along coasts and served as ports where people could congregate for economic, political and social purposes (Gordon, 2018). Like the ancient Silk Road, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project is planned as a network of land and sea connections between Asia and Europe (Schinas & von Westarp, 2017). It is a strategy that focuses on connectivity and cooperation between Eurasian countries along the land-​based Ancient Silk Road Economic Belt and the oceangoing twenty-​first-​century Maritime Silk Road (MSR). The MSR is one of China’s initiatives to create a peaceful and harmonious environment for further cooperation with other countries.The scope covers six island states with maritime transport, and 40 coastal states with multiple transport choices (Chang, 2018). It starts with some cities along the Chinese coast and extends further to

24  Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Yi Wang and Dan Shi

south-​eastern Asian countries and down to Europe. Cities along the MSR coast line at home include Shanghai, Ningbo, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhanjiang, Shantou, Qingdao,Yantai, Fuzhou and Xiamen among others. Ningbo, a city in the Yangtze River Delta –​one of the most dynamic economic zones in China –​has been quite renowned and prosperous in garment making and port transportation with a long history of over 7,000 years. The geographical location, being both at the mouth of the Grand Canal and open to the sea, has guaranteed Ningbo the exceptional advantage of being the starting point of the twenty-​first-​century Maritime Silk Road and linkage to the outside world, as well as having access to inland towns upstream (Liu, 2020). In 2015, Zhoushan Port was merged into Ningbo Port under the new name Ningbo Zhoushan Port (NZP) which marks a new turning point for the port’s development and guarantees its first place of throughput capacity in the world to date. Now NZP is a state-​owned enterprise (SOE) listed under Ningbo Zhoushan Port Company Ltd. Since taking power in 2012 for less than a decade or so, Xi Jinping has been proactively promoting the strategy of rejuvenating China through a number of drastic measures such as anticorruption on an unprecedented scale, implementation of the BRI and so on. BRI, by harking back to its historical glories, together with other strategies are collectively endeavoured to make China “become strong” both domestically and internationally, as the catch phrase goes that historically China has “stood up” in Mao’s period and grown rich through Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and open up policy”. Distinguished from his predecessors of Hu Jintao or Jiang Zeming, Xi has systematically promoted his Thoughts of Governance and policy by seeking to advance the principles of this new China on the global stage (Economy, 2018). His doctrine has been invariably embodied in the discourse of websites of ports along the MSR as well as extensively construed in the general public. This chapter will address the question of how Xi Thought as a narrative of public diplomacy has been represented domestically. We propose that Xi Thought as authoritative discourse of macro-​level design finds its expression in the multimodal discourse of port websites as an important instrument of public diplomacy at the meso level. It will also be deeply resonated in the general public at the micro level. Methodologically, this project will adopt a mixed method approach. First, we have carried out qualitative content analysis and thematic analysis on Xi Thought as well as projections through published documents on the Thought. Second, we have conducted a multimodal analysis on the home page of the NZP’s website to investigate how the port is represented in the media as a “middle” level of public diplomacy domestically. Third, we have carried out 51 in-​depth interviews with local residents in Ningbo to further gauge Xi Thought’s projections on the general public. Prior to that, a review on public diplomacy and Xi Thought will be conducted.

Public diplomacy in present China and Xi Thought In political science studies, soft power and public diplomacy are both very useful terms that have found quite broad applications in different spheres. According to

Domestic public diplomacy strategies  25

Nye (2012), soft power is more about changing the mindset rather than tangible and measurable resources, which is the ability to obtain what you want through cooperation and attraction rather than the hard power of coercion and payment. A country’s soft power is exercised as “intangible attraction” in contrast to “tangible” hard power in terms of weapons and missiles within a long-​term process.The power is by and large measured by a country’s representation through its cultural and political or otherwise non-​military means (Rawnsley, 2012). In conceptualization, soft power has been developed into a six-​pillar conception, in the context of analysis of China in particular: with the three main (re)sources of culture (in places where it is attractive to others), political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad) and foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority), plus economic development model and international image promotion, as well as economic temptation (Li & Worm, 2011; Men, 2017; Nye, 2012). As developed by Li and Worm (2011, p. 74), soft power can be exerted on three levels: “high” targeted at political elites, or “low”, targeted at the broader public; more importantly, the third level “middle” targeted at interest groups, which include business associations, ethnic groups, trade unions, non-​governmental organizations, among others. As pointed out by Rawnsley (2012), soft power is becoming a sort of bandwagon concept where every government claims to be seeking in order not to be falling out of step with the times. Cull (2008, pp. 31–​32) has also rightly pointed out that “the most potent voice for an international actor is not what it says but what it does. It is possible for good policies to make no difference to a nation’s ‘soft power’ if they are not publicized or coordinated”. In fact, there are three basic channels through which a country can wield its soft power to influence another country: formal diplomacy targeting the political elites, economic and public diplomacy targeting interest groups, and public diplomacy targeting the general public of another country. Public diplomacy (PD) is the means to promote a country’s soft power and is essential in winning hearts and minds on the ground that it attracts others in world politics, and not only to force them to change through threat or use of military or economic weapons (Nye, 2008). It is an instrument that governments use to mobilize these resources to communicate with and attract the publics of other countries, rather than merely their governments (Nye, 2008, p. 95). Therefore, PD is a holistic effort based on a country’s overall policy making. Its success lies in the coordination of public effort of stakeholders including local, international and businesses. It also carries with it a reciprocal nature, where it is done well or not well, it will feedback into policy making by potentially affecting further strategies. In this connection, Cull (2008, pp. 31–​32) has established a simple taxonomy of public diplomacy, dividing its practices into five elements: listening (i.e., assessment of foreign opinions), advocacy (i.e., some activities, short term), cultural diplomacy (i.e., promoting cultural products), exchange diplomacy (i.e., students) and international broadcasting (i.e. news, long-​term strategy). Among these elements, “advocacy in public diplomacy is an actor’s attempt to manage the international environment by undertaking an international communication activity to actively

26  Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Yi Wang and Dan Shi

promote a particular policy, idea, or that actor’s general interests in the minds of a foreign public” (p. 32). In this connection, ports stand as good examples of PD advocator by serving holistic functions for being at the forefront of government policies while in close contact with international personnel or business partners, in the case of the MSR for example. Just as Wang (2012) has also confirmed that Chinese public diplomacy is considered the continuation of its internal affairs by suggesting that the Chinese government needs to stimulate the collaboration of Chinese domestic non-​state actors in order to stimulate more collaboration with international civil society. Similarly, Yang (2020) has rightly pointed out that although public diplomacy is not intended for domestic consumption, it can still have an internal impact. He has examined the news reports on the Confucius Institutes and China’s National Image Film by assessing how these influence domestic perceptions of China and the Chinese government. In present-​ day Chinese society, Xi Thought dominates ideologically in terms of policymaking or various undertakings. Xi Jinping’s “thought”, literally “Xi Jinping thought for the new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics” (习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想) was enshrined into the Party Constitution at the 19th CCP Congress in October 2017 (Cabestan, 2019). Xi Thought has provided a long-​term two-​stage development plan: the first stage from 2020 to 2035 devoted to the realization of socialist modernization, including the achievement of the BRI; and the second stage from 2035 to 2050 to develop China into a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious and beautiful.Wang (2017) explains not only that the “Chinese Dream” is here to stay but also that it is based, as Xi indicates in a variety of sources, on the rejuvenation (复兴 fuxing) of the modern Chinese nation, a rhetorical theme utilized by many Chinese leaders in the past. These thoughts (Peters, 2017) are the essentials of the new “development philosophy” that also turns its gaze to structural market reforms as well as an enhanced governance with a system of socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics based on “consultative democracy” and the promotion of Chinese culture in both its traditional and revolutionary forms as a foundation for soft cultural power, socialist culture and Chinese identity. According to Holbig (2018), the technocratic formula for this new mode of governance is “top-​level design” (顶层设计 dingceng sheji), meaning a new emphasis on overall planning and the strategic coordination of reforms in the economic, political, social, cultural, and environmental fields instead of pursuing isolated ones in all of these fields –​and always keeping in mind the “whole picture”. Concerning economy, in developing a modernized economy transitioning from a phase of rapid growth to high quality, the country must focus on real

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economy. China will support state capital in becoming stronger, doing better and growing bigger, turning Chinese enterprise into world-​class, competitive global firms (www.xinhuanet.com//​english/​2017-​10/​18/​c_​136689568.htm, accessed 14 June 2019). The twenty-​first-​century MSR being part of the ambitious plan of BRI constitutes a major drive in realizing “the socialist modernization” of China whereby Xi Thought will find its representation along the ports in the name of “top-​ level design”. Henceforth, this chapter will proceed to adopt Xi Thought as the analytical framework by examining Ningbo Zhoushan Port as a case study to illustrate how Xi Thought is projected in ports domestically underpinned by the theoretical framework of public diplomacy.

Xi Thought represented at the macro level In order to evaluate the cultural and political representations from “top-​level design” in the governance, this chapter applies thematic content analysis on Xi Thought through analysing the official documents of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”. This is considered as the guiding ideology from PRC’s constitution on 13th National People’s Congress in 2018 (Klimes & Marinelli, 2018). Xi Thought has reflected the leadership in the governance, the importance at such a critical time and the opportunities for the future. Qualitative content analysis and thematic analysis are classified as sets of techniques used to analyse textual data and elucidate theme (Forman & Damschroder, 2008). Combining systematic process of coding, and a categorizing approach, thematic content analysis explores large amounts of textual information unobtrusively to determine trends and patterns of words used, their frequency, their relationships, structures and discourses of communications (Mayring, 2000). With an open coding approach, the research has developed 57 codes from the official document. All codes then were categorized based on coding clusters. Together with further analysis on clusters’ relationship and themes, the researchers finalized six main themes, with a few sub-​themes and codes. These six themes are “strong party”, “strong nation”, “BRI communication and collaboration”, “economic development”, “opening up” and “people’s consideration”. All themes and codes are listed in Table 2.1. These themes represent the public diplomacy considerations from top-​level designs. In China, the government and political ideology are often taken as a development philosophy for many Chinese, and are influential regarding public representation and identity (Diamond, 1995; Harrell, 1990; Sofield & Li, 2007). Also, as Gladney (1994) argued, the Chinese government is capable of engaging in a “commodified orientalism” that demonstrates how political power leads the social and economic development. Therefore, Xi Thought gives us a macro level view on the advocacy of public diplomacy for China. These themes and codes together express a few focuses and directions in China’s “top-​level design”. First, besides putting “Party” at the top of the governance, Xi Thought has a clear focus of building up a “strong nation”. It points out that social and economic development would need a basis of a strong and democratic nation.

28  Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Yi Wang and Dan Shi TABLE 2.1 Themes and codes of Xi Thought

Themes

Explanation

Codes

1.0 Strong party

This theme indicates 1.1 strong party that the Party must be the first before anything else, and the Party guides all works.

2.0 Strong nation

This theme indicates that a strong and democratic nation should be built first, to make sure social and economic development.

2.1 strong nation 2.2 democratic 2.3 national rejuvenation 2.4 all-​round well-​off society 2.5 harmonious and beautiful 2.6 moderately prosperous society 2.7 culturally advanced

3.0 Belt and Road Initiatives

This theme particularly discusses the impacts from BRI on social and cultural representations.

3.1 policy communication 3.2 facility/​people/​trade/​ funds communications 3.3 new platform for international collaboration

Sub-​codes

2.5.1 ecological civilization 2.5.2 green ecology 2.5.3 green development 2.6.1 technologically advanced 2.6.2 technology and economy combined 2.6.3 living standard improved 2.7.1 culturally rich 2.7.2 culturally confidence 2.7.3 enhancing nation’s cultural soft power 2.7.4 cultural creation 2.7.5 improvement of party’s media/​news dissemination

Domestic public diplomacy strategies  29 TABLE 2.1  Cont.

Themes

Explanation

Codes

Sub-​codes

3.4 trade and friendship 3.5 sild road 3.6 Maritime Silk Road 4.0 Economic development

This theme indicates a strong focus on economic development other than cultural and social and other aspects.

5.0 Opening up This theme means that a further opening up for the country should happen at different aspects and facets. 6.0 People’s Xi expressed that consideration all development needs to be based on people’s needs, people’s living environment and people’s considerations.

4.1 high quality 4.2 meeting people’s needs 4.3 leading economic development 4.4 innovation driven 4.5 cooperative development 5.1 expanding openness 5.2 opportunities more than challenges 5.3 reforms 5.4 new resources 5.5 technology 6.1 living environment 6.2 people’s needs 6.3 social and cultural harmony

In order to build the strong nation, technological advance, cultural confidence and green sustainability are the three main areas. These have since become the guiding principles in macro governance, and could be interpreted at a more local level.This “top-​level design” also indicates the importance of BRI. It discusses that the nation needs to utilize the opportunities brought by BRI, to maximize our social and economic growth. Further opening up the country could be the initiative for us to look for new resources, new opportunities and reforms. Xi Thought points out that opening up the nation could bring more benefits compared to challenges. Overall, Xi Thought has a specific focus on “people”. It confirms that all development of the nation needs to be based on meeting people’s needs and needs to position people’s welfare as our top consideration. Xi Thought has a focus on people’s empowerment and the overall sustainability of the nation. We believe that such macro-​level design at the top will be projected at the meso-​level in ports and the micro-​level in local

30  Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Yi Wang and Dan Shi

residents. Therefore we have carried out further research into Ningbo Zhoushan Port (NZP) and the local people in the Ningbo city.

Meso-​level analysis of Ningbo Zhoushan Port Meso-​level analysis This section aims to examine whether top-​level designs would affect meso-​level cultural representations. Here, the meso-​level represents industries, institutions and corporations.This research analyses Ningbo Zhoushan Port (NZP) as the case study to examine its organizational image building at the meso-​level in order to find out how the top-​level public diplomacy is projected domestically from their online promotional multimodal texts.The multimodal data under investigation is collected from the English website of the homepage on the basis that English is the language medium that contributes more to sense making to overseas viewers. Multimodality qualitative analysis has been employed to investigate how the corporate is presented in the media as a “middle” level of public diplomacy by looking into the home page of NZP. The home page of the Port is one of the key official platforms used for business management and promotion, where it is the interest groups’ first point of entry to get access to the information of the main page and other pages in the website. It is the place where all the information is intensively displayed, connected and contributed for meaning construction. Hence in the current chapter, the multimodal study is designed to explore how the home page of NZP has been semiotically constructed with interactions of displayed objects. This can lead to our understanding of what messages are delivered from the home page of NZP, and how Xi Thought is projected at this meso-​level. The analytical framework used for multimodal analysis is based on the grammar of visual design proposed by Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006). Based on different language functions adopted from Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), three layers of meaning have been explored. Representational meaning is used to trace the visual structure of representation involved in the transitivity experience;Interactive meaning to understand the relationship established with the viewer; and Compositional to explore how each multimodal element is coordinated in a coherent way. As noted by Baldry and Thibault (2010), the home page is “a functional component within the larger scale structure of the website as a whole” (p. 113). The structure of the home page is in general highly generic in the way it is organized, though with variation (Baldry & Thibault, 2010). A web page comprises different clusters displayed in different spatial locations on the screen. The layout of a typical home page is schematized via a unified combination of the site name, top banner, picture, left panel, top bar, top centre-​r ight panel, bottom centre-​r ight panel and bottom bars (Baldry & Thibault, 2010). Based on the genre scheme of web page, the home page of NZP can be divided into four clusters. Cluster 1 indicates the site name, which includes the company name and the logo of the company –​Ningbo Zhoushan Port. Cluster 2 lies in the top bar, which is thematically related to the top banner

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and corresponds to each information grid under each thematic headline at the lower part. Cluster 3 is the main body part at the top centre panel thematically integrated with verbal and visual clusters, which will be accentuated and focused for analysis in this chapter to explore the semiotic process of meaning construction. Cluster 4 is the panel on the right that mainly provides quick access to the latest news and information. In Cluster 3, the home page of NZP has three different rolling pages. When looking into each individual multimodal page, Cluster 3 has been upgraded into three different superclusters in order to understand the clusters involved in each supercluster as shown in Figure 2.1, Figure 2.2, and Figure 2.3 as follows.

Constructing corporate identity As shown in Figure 2.1, Supercluster 1 mainly comprises five clusters, involving both visual and linguistic semiotic modes. Cluster 1 shows the transhipment base of containers berth; Cluster 2 shows the transhipment base of iron ore and specialized liquid chemical products berth; Cluster 3 shows the transhipment base of crude oil and coal terminals. From Clusters 1–​3, the main services that are currently available in the port can be derived, where it is mainly involved in stevedoring, storing and transporting domestic and foreign trade containers, imported iron ores, crude oil, coals and liquid chemical products. Cluster 4 is a world map, which indicates its intention of linking the globe, serving the world. The visual images of Clusters 1–​4 aim to show a multi-​functional and comprehensive modern deep-​water port, and are connected to the linguistic sign of Cluster 5 to co-​express its current position as a first-​class international deep-​water hub port, building a strong port to serve China and the world. The visual structure of representation is classificatory with some framing in it. Each cluster element of the composition is framed in three distinctive images by

FIGURE 2.1  Supercluster

1 in the home page of NZP

32  Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Yi Wang and Dan Shi

showing the different scopes of business and presenting the diversified corporate services available in the current port working system. Each of this pieces is offered itself as an item of information for viewers’ knowledge, as an item of products or services on display. The viewers have been considered as potential customers or anyone who is interested in knowing more about the port business. All these three clusters were taken from high angles indicating a relatively higher power from the viewer in making a decision for taking on the services. Distinct from a sequential organization of text, visual images are structured spatially. Based on the compositional information value, all the information in Supercluster 1 is idealized in comparison with more detailed and realistic information shown below mainly in the linguistics semiotic modes. The left-​oriented zone of image indicates the given information of the different scopes of port business conducted generally known to the viewers, while the right zone of image highlights the new information of building up a first-​class international deep-​water hub port to foreground the corporate identity. With a world map as background, the key message aims to open up and link this corporate identity to the globe as a microcosm of the world. Both of the linguistic and visual images have thus been integrated to co-​construct its corporate identity.

Establishing company’s credentials In Figure 2.2, there are four clusters involved in Supercluster 2, which mainly focuses on presenting the port facility in addition to the diversified port business currently running in NZP shown in Supercluster 1. Here within Supercluster 2, Cluster 1 shows the Hangzhou Bay Sea-​crossing Bridge that was completed in 2007, which halves the travelling time from Ningbo to Shanghai. Cluster 2 indicates the highly developed highway network around the Yangzi River connecting Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing and other expressways within Zhejiang Province,

FIGURE 2.2  Supercluster

2 in the home page of NZP

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which provides an ideal logistic condition for the port. Cluster 3 shows a breakthrough of 10 million TEUs (20-​foot equivalent unit –​standard container measurement) hit by the container throughput of Ningbo Port in 2008. Now according to the most recent records in late 2019, the annual container throughput has already exceeded 27 million TEUs. Cluster 4 shows the advanced indoor facility control, and computerized management for container operation. In its visual image presentation in Supercluster 2, each element of the composition is even more strongly framed. This stronger framing allows an inclination of presenting each as a separate unit of information, illuminating its individuality and differentiation, rather than diversity as shown in Supercluster 1.The visual structure of representation follows distinctively an analytical process within an unstructured part–​whole relation. The given well-​known information has fallen into Cluster 1 and 2, as indicated by the information value of different zones of image, presenting intensively its rapidly developed and highly convenient traffic conditions. Cluster 3 and 4 have then been accentuated as the key information for the viewers. Interestingly, the historical moment in 2008 with a breakthrough of 10 million TEUs shown in Cluster 3 has been recorded from a rather low angle, representing the company’s power over viewers to establish and build up its influential credentials. The building of the company’s credentials has been further supported in Cluster 4 by the visual depiction of participants from an oblique angle with a detachment from the viewers and the frontal presentation of computerization, as one of the key signs and reflection of facilitating itself as a modern digital port.

Demonstrating readiness for service provision When we move to the last rolling page in Supercluster 3 shown in Figure 2.3, it involves mainly two clusters, with one specifically for visual and the other linguistic. Cluster 1 shows the image of what is considered as the first-​class container berth at

FIGURE 2.3  Supercluster

3 in the home page of NZP

34  Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Yi Wang and Dan Shi

the port, with its modern advanced facilities, advantaged unique environment and quality global services, which is corresponds to the linguistic sign in Cluster 2 of aiming to build a main line port for international ocean-​going container transport. As explicitly shown in Figure 2.3, the linguistic sign in Cluster 2 is saliently situated in the middle covered by the imagistic background in Cluster 1, with the visual composition structure mainly constructed in the dimensions of centre and margin. In addition to its spatial placement in the centre, the salience of the linguistic element in Cluster 2 has been particularly reflected in its font size, colour, and formatting. The information value of the centre with the linguistic signs in a relatively large font size, sharp red colour and bold highlight is more eye-​catching for viewers.The centre has managed to be more salient than the background, which intends to grab more of the viewers’ attention to its established corporate identity from a deep-​water port hub narrowing down specifically to container transport. Distinct from Supercluster 1 and 2, the visual representational structure here in Cluster 1 formulates a symbolic process, where the corporate identity is thus re-​ established. This established corporate identity is backgrounded consistently by the visual image of its corresponding comprehensive container berth at the port, co-​ expressing the meaning together to present the main container business available and meanwhile demonstrate the readiness of the company to render the needed services for the potential customers. Derived from the NZP website, the home page is presented with different multimodal pages co-​constructed by both visual and linguistic semiotic modes. From the representational perspective, the visual structure of representation has been realized from the classificatory process showing different scopes of business and diversified port services globally linked, to the analytical process equipping itself with naturally and nurturally unique resources, and finally to the symbolic process re-​establishing its corporate identity localizing its status as the main port for international container transport. In the interactive meaning construction, all the images were taken either from a high angle offering itself as items of products and services for viewers’ decision, or low oblique angles prioritizing its power in foregrounding the corporate credentials.The modern advanced facilities, advantaged unique environment and quality global services both linguistically and visually constructed bring a corporate image of professionalism, competitiveness and expertise in port business to the viewers, where this corporate image of “strong port” is successfully built up. Composition relates both representation and interaction into a coherent whole foregrounding its international connection with its backgrounded microcosm of the world to emphasize the opening up and global services currently available. Viewers as potential customers are then convinced through its organizational image building in establishing the company’s credentials and corporate identity to demonstrate its corporate image of “strong port” under the leadership of “strong nation” and “strong party”, and a socio-​cultural image of global service to promote opening up and facilitating BRI communication and collaboration for economic development. This fits with micro-​level residents’ focuses in their lives, which as well reflects with macro-​level on “building up harmonious and prosperous society” in

Domestic public diplomacy strategies  35

Xi Thought. In this case, the website of the Port acts out its role in PD similar to the role of a messenger. Just as Cull (2008, p. 49) has insightfully pointed out, the advocate can boost the credibility of an idea by working to associate that idea with the messenger who will give it the most credibility. It serves as a powerful channel of domestic representation of PD projected overseas through business connections and embodiment of soft power.

Micro level analysis on the general public It is believed that Xi Thought as top-​level design will be represented culturally, socially and politically at the micro-​level of the people. Therefore, the research has conducted 51 in-​depth interviews with local residents in Ningbo, regarding their impressions of the city, as well as their understanding of the city’s representation. It is hoped that through in-​depth interviews, we can find out social and cultural presentations at the micro-​level, and whether such a local level could match with the top-​level design of Xi Thought. This could further help us to understand how public diplomacy of a nation can penetrate into different levels. Using a life history method, 51 unstructured and in-​depth interviews were fully transcribed. Ethical issues have been cleared with the Research Ethics Committee at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Using a combined purposive sampling and snowballing approach, the research has approached more than 100 residents in Ningbo at various regions and districts, and finalized 51 interviewees. The life history approach allows the interviewees to talk more about their own stories, how they grew up in the city, their memory of the city and emotional connections with the city. The life history method comes from a narrative form, which explores the constructivistic story and the expression of self-​representations (Dhunpath, 2000). It is considered as a helpful approach here to examine the social and cultural representations of Xi Thought from residents’ perspectives. The research has conducted semi-​open coding with these interviews in order to obtain as much information as we can. Because all interviewees have discussed their impressions on the city representations, “place identity” and “destination image” literatures are used here in order to acquire various themes for coding. In conclusion, from those literatures, perceptual/​cognitive factors and affective factors have been selected (Baloglu & McCleary, 1999; Stylidis, Belhassen, & Shani, 2017; Pike & Ryan, 2004). The themes and codes are finally concluded in Table 2.2. Guided by those suggested themes and codes from literatures, the research applies a semi-​open coding method, which allows extra codes to enrich the contents, meanwhile maintaining the structure of coding. The coding procedure of interview transcripts explains how local residents view the city, and how they consider the cultural and social representations of the city. The research then compares the macro-​level codes with micro-​level codes to find out whether there are any matches and overlaps. These overlaps could indicate the penetrated influences from top-​level design of Xi Thought at micro-​level (residents’ level).

36  Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Yi Wang and Dan Shi TABLE 2.2 Themes and codes from interviews

Themes

Explanation

Codes

1.0 Strong nation

Interviewees might express a pride in the nation’s strong development, or strong city’s development.

1. Strong nation

2.0 Socioeconomic attributes

The interviewees consider many socioeconomic developments representing the city

2.1 Economic development 2.2 Degree of urbanization 2.3 Extent of commercialization 2.4 Political stability 2.5 Fame/​reputation 2.6 Costs/​price levels 2.7 Community harmony 2.8 Extent of opening up 2.9 Modernization 2.10 Innovation 2.11 Technologically advanced 2.12 Living standard improved

3.0 Amenities/​ facilities

These codes show the 3.1 Shopping facilities development in amenities 3.2 Transportation and facilities for the city can 3.3 Accessibility represent the city as well. 3.4 Architecture/​buildings 3.5 Service quality 3.6 Restaurants

4.0 Natural environment

Natural environment includes 4.1 Scenic beauty their impressions on the 4.2 Beautiful landscape rural importance of the landscape areas and scenery to the city representation.

5.0 Cultural and historical environment

Their feelings towards culture, 5.1 History of Ningbo and how do they feel what 5.2 Ningbo Gang should represent the city 5.3 Business oriented history from a cultural aspect. 5.4 Cultural background (Liangzhu culture and etc) 5.5 Water element (importance of water in their lives and their family histories) 5.6 Port culture

2. Strong city development

Domestic public diplomacy strategies  37 TABLE 2.2  Cont.

Themes

Explanation

6.0 Attractions

7.0 Social environment

Social environment determines the city’s stability for local residents. Therefore, they would consider the overall sound social environment could represent the city’s soft power.

Codes 6.1 Cultural attractions 6.2 Fairs, exhibits, festivals 6.3 Different customs/​culture 6.4 Historic sites/​museums 6.5 Gastronomy (food and drinks) 7.1 Safety 7.2 Night life entertainment 7.3 Crowdedness 7.4 Cleanliness 7.5 Hospitality/​friendliness/​ receptiveness

First, when macro level expressed the priority of development is a strong nation and strong party, the micro level has shown that a strong nation and social stability have increased pride and empowerment among the community. Second, the macro level indicates that building a viable and healthy society requires deep cultural sediments combined with modern cultural elements.While, at the micro level, many interviewees also agreed that both historical culture and modern culture are important for the city’s cultural representation. However, they felt that Ningbo is a city lacking such cultural constructions. While the macro-​level indicates that the strong nation provides the social stability, the interviewees at the micro-​level have indicated that Ningbo can be considered as a very harmonious society, which could be taken as part of the city’s reputation. This is as well a strong reason to enhance their place attachment and resident empowerment. Further, the green ecological system and overall sustainable development are key focuses at the macro-​ level. At the micro-​level, interviewees indicated that the green and beautiful landscape/​natural environment should be considered as the important city image for Ningbo, although they are not properly managed at the moment. At the micro-​ level, interviewees expressed that Ningbo is a city well known for its fast economic growth speed, history of family business development, and highly commercialization and modernization. These are an important basis for enhancing the city’s representations, as well as people’s empowerments through the meso-​level. At the macro-​level, Xi Thought also mentioned that a sustainable economic development should be continually taken as the development priority. Such priority needs the support of technological growth and social stability. Finally, there are some elements that are expressed at the micro-​level, but have not been mentioned directly at the macro-​level, for example, the port culture and “water element”. Interviewees

38  Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Yi Wang and Dan Shi

pointed out that both port culture and the water element are important in Ningbo’s representations. Even though many interviewees have never been to the port, they consider that the port should be the “representative” for the city, as this is what Ningbo is famous for. Similar to port, “water” has been mentioned by almost everyone. It could be dam, could be water, could be river, could be the sea, could be lake, and could be seafood. Interviewees consider water as the most important thing in their lives, and makes Ningbo unique from other cities. Although these elements are not directly mentioned at the macro-​level, Xi Thought did mention quite a lot about BRI. Ningbo, as a very important port city of BRI, MSR in particular, has shown its strategical importance here. The coding exercise for macro level with Xi Thought documents, and for micro level with interview transcripts, has located a few matching focuses, including “strong nation”; “economic resilience”; “social stability and cultural viability”; and “green environment and sustainable development”. These indicate that Xi Thought has provided a “top-​level” initiative for the nation’s development, while residents at the local level might feel similarly for their city’s representations and developments. In other words, top-​level design as advocacy resonates with people’s perceptions from public diplomacy perspectives domestically.

Discussion and conclusion Through our analysis at the macro, meso-​level and micro-​level, we can see that the three levels are intertwined and interwoven closely together. As was argued by Snape (2019), engagement with the Chinese academic literature can demonstrate how central documents and political discourse are used as a governance technique by both Party and government. Examinations into the three levels of approaches on public diplomacy ranging from Xi Thought at the top to the website of Ningbo Zhoushan Port, and further down to the civil society have exhibited that all of them have worked in a circuit with the macro level being the guiding principle while the meso level is the bridge with the micro as the projection of effects from both of the above. This has somewhat achieved the ideal public diplomacy structure proposed by Cull (2008, p. 48), which “would provide for systematic listening, research, and analysis within each strand of public diplomacy and ensure a mechanism to feedback results and advice into the administration of public diplomacy and back into the highest level of policy making”. Companies as important stakeholders play a significant role in public diplomacy at the meso level in projecting soft power from the top. For SOEs in particular, they are the entities that implement specific collaborative projects of BRI and communicate China’s BRI around the world (Yang, 2018). In an examination of the Chinese context, Yang (2018) has shown how Chinese soft power is both inward and outward, looking into the examples of the Shanghai Expo, China’s national image films and the revival of Confucius. He argues that understanding this dual role of soft power is important in comprehending the underlying motivations

Domestic public diplomacy strategies  39

behind China’s attempts to create and manage its identity as orderly, prosperous and legitimate. As rightly pointed out by Nye (2008), public diplomacy tries to attract by drawing attention to a country’s potential resources through various means including broadcasting, subsidizing cultural exports, arranging exchanges and so forth. In this case, the website is employed to deploy China’s public diplomacy domestically with the ultimate goal of producing soft power. Although no contract is involved in this context, the fact that the corporate is an SOE pertains to the fact that it has a binding relation implicitly with the government (Yang, 2018). In this examination, we have found that the advocacy of public diplomacy has been effective domestically by “conveying information and selling a positive image” from the business perspective as well as the general public. In this sense, a long-​term relationship has been fostered that will create an enabling environment for government policies, as was envisioned by Nye (2008). Ports constitute the “middle” level of public diplomacy targeting interest groups, which are one of the channels that China has tapped into among its soft power resources. With this proclamation of Xi Thought narrative, the world at large needs to understand the longer-​term ramifications of the “new era” discourse for China’s domestic politics as well as for its self-​image in the international context (Holbig, 2018, p. 191). Gone are the days when the leadership were to “grope for stones to cross the river” at the time when the reform and open-​up policy was first implemented in Deng Xiaoping’s era, Xi Thought now serves as an overarching guiding doctrine in policies or strategies on development of not just ports but almost every front of the country. In this sense, the nation’s “soft power” is not just publicized but also coordinated in the public effort of both local and business stakeholders domestically. Such an “enabling environment for public diplomacy” envisaged by Nye (2008) has thus created and will be sensed and experienced internationally in due course. Ports in this study as a holistic conception will project the representation of a country because they are the first point of contact where ships and containers from overseas will land, construe and digest. Ports are not only represented by cranes and containers, or logos and slogans, they project their unique images so that various stakeholders may identify or be drawn to them in one way or another. If we compare cities to a complex cocktail, the spectacle of empty streets caused by the lockdown of the Covid-​19 pandemic in 2020 will serve as a stark reminder of how people are making urban spaces, port city in this case, compelling and fascinating. Therefore, people irrespective of being at ports, in streets or anywhere else are the decisive factors that can testify to the success or failure of any moves in public diplomacy strategies. Furthermore, the breakneck speed of change coupled with various “black swan” events in the world has confronted every nation with unprecedented challenges and unparalleled possibilities in the new era. A virtual environment such as the Internet allows geographically remote users to interact real-​time, which constitutes one of the core problems of contemporary advocacy by disrupting old news boundaries and cycles. Information is power; in today’s world almost every people has

40  Nancy Xiuzhi Liu, Yi Wang and Dan Shi

access to that power. Those who can occupy the attention span long enough will be the winners. Those who may garner more attention and focus will gain power. Politics has become more about the competition to win credibility as politics in the information age may ultimately be about whose story wins (Nye, 2008, p. 95). In this sense, NZP has accomplished a lot by promoting its image in line with the public diplomacy strategies domestically. Recent access to the port’s Chinese website has found it has been updated dramatically by making it more eye-​catching and interactive with new features of motion graphics and animated movies with flashes. This study has only focused on one of the ports along the Maritime Silk Road by examining how public diplomacy under Xi Thought has been projected from top-​down and bottom-​up levels domestically. It will be more constructive to look into other ports along the MSR to further gauge the representations. More importantly, how this domestic projection is resonated by international stakeholders calls for more probe in future.

Note 1 Corresponding author.

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Wang,Y., 王义桅 (2017). Five missions: The significance of the 21st-​Century Maritime Silk Road (21世纪海上丝绸之路意义在何？：五大使命) http://​news.youth.cn/​zt/​qxfj_​ 131887/​mtjj/​201706/​t20170613_​10058900.htm, accessed 12/​20/​18. Yang,Y. (2018). Corporate public diplomacy and global communication of China’s “Belt and Road”. Initiative. Pacific Focus, 33(3), 497–​523. doi:10.1111/​pafo.12130. Yang, Y. (2020). Looking inward: How does Chinese public diplomacy work at home? The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 22(3), 369–​386. doi:10.1177/​ 1369148120917583.

3 A SURVEY OF CHINESE PHOTOJOURNALISTS Identities, work conditions and attitudes in the digital age Shixin Ivy Zhang1 and Adrian Hadland

Introduction There is no question that in the digital era, just like the analogue period that preceded it, images constitute a critical component of news discourse. The great news stories of our time continue to be lodged in the public consciousness through powerful images from the 9/​11 terror attacks in New York in 2001 through to the more recent human suffering of refugees crossing the Mediterranean. Chinese photojournalists’ contribution to the provision of key images that form part of news discourse remains largely unrecognized outside their homeland. But this is changing, and fast (Hunt, 2016). According to a CNN report, 11 Chinese photographers not only inform the audience were shortlisted for the 2016 Sony World Photography Awards. Chinese entries to the awards have surged 263% from 2015. Zhang Lei, a photographer at the Tianjin Daily, won a top prize in the World Press Photo Contest (WPP) for his image of Tianjin shrouded in haze in 2016. Zhang told Tencent Photo that the photo that won the WPP first prize singles was taken on Mansion 117, the tallest building in Tianjin on 10 December 2015. “I started taking photos of smog in 2012 … I’ve been to that building many times. I’m very familiar with the scene in the photo. I have expectations with the photo”, said Zhang. Winning the WPP prize is like winning a lottery. But for any award-​winning work, you must have basic photographic skills, then you have the sense of documenting societal issues, for instance, the smog in northern China. I believe it is worth recording and I take photos persistently and honestly. (Tencent Photo, 2016)

44  Shixin Ivy Zhang and Adrian Hadland

Founded in 1955,WPP is “one of the most prestigious awards in photojournalism and multimedia storytelling” (www.worldpressphoto.org). It is also well known to China’s photography industry and the Chinese public. Since Yang Shaoming from Xinhua News Agency won a WPP third prize for his photo featuring Deng Xiaoping and his family after Deng’s retirement in 1988, a total of 36 photographers from mainland China have won this award. “WPP is like a mirror to China” that reflects the transformation of China and China’s photography (Guancha.cn, 2015). Chinese photojournalists are a rising force in the world press corps. “Individual Chinese photographers have started to earn fellowships and awards abroad”, says Judy Polumbaum, Professor Emerita of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. “Photojournalists elsewhere have become aware of their Chinese peers … we are probably seeing the beginning of broader awareness” (Hunt, 2016). News photographers are an understudied group of creative practitioners (Hadland, Lambert & Campbell, 2016). Chinese photographers are even more understudied. There is little research about the current state of Chinese photojournalists in the English corpus. To fill this gap, this study aims to shed light on Chinese photojournalists’ identities, work conditions and attitudes towards ethics, the impact of digital technologies, and the future prospects of photojournalism. Statistical data in this study draws on the 2015 and 2016 Photojournalism Survey conducted by the University of Stirling in collaboration with the WPP Foundation.

Previous studies on photojournalists Professional photojournalists are facing rapid change in the form of advancements in digital technology, the rise of amateur or citizen photojournalists, increasing uncertainties in work circumstances, ethical concerns as well as political, organizational and commercial influences. In 2015 and 2016, Hadland, Lambert and Campbell published the results of annual surveys of 1,556 photojournalists from more than 100 countries who had entered the World Press Photo contest in 2015 and 2016. The survey found the digital age has proven to be a period of great risk for photojournalists. Most felt they were particularly vulnerable to physical risk with country of residence representing a powerful influence on the likelihood of this risk. Other findings included that professional photojournalists were overwhelmingly male, largely self-​ employed, worked alone, were highly educated, and faced a range of serious challenges from new technologies, citizen photographers and ethical concerns to concerns about the sustainability of photojournalism as a professional occupation. Using the same dataset, the three authors also analysed the current professional practices of sport photojournalists (Haynes, Hadland & Lambert, 2016). For this chapter, we have extracted the data from 275 Chinese journalists who participated in the 2015 and 2016 World Press Photo surveys. Previous studies on photojournalists have mostly been nation-​specific surveys usually examining photojournalists from the United States and focusing on a range

A survey of Chinese photojournalists  45

of areas from the visual depiction of war, photojournalists’ personalities, multimedia skills and trauma to the impact of visual images on public opinion formation (Fahmy, 2005; Fahmy & Wanta, 2007; Greenwood and Reinardy, 2011; Freeman, 2004; Newman, Simpson & Handschuh, 2003). Fahmy’s (2005) survey of 516 members of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) in the US revealed the attitudes and perceptions of photojournalists and photo editors toward the visual coverage of 9/​11 and the Afghan War. It found that political sensitivity ranked higher for selecting graphic images of the Afghan War than for selecting graphic images of 9/​11. Readers’ criticisms, taste, self-​censorship, and personal ethics were identified as influencers in the visual gatekeeping process. Furthermore, Fahmy and colleague Wanta assessed how news professionals view the impact of their work. They found that visual journalists believed their work could have a powerful effect on the public (Fahmy & Wanta, 2007). A study by Greenwood and Reinardy (2011) focused on photojournalists in traditional newspaper organizations in the US. Their online survey of 124 photojournalists indicated that little was being done to provide photojournalists with training in multimedia skills. Freeman (2004) examined the personality of photojournalists based on an online test with a small group of top daily newspaper photographers in the United States –​the NPPA’s Monthly News Clip Contest from the years 1996 to 2000. Lastly, Newman, Simpson and Handschuh’s (2003) survey of 875 photojournalists in the US revealed the exposure of photojournalists to trauma and post-​traumatic stress disorder. They argue for the inclusion of emotional risk in theories about the relationship of photojournalistic practices to the creation of images. It is not our goal to give a thorough and comprehensive review of previous studies on photojournalism and photojournalists. But the above-​mentioned survey-​ based studies have clearly delineated a USA-​focused view through a Western media lens. Few studies have examined photojournalists from the Global South and there is little question that more insight into their working conditions, challenges, motivations and aspirations would add to our understanding of this important aspect of news discourse in the digital era. Regarding Chinese photojournalism, existing research focuses on a narrow range of themes and topical issues. As early as 1993, Renney studied photographic content in Chinese newspapers and found that entertainment was a primary function of photos, followed by economic news and education/​indoctrination functions. Nearly all images were positive and more than half were posed (Renney, 1993). Wu and Yun (2007) traced the historical development of documentary photography in modern China and argued that documentary photography, as a form of communication that tried to create social and aesthetic meanings, grew out of and was heavily dependent on civil society. Huang and Fahmy (2011) conducted a content analysis of photos from four major US newspapers and four major Chinese newspapers depicting the 2008 anti-​ China/​ Olympics protests. They revealed different themes in the US and China. While the US dailies visually portrayed a

46  Shixin Ivy Zhang and Adrian Hadland

pro-​Tibetan independence leaning, the Chinese dailies visually were more pro-​ Chinese government. Liu (2013) studied the convergence of professional journalism and global environmental politics. Based on the analysis of 148 photojournalistic works that received WPP environmental awards from 1992 to 2011, he found that the media of developed countries dominated the discourse, and the conventional notion of journalistic objectivity remained intact. In addition, Chinese photographers’ style of depicting an environmental crisis as studio art could be justified in the Chinese media system because an important standard of photojournalism was whether it could “uncover the essence of things” (Liu, 2013). The most recent research has been Zhang’s (2015) examination of the ideology and practices of four Chinese war photojournalists. She argued that Chinese photojournalists maintained their distinctive “Chineseness” and faced limitations due to ownership, audiences, internal and external constraints. This study asks the following research questions: RQ1:  What is the demographic profile of Chinese photojournalists? RQ2:  What are the working conditions of Chinese photojournalists? RQ3: How do they perceive ethics, the impact of digital technologies and the future prospects of photojournalism?

Journalistic field, capital and habitus Theoretically, this chapter will draw on Bourdieu’s field theory and related notions of capital and habitus. French sociologist Bourdieu’s field theory has been widely discussed and used in journalism research in recent years. It highlights the dialectical relationship between the dispositions of individual journalists (i.e. the journalistic habitus) and the cultural practices and norms of the journalistic field (Phelan & Salter, 2017). In his consideration of the journalistic field, Bourdieu asks about agents, hierarchies and the logic of the field: which agents played a role? Who directed whom? And which capital was necessary to advance professionally? (Meyen & Fiedler, 2013). Tsui and Lee (2012) point out that the main utility of field theory resides in its provision of a framework for discussing individual variations. Thus, taking photojournalism as a sub-​field in journalistic field in China, the habitus of Chinese photojournalists and the capital they possess (economic and cultural capital) will be analysed and explained within Bourdieu’s theoretical framework. A field is referred to as a “structured social space”, “a field of forces” (Bourdieu, 1998a: 39). The journalistic field is semi-​autonomous with its own logic and rules, as Bourdieu writes, “Journalism is a microcosm with its own laws. It is independent or autonomous because what happens in it cannot be understood by looking only at external factors” (Bourdieu, 1998a: 39). Meanwhile, cultural producers within the journalistic field are most susceptible to economic and political power. More specifically, a field consists of a set of positions, a set of trajectories associated with the positions, and a set of rules regarding what needs to be done and what

A survey of Chinese photojournalists  47

kinds of capital needs to be acquired by an individual in a certain position (Tsui and Lee, 2012). Bourdieu’s field theory focuses on competition and difference (Benson, 2006; Meyen & Riesmeyer, 2012). Fields are spaces of competition in which agents compete for recognition and prestige according to the “rules of the game” and the resources agents possess. And each field is structured around differences of perception and practice (Powers & Zambrano, 2016). A common criticism is that Bourdieu’s framework privileges structural constraints over individual agency. However it enables the analysis of structure and agency as well as facilitating a more integrated interpretation of both structural inequalities and individual variations (Tsui and Lee, 2012; Botma, 2013). Field theory provides a new unit of analysis for media studies: the “mezzo-​level” (or “meso-​level”) inter-​organizational and professional environment between the macro-​level society and the micro-​level individual journalists (Benson, 2006; Neveu, 2007). Capital, which is closely linked to field, describes the power of agents. An agent’s power and social positioning within a field is determined by the capital the agent possesses in the social space. As Bourdieu (1998b: 6) noted, “Social space is constructed in such a way that agents or groups are distributed in it according to their position in statistical distribution based on the two principles of differentiation: economic and cultural capital”. Bourdieu’s term of capital takes different forms including economic, cultural, social and symbolic resources (Bourdieu, 1985; Wiedemann, 2017). Economic capital refers to money, assets or financial resources; cultural capital encompasses educational background, knowledge and skills; social capital refers to membership of networks, networks of contacts, social connections, friendships with the “right” people; and, finally, symbolic capital is the form the above capitals take once they are perceived and recognized as legitimate by others in the field (Powers & Zambrano, 2016; Wiedemann, 2017). Specifically in the journalistic field, there are economic and journalistic capital. Journalistic capital includes cultural capital (journalistic skills), social capital (networks) and symbolic capital (Meyen & Riesmeyer, 2012). Benson (2006) argued that the journalistic field is structured around the opposition between the “heteronomous” pole representing forces external to the field (primarily economic) and the “autonomous” pole representing the specific capital unique to that field (e.g., artistic or literary or scientific skills). Habitus is a system of dispositions bringing together both objective social structures and subjective personal life experiences (Bourdieu, 1977; Wiedemann, 2017). Structured on field conditions, habitus further structures an individual’s perceptions and practices (Bourdieu, 1984; Kumar & Haneef, 2017). Bourdieu (1971) divided habitus into opus operatum and modus operandi.While the opus operatum refers to the personal life story shaped by age, gender, and outward appearance, socialization, and the current life situation, the modus operandi refers to how and why people act. Opus operatum defines modus operandi (Meyen & Fiedler, 2013). In a word, the concept of habitus aims at long-​lasting schemes of perception, thinking and acting, and emphasizes that recent experiences are shaped by past experiences (Meyen & Fiedler, 2013).

48  Shixin Ivy Zhang and Adrian Hadland

Using the concepts of field, capital and habitus as instruments of analysis, the following categories were developed to understand the identities, work conditions, perceptions and attitudes of Chinese photojournalists against the world-​ wide photojournalists. • •

•

Demographics: habitus as opus operatum and individuals’ cultural (or journalistic) capital (age, gender, education level and training) Working conditions: positions in the (photo)journalistic field and individuals’ economic capital (employment status, the type and size of organizations, roles, practice and financial situation) Perceptions and attitudes: habitus as modus operandi (risks, ethics, citizen photography, and the future prospects).

Methods This study draws on data from two broader questionnaire surveys that investigate the attitudes and values of photographers on a range of issues covering employment arrangements, professional practices and opinions about future developments in the field (Hadland, Campbell & Lambert 2016). The two consecutive online surveys were conducted by University of Stirling in collaboration with the World Press Photo Foundation (WPP) in 2015 and 2016. Respondents were entrants of the WPP Contests. In 2015, a total of 1,556 questionnaires were completed with a 25% response rate. About half of those who filled in the survey were living in Europe with about a quarter in Asia (including Oceania and the Middle East), 11% in South and Central America and the Caribbean, and just under 10% in North America. In a similar follow-​up survey in 2016, more than a third of the competition entrants, 1,991 photographers, responded. All the respondents participated voluntarily and confidentially in the two online surveys. Ethical procedures were approved by the University of Stirling’s General University Ethics Panel (GUEP). A pilot survey was conducted with the assistance of the Reuters News Agency in London in early 2015. This current study is based on answers from a total of 275 Chinese photographers who participated in the WPP survey in 2015 and 2016.There were 62 respondents, representing about 4% of the total in 2015; and 213 in 2016, representing almost 11% of the total sample. In addition, one of the authors conducted semi-​ structured interviews in Beijing with four photojournalists from Xinhua News Agency and China Radio International in May 2014. Ethical clearance for these interviews was approved by the University of Nottingham Ningbo China’s ethics committee. The four interviewees have been to the Middle East covering wars and conflicts. Each interview lasted about one hour. The interviewees were given fictional names to protect their identities. These interviews, along with secondary literature such as news reports in Chinese featuring interviews with photojournalists from China, are

A survey of Chinese photojournalists  49

used to contextualize and explain the survey results, and to further discuss Chinese photojournalists as an interpretive community.

Survey results In this section, the survey data are grouped and presented in three categories: Demographic profiles (gender, age, education level, and training); working conditions (employment status, the type and size of organizations, roles, and financial situation); and photojournalists’ perceptions and attitudes towards risks, ethics, citizen photography, and the future prospects of photojournalism.

Demographics As Table 3.1 shows, Chinese photojournalism is dominated by males (92%), which is much higher than the overall 84.5% in the 2016 world survey. The average age of Chinese photojournalists is 40 years old. The largest age group falls into 30 to 39 years old. Distribution of age groups is similar to the world-​wide trend in which the 30–​39 age is the dominant group. Chinese photojournalists have very high education levels with 236 respondents (86%) claiming to be university educated. The top three subject areas are Arts and Humanities (70 respondents, 25%), photography (69 respondents, 25%) and journalism (64 respondents, 23%). In comparison, the overall world figure is 1,372 respondents (69%) who have university level qualifications. The most popular subject areas for Chinese photojournalists were photography (629 respondents, 26%), followed by journalism (395 respondents, 16%), and Arts and Humanities (371 respondents, 15%). This suggests that Chinese photojournalists have a higher education level than the world average and more of them study Arts and Humanities than their counterparts in the other parts of the world. Findings indicate Chinese photojournalists are well trained in photography with a majority of respondents (188 respondents, 68%) claiming to have received either college course (107 respondents, 39%) and/​or in-​house training (81 respondents, 29%) respectively. These figures are higher than that of the overall world survey results, which show 1,168 respondents (52%) having college course and/​or in-​ house training. The top three subject areas that are covered in specific training are photography (212 respondents, 77%), video (74 respondents, 27%) and multi-​media (45 respondents, 16%). The percentage in these three areas is much higher than that of the 2016 world survey results –​photography (1539 respondents, 49%), video (444 respondents, 14%) and multimedia (297 respondents, 9.5). In sum, a typical Chinese photojournalist can be described as a male, 40 years old, university educated with a major in Arts and Humanity or photography. He tends to be professionally trained in photography, video and multimedia. Compared to the world demographic profiles in photojournalism, the most distinctive features

50  Shixin Ivy Zhang and Adrian Hadland TABLE 3.1  Demographics of Chinese photojournalists by gender, age, education level, and

training in photography over two years from 2015 to 2016 (N=275) Demographics

Number of responses

Percentage

Gender   • Male   • Female

252 23

91.64 8.36

2 51 99 64 46 13

0.73 18.55 36.00 23.27 16.73 4.73

3 11 25 236

1.09 4 9.09 85.82

70 24 64 69 7 33 12 32 26

25.45 8.73 23.27 25.09 2.55 12 4.36 11.64 9.45

81 107 31 8 78

29.45 38.91 11.27 2.91 28.36

212 74 30 45 21 35 49 3

77.09 26.91 10.91 16.36 7.64 12.73 17.82 1.09

Age (years)   •  19 or younger   •  20–​29   •  30–​39   •  40–​49   •  50–​59   •  60–​69 Education   •  No formal qualifications   •  School level only   •  Post-​school/​vocational   •  University level Main subject area at university   •  Arts and humanities   •  Social sciences   • Journalism   • Photography   • Law   • Business   •  Natural, medical or life sciences   •  Computing, technical or engineering   • Other Training in photography   •  In-​house training   •  College course   •  Undergraduate degree   •  Postgraduate degree   •  No specific training Subject area covered in training   • Photography   • Video   • Audio   • Multimedia   • Web design   •  Graphic design   •  No specific training   • Other

A survey of Chinese photojournalists  51

of Chinese photojournalists are that they are predominantly male (92% vs overall 85%) with university education (86% vs overall 69%) and who have received professional training (68% vs overall 52%), multimedia in particular.

Working conditions In this section, findings regarding Chinese photojournalists’ employment, the type and size of organizations they work for, their roles and practice, as well as their financial situation will be presented. Regarding employment status, Chinese photographers have a high proportion in full-​time employment (183 out of 242, or 76%), rather than self-​employed (24%), compared to about 42/​54% (employment/​self-​employment) in the rest of study. Nearly half of them (49% out of 275) work as full-​time photographers. Meanwhile, a high number of them (75%) also work as part-​time photographers who do other part-​time work. Specifically, a total of 114 Chinese respondents (41%) reported they had a long-​ term contract with a large media company (100 plus staff). Only 59 photographers (21%) were self-​employed. These figures from China, as Figure 3.1 below shows, form a stark contrast to the world trend in which 54% (more than 1,000 respondents) are self-​employed and 22% (446 respondents) have a long-​term contract with a large media company. There is a strong association between gender and employment. Findings indicate that 170 Chinese males were employed (out of 183 total employed, 93%). (Pearson chi2(1) = 3.5862; Pr = 0.058). In terms of self-​employment, 50 Chinese males (20%) were self-​employed whereas 9 females (39%) were self-​employed. In addition, 110 males (44%) and 4 females (17%) had a long-​term contract with a large media company (Pearson chi2(7) = 11.9490; Pr = 0.102).This indicates that Chinese male photographers are much more likely to be employed than females, and tend to have

World 54%

I am self employed

China 22%

World 8%

I work as a member of a media collective or co-operative

China 13%

I work for a large media company (100+ staff) where I have a long-term contract

World 21% China 41% 0%

FIGURE 3.1  Percentage

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

of photojournalists in China and the world in terms of types of employment (N=275 for China; N=1,991 for the world)

52  Shixin Ivy Zhang and Adrian Hadland

a stable job with a large media company. Chinese female photographers tend to be self-​employed. Regarding the distribution of organizations, a high number of Chinese photographers (109 respondents, or 42%) are employed on print-​only newspapers or magazines.Their average ages are quite high with a 52 years old average for print newspapers and 57 years old for print magazines (significance p-​value for relations between organization and age = .00353519). A significant number of Chinese photographers (69 respondents, or 25%) work in companies with a large number of photographers (more than 30). Meanwhile, an even higher number, 96 respondents or 35% work in companies with fewer than 10 photographers. Their roles are mainly photojournalists (93 or 44%), documentary photographer (74 or 27%) or press photographer (51 or 19%). Regarding practice, the majority of respondents (198 or 72%) claim they work alone most of time. They sometimes work in a multi-​media team (163 or 60%). Their assignments are mostly still photographs only (141 or 51%), along with writing texts and images (63 or 23%) and mix of still and video (30 or 11%). The financial situation of Chinese photographers is quite similar to that of the world trend. Most of them report they are managing (118 or 43%). See Figure 3.2 below. In sum, the majority of Chinese photographers are in employment working as full-​time or part-​time photographers. Male photographers are likely to have a stable job with a large media company while female photographers tend to be self-​employed. Older photographers (above 50 years old) tend to work at print publications. Photographers work alone most of time and sometimes in a multi-​media team. Their roles involve providing still photographs only, writing text and images, or shooting a mix of still and video. Like their counterparts in other parts of the world, Chinese photographers were mostly “managing” with their finances.

World, 3% China, 4%

Very good

World, 21% China, 24%

Good

World, 41% China, 43%

I am managing World, 21% China, 24%

Difficult World, 11% China, 5%

Very difficult 0

10

FIGURE 3.2  Photographers’ description

China; N=1,991 for the world)

20

30

40

50

of their current financial situation (N=275 for

A survey of Chinese photojournalists  53

Attitudes While addressing the question of “which of the risks worries you most”, Chinese photographers pointed out “failure of my company” (94 respondents, 38%) and “failure to keep up with the technology” (35 respondents, 13%) as being most relevant. This result differs from world trends in which 816 respondents (41%) cited “risk of physical injury or death during work” and 228 respondents (12%) cited “erratic and unpredictable income” as the most worrying risks. Regarding ethics, 185 Chinese photographers (67%) believed the manipulation of photographs (adding or removing content) was a very serious problem. This percentage is 12% lower than world-​wide survey cohort (1,572, 79%). Also, 204 (74%) Chinese photographers thought it was very important for photographers to understand professional ethics. The corresponding percentage was 83% (1,660 respondents) in the world survey, nearly 10% higher than that of China. It suggests Chinese photographers may take manipulation of photographs and professional ethics slightly less seriously on average than their counterparts in the other parts of the world. Regarding the assumption that amateur or citizen photography is changing the way professional photographers work, Chinese photographers were mostly positive towards amateur/​citizen photography. A total of 182 Chinese respondents (66%) agreed that amateur/​citizen photography added something new and only 40 respondents (14%) disliked it and/​or regarded it as a threat to their livelihood. In comparison, the world survey revealed that 712 (36%) respondents were positive while 566 (29%) respondents were negative towards amateur/​citizen photography. Figure 3.3 shows the details below. Regarding the future prospects of photojournalism, a total of 125 Chinese photographers (45%) indicated they “sometimes” felt overwhelmed by the pace of technological change while 57 (21%) said they were “never” overwhelmed. In comparison, the world survey shows 828 (42%) photographers chose “sometimes” and 635 (32%) chose “never”. This suggests Chinese photographers are a bit more

Amateur/citizen photography adds something new

World, 36%

I neither like nor dislike amateur/citizen photography I don’t like amateur/citizen photography, it makes my work difficult I feel strongly that amateur/citizen photography is a threat to my livelihood Other 0%

FIGURE 3.3  Chinese

China, 19% China, 5%

China, 66%

World, 32%

World, 16%

World, 12% China, 9% World, 4% China, 0.4% 10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

and world-​wide photographers’ attitudes towards amateur/​citizen photography (N=275 for China; N=1,991 for the world)

54  Shixin Ivy Zhang and Adrian Hadland

overwhelmed by the pace of technological change than photographers from other countries. In addition, Chinese photographers felt more positive towards the future of photography. total of 119 Chinese photographers (43%) “always” felt positive about the future of photography whereas only 501 (25%) photographers in the world survey “always” felt that way. In answering the question of “what skills should universities, colleges or training institutions be offering to the next generation of photographers so they can have long-​term, successful careers?”, the top three options for Chinese photographers were “photography skills” (230 respondents, 84%), “social media skills” (149 respondents, 54%) and “video skills” (125 respondents, 45%). In comparison, the top three options in the world survey are quite similar to that of Chinese photographers but the percentages vary significantly –​“photography skills” (1593 respondents, 16%), “communication/​networking” skills (1116, 10.9%), and “video skills” (1087, 10.7%). In sum, Chinese photojournalists perceive company failure and the technological change as the biggest risks. They take manipulation of photographs and professional ethics seriously but not as much as photographers in other parts of the world.They hold a generally positive attitude towards amateur/​citizen photography and the future of photography. They believe “photography skills”, “social media skills” and “video skills” are the most important for the next generation.

Discussion In this section, the above-​mentioned survey results will be further discussed in combination with in-​depth interviews and secondary literatures.

Demographics/​gender How do Chinese photojournalists differ from the general population of journalists? According to a national survey of Chinese journalists (N=1,276) conducted in 2010, the number of female journalists (53%) exceeded males (47%), thus “the increasing percentage of female journalists in China is a notable and consistent trend” (Zhang & Su, 2012: 14). However, data in this study indicates that the gender composition of photojournalists in China who enter the World Press Photo awards is highly skewed toward males (92%). According to Zhang and Su (2012), Chinese journalists are generally younger, better educated and more likely to be female than ever before because more women have been enrolled in journalism schools in China’s universities and many young journalists work at websites. The Chinese media underwent a commercialization and marketization process in the 1990s as a result of reforms implemented in 1978. With an increasingly commercialized Chinese media, educated young people are needed to fill the workforce and have more opportunities to become journalists (Zhang & Su, 2012). But there is a strong gender imbalance in news photography. For photojournalists, specialized photographic work is demanding. It requires

A survey of Chinese photojournalists  55

practitioners to be physically stronger, tougher, more skilful (camera work) and experienced than general journalists. Gender is an important issue for photojournalists especially for those who work in dangerous places such as war/​conflict zones. A 35-​year-​old Chinese female journalist was posted to work in Tel Viv, Israel with her husband for two years from 2009 to 2011. She said she often needed to go out to take photos, do interviews and take audio recording on her own. Occasionally, both she and her husband went out together and one of them shot videos only. She said: Gender basically has no big impacts (on the work). It is nothing more than physical strength. But photography and videography are different. … I have never worn a bullet-​proof vest in the conflict zones. Once we went to Palestine to cover the anti-​separation-​wall protest. We followed a Palestinian fixer who was hired as our interpreter. He was hit by a rubber bullet many years ago and he still carries the scar from it. He told us to put a plastic bag over our heads and tie it up to protect ourselves from the tear gas. Otherwise we had to wear the masks which were heavy. It would be exaggerated and unnecessary. Those who wore the masks were photographers or videographers. They stood on the spot closest to the wall. It was like the Israelis soldiers throwing tear gas directly to the photographers. They (Israelis soldiers) felt you were provoking them and they then threw the tear gas at you. The tear gas fell just next to where the photographers stood while they were shooting photos. Palestinians, wearing big gloves like the kitchen gloves, picked up the tear gas shells and threw them back at the Israelis. (Personal communication with Vivian, 2014) This quote shows that news photography does pose great physical risks to practitioners in hazardous and chaotic situations. Chinese news outlets may be concerned about the gender issue while hiring and/​or assigning photographers. This also explains why male photographers in China are more likely to have a stable job within a large media company while female photographers tend to be self-​employed.

Working conditions Regarding working conditions, this study finds that the majority of Chinese photographers (76%) are employed (full time or part time) and a large portion of Chinese photographers (41%) work for a large media company (100 plus staff) with a long-​term contract. Quite a number of older photographers (above 50 years old) work at print publications. This trend can be attributed to the fact that China has over 2,000 newspapers and 9,000 magazines. It has the largest newspaper circulations in the world reaching 100 million copies as a result of the commercialization and marketization of news media (china.org.cn). Most print publications have a photography department staffed with photographers on long-​term contracts.

56  Shixin Ivy Zhang and Adrian Hadland

In addition, all news media are state-​owned in China. Photographers who work at large state-​owned media companies are treated as government employees. They enjoy job stability/​security, rich resources (including training courses) and benefits such as health insurance, pension, housing allowance etc. In addition, full-​time photographers are allowed to do part-​time jobs as well. Hence despite the fact that high mobility becomes possible in the market-​oriented media environment (Zhang & Su, 2012), many photographers prefer to work at large media companies. Even though they are not hired as staff photographers, they can work as contract photographers. For instance, China Photo Mall run by Xinhua Photography Center started in September 2002 and by the end of 2011, the number of contracted photographers had already exceeded 10,000 (Lv, 2012). Regarding perception of risks, Chinese photographers most worry about “failure of company” and “failure to keep up with the technology”. This does not come as a surprise in the digital age. Despite the fact that China has the world’s largest circulation in newspapers, the journalism crisis (or newspaper crisis) is also happening in China. The advertising revenue that accounts for more than 90% of the total revenue of China’s newspaper industry has dropped two digits for three consecutive years. In 2015, the ad revenue of newspapers fell by 36% (Yu, 2016). Newspaper readership accounts for less than 20% of the total population and the readers’ average age is above 50 years old. The “Chinese newspaper industry has reached the ‘most critical moment’ of life and death”, said Prof. Yu Guoming, a journalism professor at Beijing Normal University in China. In the face of the looming crisis, Chinese photojournalists have serious concerns about job security. Wang Ge, a former photojournalist at a newspaper in Wuhan in southern China, became an independent photographer in 2015. When I worked at the newspaper, I was assigned to take many photos that I dislike.That kind of work and life were tiring. Over time, I was in a cycle of repetition. Every year the photos I took were more or less the same. The daily work and what I really want were two totally different things. Gradually I wanted to be an independent photographer. In the end, I left the newspaper (news.qq.com, 2015).

Perceptions/​attitudes Regarding ethics, most interviewees admit they use Photoshop and believe the adjustment of light, exposure and image clipping are all permissible. Meanwhile, they oppose staged photos and the addition and/​or removal of objects from pictures because such behaviour has “altered the facts” and is unacceptable. Since there are no explicit ethical codes in Chinese newsrooms, photojournalists follow implicit ethical codes and moral standards in post-​production editing (Zhang, 2015). An interviewee in his 20s said:

A survey of Chinese photojournalists  57

We use digital cameras. I once had a conversation with an AFP journalist. He said that the digital camera today is very advanced. But the photos still need post-​production adjustments. The camera is a machine after all, no matter how intelligent it is. The photos we take do not have the exact effects as expected. Making adjustments shall follow some principles. Image clipping is okay but removal of objects is a no-​no. For example, the incident of Narciso Contreras from AP.2 I feel it is a shame. Narciso is a freelance photographer from Mexico. I met him in Egypt. He was not the first person to do this (removing objects). Many photographers failed on this. It altered the objective facts. (Personal communication, 2014) Another Chinese photographer talked about the shooting of dead bodies and corpses. He said: Shooting dead bodies shall follow socialist moral codes. Appropriate forms and expressions shall be used. One of our photographers took a good photo. In Palestine, a father and son’s bodies were packed into one ice box in the morgue.They pulled out the bodies and the photographer took photos of the heads only. It looks like the father and son were sleeping.The photo is incomplete. Only two faces were taken, which forms a triangle. Such expression has a different effect. People can accept it. (Personal communication with Taylor, 2014) These quotes support the survey’s findings that Chinese photojournalists understand the importance of professional ethics in news photography and take it seriously. But because there are no clearly stated ethical codes or editorial guidelines in place at news organizations, photojournalists practise photography based on their own understanding and interpretations about right or wrong, good or bad. In the digital age, citizens armed with mobile phones have made an entry into the “occupational turf ” of photojournalism, which has led to “de-​professionalization” and/​or “de-​professionalism” (Mortensen, 2014a). Amateur images appear next to professional photojournalists’ photos, which causes tension and sense of threat among professional photojournalists (Mortensen, 2014b). Even though digitalization did not “cause” the threats to professional photojournalism compared to other professions and cultural industries, the impact of digitization on photojournalism has been among the most severe (Klein-​Avraham & Reich, 2014). The debate on the role of citizen journalism continues. On the one hand, amateur news photographs are applauded for adding eye-​witness credibility, authenticity, transparency, realism, and a sense of “being there” (Pantti 2013; Williams, Wardle and Wahl-​Jorgensen 2011; Zelizer 2007; Mortensen, 2014a). On the other hand, professional photojournalists express concern about the quality of amateur photographs, the danger of professionals getting laid off, and professionals’ low job dissatisfaction and morale (Greenwood & Reinardy, 2011).

58  Shixin Ivy Zhang and Adrian Hadland

This study reveals that unlike those from the rest of the world, Chinese photojournalists mostly feel positive towards amateur/​citizen photography and the future. One interviewee said citizen photography offered more options and choices for editors and news outlets. He said: I attended a seminar hosted by my news agency some time ago. Citizen photography and mobile photography affects journalism in terms of breaking and unexpected news. While professional photographers can’t arrive at the scenes, the passers-​by happen to be there and they take photos. But they have not received any training. We (professionals) can’t compete with them (amateurs) in terms of timeliness. It just provides us with more choices. They can send their photos to us for publication.What we need to do is to enhance the professional follow-​up and in-​depth reports. (Personal communication with Tom, 2014) Interviewees also shared their insights and ideas about the wider impact of digital technology and social media. Tom talked about his use of digital camera and film camera for different purposes –​digital camera for work and film camera for personal interests. Digital technology makes people lazy. In the past two years, I took hundreds of thousands of photos with digital camera.There are not many good photos. If the photos are no good, I just delete them. For film cameras, I do not press the button so easily. There are only 36 films. I need to consider whether it is worthwhile to take the photo. The use of digital camera is more freely and at low cost. Film cameras are different. It has more success rate. In the case that I am in a hurry and need to send out the photos within 10 minutes, I use digital camera. If I photograph for my own use, for example, having a photo show or book publishing, I use film camera. Digital camera is for work and film camera is for personal interests. Photos on film are more close to art. They are also easy to store. You can take them out after a long time. Digital photos are fabricated, calculated and done by computers. When you lose the hard disks, photos are gone. (Personal communication with Tom, 2014)

Conclusion Chinese photojournalists are a rising force in the world press corps and they are getting more recognition and exposure via photography contests such as that conducted annually by WPP. In Bourdieu’s terms, Chinese photojournalists possess more and more symbolic capital in the world’s photojournalistic field. This study has taken Chinese photojournalists as research object and discussed their demographic profiles (habitus as opus operatum), working conditions (field) as well as their perceptions and attitudes towards ethics, the impact of technology and the future

A survey of Chinese photojournalists  59

prospect of photojournalism (habitus as modus operandi).The survey results have been triangulated with in-​depth interviews and secondary literatures. In summary, Chinese photojournalists seem to own strong cultural or journalistic capital when it comes to the habitus as opus operatum. They have an average age of 40 and are well educated and well trained in photography and multimedia. They are predominantly male due to the nature of photographic work and the social bias/​stereotypes against women photographers. Gender imbalance in photography is evidently serious in China. While male photographers tend to have a stable job at a large media company, female photographers tend to be self-​employed. This phenomenon suggests that Chinese female photographers hold a less advantageous social position in the journalistic field. In terms of perceptions and attitudes, i.e. the habitus as modus operandi, Chinese photojournalists believe it is important to understand professional ethics. Since explicit ethical codes are not in place at news outlets, Chinese photojournalists follow implicit ethical codes and moral standards. They are generally positive towards citizen photography and the future prospects of photojournalism. Digital technology has impacted on Chinese photojournalists in the sense that journalists use digital and film cameras for different purposes, while emphasizing the need to grasp videography and multi-​media skills, and adopt innovative methods such as aerial photography. Finally, this study shows that while Chinese photojournalists experience many similar pressures and trends to their colleagues internationally, there remain specific complexities and challenges which are unique to the Chinese journalism sector. In particular, the high number of full-​time, late career photojournalists may be vulnerable if prevailing conditions do have a strongly negative impact on traditional newspaper companies, as they have in many other countries. This could result in severe job losses and could challenge the sustainability of photojournalism in a Chinese context.

Notes 1 Corresponding author. 2 In 2014, AP banished freelancer Narciso Contreras for altering a photo (removing a video camera from the bottom-​left corner of the photo) taken in Syria on 29 September 2013.

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Neveu, E. (2007). Pierre Bourdieu: Sociologist of media, or sociologist for media scholars? Journalism Studies, 8(2): 335–​347. Newman, E., Simpson, R. & Handschuh, D. (2003). Trauma exposure and post-​traumatic stress disorder among photojournalists. Visual Communication Quarterly, 10(1): 4–​13. News.qq.com (2015). Interview notes with 10 photojournalists’ (10位摄影记者的年度采 访手记), 24 December, http://​news.qq.com/​cross/​20151224/​92OH10AW.html. Retrieved 20 November 2016. Pantti, M, (2013). Getting closer? Encounters of the national media with global images. Journalism Studies, 14(2): 201–​218. Phelan, S. & Salter, L. A. (2017). The journalistic habitus, neoliberal(ized) logics, and the politics of public education. Journalism Studies, DOI:10.1080/​1461670X.2017.1370976. Powers, M. & Zambrano, S. V. (2016). Explaining the formation of online news startups in France and the United States: A field analysis, Journal of Communication, 66: 857–​877. Renney, K. R. (1993). Photographic content in Chinese newspapers. International Communication Gazette, 51(2): 149–​169. Tsui, C. Y. S. and Lee, F. L. F. (2012). Trajectories of women journalists’ careers in Hong Kong –​a field theory perspective. Journalism Studies, 13(3): 370–​385. Wiedemann, T. (2017). Surviving in the journalistic field. Journalism Studies, 18(8): 943–​959. Williams, A.,Wardle, C. and Wahl-​Jorgensen, K. (2011). Have they got news for us? Audience revolution or business as usual at the BBC?. Journalism Practice, 5(1): 85–​99. Wu, J. and Yun, G. (2007) The coming of age of documentary photography in China. Javnost –​ The Public, 14(3): 31–​48. Yu, G. (2016). Yu Guoming: Zhongguo baoye yijing dao le shengsi cunwang de zui weiji shike [Yu Guoming: China’s newspaper industry has reached the most critical moment of life and death]. Caijing Jizhe Quan, http://​mt.sohu.com/​20160707/​n458298638.shtml. Retrieved on 18 November 2016 Zelizer, B. (2007). On “having been there”: “Eyewitnessing” as a journalistic key word. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 24(5): 408–​428. Zhang, S. (2015). Conflicts through the lens of Chinese war photojournalists. Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 2(1:1): 65–​84. Zhang, H. & Su, L. (2012) Chinese media and journalists in transition, in Weaver, D. H. & Willnat, L. (Eds.), The global journalist in the 21st century (pp. 9–​21). New York: Routledge.

PART II

Chinese news discourse

4 RECONTEXTUALIZING POLITICAL METAPHOR IN NEWS DISCOURSE A case study of the Chinese president’s metaphors in English reports Li Pan1 and Chuxin Huang

Introduction The close relationship between politics, language and media can be reflected in that political discourse constantly forms a crucial part of media discourse (Schäffner & Bassnett, 2010; Okulska & Cap, 2010). The discourse produced by political leaders is often of great concern to their own country and society, the media and even the international community. When the media recontextualize and communicate the speeches of politicians, they not only inform the audience what the speakers have said, but also influence how the readers view the politicians and their public utterances through positioning the speakers and their discourse in the news coverage (Schäffner, 2015). In other words, the recontextualization of political discourse to media discourse concerns not only what idea is conveyed but also how it is expressed. Political discourse has long been analysed as “a means of codifying the way public orators used language for persuasive and other purposes” in the Western classic rhetoric (Chilton, 2004, p. ix). Political metaphor used by political leaders, as a major linguistic feature of political discourse, has been widely circulated and received much media attention (Charteris-​Black, 2011; Musolff, 2016). However, how political metaphor is accommodated in news media has far from been thoroughly researched. What is especially interesting but little touched upon is how political metaphors used by political leaders in their public speeches are translated and recontextualized in the domestic and foreign media. Drawing upon the recontextualization principles in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 2003) and the Appraisal Theory (AT) (Martin & White, 2005), the authors propose an analytical model to examine the recontextualization of metaphors used by political leaders in news discourse across languages and cultures. This study investigates a metaphor that the Chinese President Xi Jinping used in his speech during a 2019 visit to Nepal and its varying English versions quoted in

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English news reports disseminated both by the Chinese and the Anglo-​American media in order to explore how a Chinese political metaphor used in political speech is removed from its original context, quoted, accommodated and recontextualized in English media reports. The research questions are (1) What are the differences between the translations of the political metaphor by the Chinese and the Anglo-​ American media? (2) How is the metaphor quoted and recontextualized in news discourse? (3) Why does the recontextualization of metaphors differ in the news discourse by the Chinese and the Western media?

(Re)contextualization of political metaphor in news and translation Global media are found active in reporting and spreading metaphors sourced from political discourse (Charteris-​Black, 2011; Musolff, 2016). The language used in political contexts forms a genre or type of discourse –​“political discourse” –​partly because political activities are “largely discursive” (van Dijk, 1997, p. 37). Metaphor has been employed for persuasion in political discourse since Aristotle (Charteris-​ Black, 2014). The Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) holds that metaphors are not just linguistic expressions but reflect how our thoughts, attitudes and actions are organized (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Ortony, 1993). A metaphor thus may evoke varied understandings of its source image given our different experiences and perceptions about the image. Similarly, political metaphor frames or influences how we perceive or understand political issues through exploiting the source domain images to hide or highlight certain aspects of the target concepts in question (Musolff, 2016). Metaphors are “products of discourse, and thus are thoroughly contextualized” or “inseparable from context” (Gibbs & Lonergan, 2009, p. 251). The persuasion of political metaphor is also “a multi-​layered discourse function” dependent on the interaction between “intention, linguistic choice and context” (Charteris-​Black, 2011, p. 51). Political metaphors are therefore contextually contingent in terms of the production and interpretation of their meanings or intents, especially in the case of recontextualization. The connections across contexts can be understood as intertextuality, which is also “a matter of recontextualization” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 61). In addressing the recontextualization of political metaphor in news discourse, the political discourse is viewed as taken out of its originated context to enter the news discourse context. Given that “the media belong to the main actors in political communication” (Schäffner & Bassnett, 2010, p. 3) and the media also engage with political events and discourse in news production, “journalistic texts are thus also in intertextual relations with political texts, which, moreover, can be relations of intertextuality across languages and cultures” (Schaffner, 2012, p. 112). Bernstein (1990) defines recontextualization as having a discourse relocated from its original context or practice and appropriated within another one. Based on Bernstein’s comparatively narrow definition, Fairclough (1988, 2003) and Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) broadly define recontextualization as a

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representation of social events. Moreover, recontextualization in news discourse should consider news as “the social construction of reality” (Fowler, 1991, p. 10). In this study, the recontextualization of political discourse in news discourse involves both the quotation of political metaphor as a communicative event and the appropriation of the quoted metaphor in news discourse. What makes quotations of political speeches in news reports across languages tending to produce ambiguity is that they are usually quoted in the target language in the news as if the original speakers actually uttered them in the target language. The quotation is represented as either a reported speech that involves “a transformation of reality” signalled by linguistic signs (Günthner, 1992, p. 225) or a direct speech that might be misleading in reporting the political discourse for the use of quotation marks does not necessarily convey the original meanings (Brownlie, 2010). In the cases of quoting foreign languages, translation is invisible; whether the translation has to be “undertaken by the journalist or by someone else is completely elided” (Brownlie, 2010, p. 40). When the quoted extracts are decontextualized from the political context and then recontextualized into the news discourse, the changed attitude and intention will be closely related to “the new context, the purposes that translators and other agents … pursue and their overall political goals” (Ietcu-​Fairclough, 2008, p. 68). Such quotations might entail the positioning or negotiation of discourse participants and social realities through producing competing narratives in the unfolding texts. In representing the quotes of foreign political discourse in news reports, the media can resort to different translated versions and reporting verbs to subtly change the original meaning and intention. In interlingual news reporting, the quotations of the political metaphors act as the contextualization cues at the intertextual level in news reporting (Schäffner & Bassnett, 2010; Schäffner, 2008, 2012). While the lexical items of political metaphors quoted in news are key to their persuasion and interpretation in the media context (Pan & Huang, 2020), other co-​occurring signs in the news text also matter. In this sense, not only the evaluation of those cues but also the translations of the metaphor have to rely on “co-​occurrence judgements” manifested in other elements (Gumperz, 1989, p. 3). Thus, it is interesting to compare how the different translations of the same metaphor sourced from political discourse are quoted and recontextualized by varied English news media. Scholars have touched upon the political metaphors used in media discourse from varied aspects, such as the effect of political metaphors on supporting or deflecting public opinions in mass-​media language (De Landtsheer, 2009), the relation of the communicative potential of metaphor use in headlines to their culture-​specific elements (White & Herrera, 2009), and the variation of the same political metaphors recontextualized in media language (Kövecses, 2009). The variation of metaphor is more frequent in interlingual news reporting where a political metaphor from the originated context is translated, transformed and recontextualized, given that the metaphors are found disambiguated in press translation (Gumul, 2010, p. 99). So far, mostly investigated is appropriation or mediation in media translation based on (re)framing (Baker, 2007; Valdeón, 2008; van

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Doorslaer, 2010; Pan, 2014, 2015; Qin & Zhang, 2018; Wu, 2018; Liu, 2019), while relatively underrepresented is how the quotes of political metaphors are translated and contextualized in news translation (Schäffner, 2008, 2012; Pan et.al., 2019; Pan & Huang, 2020). Even more rarely explored are the different purposes and functions of the quoted and relocated political metaphors from one practice or context to another.

Recontextualizing political metaphor: an analytical model In this study, recontextualization, as the incorporation of political metaphor from Chinese political discourse into English media discourse, involves a movement of the discursive practice of political speech, e.g. the address by President Xi in a foreign visit, to the media practice of news reports, either by the Chinese or the foreign media in the English language. Figure 4.1 illustrates the recontextualization of political metaphor in news discourse as a social practice across language and cultural boundaries. As Figure 4.1 indicates, recontextualization from political to media discourse is never simple nor transparent, especially when translation is involved. As Fairclough (2006, p. 85) argues, the form or meaning of events narrated in news discourse “are transformed according to the genre conventions of news narratives”. Fairclough (2003) develops the four principles of recontextualization in discourse practices: Presence, Abstraction, Arrangement and Additions (pp. 139–​ 140). Presence indicates which elements of events are represented, present/​absent, prominent/​ background. Abstraction suggests the degree of abstraction/​ generalization from concrete real events. Additions refers to what is inserted in representing particular events for explanation/​legitimation, such as reasons or purposes and evaluation. Arrangement deals with how the source materials or events are reorganized. These

FIGURE 4.1  Modelling

recontextualization of political metaphors in news discourse

Political metaphor in news discourse  69

discursive practices can be equally manifested in transforming quoted metaphors in media translation. As in Figure 4.1, the news discourse recontextualizes the metaphor sourced from political discourse via the Presence and Abstraction of the original metaphors through translation and quotation, and the Additions and Arrangement of other intertextual or contextual elements in news coverage. At the same time, a quotation of metaphor is usually combined with “a neutral reporting with an evaluation” (Schäffner & Bassnett, 2010, p. 5). The AT developed by Martin and White (2005) examines how language construes evaluation in discourse through exploiting three systems of linguistic resources: attitude, engagement and graduation, so as to position the discourse producers interactively with their prospective audience. The engagement system in AT interprets “the communicative arrangements by which the journalistic author engages dialogistically with the diversity of voices and viewpoints” (White, 2012, p. 58). When the news reporters position the political metaphors attributed to the political leaders, the authorial attitude towards the quotes can be activated via the engagement resources, i.e. the reporting verbs in the authorial voice, which signal a varied stance or attitude to the quoted source (White, 2012) and may further direct public opinions. Concurrently, as an institutional practice, the global news agencies usually give instructions on faithful and accurate translation of quotes in news reporting (Bielsa & Bassnett, 2009, pp. 71, 88). However, the picture may be different and complex in quoting political metaphors given their varied meaning potentials for evaluations (Charteris-​Black, 2011), which may lead to misrepresentation or mistranslation in news coverage. In reporting the Chinese president’s metaphors, recontextualization is requisite for translating and embedding them in English news, intertextually, interlingually and interculturally. To probe the complexity of recontextualization, it is necessary to investigate in what ways and for what reasons certain metaphor(s) are quoted in discourse practices. Drawing on the recontextualization principles in CDA (Fairclough, 2003) and the engagement system in AT (Martin & White, 2005), an analytical model is proposed to examine the recontextualization of political metaphor to media discourse, mainly through translation and quotation. Since political metaphors have been frequently found in the form of direct quotations and reported speeches (Schäffner, 2008, 2012; Musolff, 2016) and quite often used in the news headlines (Charteris-​Black, 2011), the model takes the textual context as its starting point, focusing on the relocation of metaphor from political speech into both the headlines and quotations in news. Specifically, in addressing the recontextualization of metaphor from a political speech to the headline, direct quotation and reported speech in news reports, the model can incorporate the textual analysis of Presence, Abstraction, Arrangement and Addition of the linguistic features of metaphor and its surrounding texts in media discourse. The added value or evaluation throughout the news can be examined with the toolkit of AT in terms of the evaluative meanings of the reporting verbs and other contextual cues in signalling intention, positioning and stance. Figure 4.2 displays the procedures for analysing the recontextualization process.

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FIGURE 4.2  Analysing

recontextualization of political metaphors in news discourse

Figure 4.2 illustrates the analytical framework for recontextualizing political metaphors in news discourse. It first looks at how the Chinese political metaphor is represented and transformed in English news discourse through translation and quotation, i.e. the Presence and Abstraction of metaphorical images, which might imply differed attitudes.The analysis then explores the Addition of engagement elements to the quoted metaphors, i.e. the reporting verbs and their surrounding authorial comments in media reports. The analysis is finally extended to the Arrangement of other textual elements and reported events in the reports that are related to the political metaphors and their original context.

Recontextualizing the Chinese president’s metaphor Data To investigate how the Chinese president’s metaphors are recontextualized in the English reports by both the mainstream Chinese media and Anglo-​American media, we focus on one of the metaphors used by President Xi in his talks with the Nepali Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli during his first Nepali state visit between 12 and 13 October 2019. The Chinese metaphor comes from Xi’s remark “任何人企图在中国任何地区搞分裂，结果只能是粉身碎骨” after Oli conveyed Nepal’s stance of supporting the one-​China policy and other core interests of China. It is so far one of Xi’s most quoted metaphors in the English reporting of his addresses outside China, as found in our pilot studies on media translations of Xi’s metaphors on domestic or international occasions. The analysis centres on the English versions of “粉身碎骨”. The former part of the original remark, “任何人企图在中国任何地区搞分裂”, is directly rendered

Political metaphor in news discourse  71

as “anyone that attempts separatist activities in any region of China”. However, the latter part “粉身碎骨”, describing the consequences of the agents or their separatist activities, is quite complicated and susceptible to manipulation or misrepresentation through translation, because whether and to what extent the original metaphorical images are reproduced in its English translations seems quite unstable and contextually dependent. Thus, we prefer not to give its translation and instead to see how it is represented in the English reports. The data consists of 16 English news reports including 11 articles from 9 Anglo-​ American mainstream media, amounting to 7,731 words, and 5 articles from three Chinese news media, totalling 1,749 words. The time range for the collected news is between 13 and 16 October 2019, the four days after Xi’s state visit to Nepal. The headlines are generally regarded as “the shop window display of newspaper” (White & Herrera, 2009, p. 136). All the 16 headlines in the data are presented in Tables 4.1 and 4.2, where the English versions of “粉身碎骨” are marked in bold type. The publication date of each article is shown following each headline in the Tables 4.1 and 4.2.

TABLE 4.1  Headlines and sources of the Anglo-​American media reports

Publication

Title

BBC

1. Hong Kong protests: President Xi warns of “bodies smashed” (14 October 2019) 2. China’s Xi warns attempts to divide China will end in “shattered bones” (13 October 2019) 3. Tens of thousands of Hong Kong protesters plead for U.S. help (14 October 2019) 4. China’s Xi warns efforts to divide China will end with “crushed bodies and shattered bones” (14 October 2019) 5. Hong Kong protests are at “life-​threatening level”, say police (14 October 2019) 6. Hong Kong: Carrie Lam hints at further measures to suppress protests (15 October 2019) 7. Xi vows attempts to split China will “end in crushed bodies and shattered bones” (14 October 2019) 8. President Xi Jinping vows Chinese separatists will be “smashed to pieces” as US-​themed protests begin in Hong Kong (14 October 2019) 9. Xi Jinping warns that attempts to divide China will end with “crushed bodies and shattered bones” (14 October 2019) 10. China’s Xi Jinping warns attempts to divide country will end in “crushed bodies and shattered bones” (14 October 2019) 11. Hong Kong leader, Carrie Lam, gets jeered, tainting annual address (16 October 2019)

Reuters

The Telegraph The Guardian

CNN ABC News

Business Insider Fox News The New York Times (NYT)

72  Li Pan and Chuxin Huang TABLE 4.2  Headlines and sources of the Chinese media reports

Publication

Title

Xinhua

12. Xi says China ready to advance friendly cooperation with Nepal (13 October 2019) 13. Any attempt to split China will end in vain: Xi (13 October 2019) 14.  President salutes Nepal, warns separatists (14 October 2019) 15. President Xi Jinping says any attempts to separate China will fail (13 October 2019) 16. Xi Jinping says any attempt to split China will end in vain (14 October 2019)

China Daily CGTN

Analysis The analysis examines the quotation of the metaphor in terms of the four strategies of recontextualization, i.e. Presence, Abstraction, Arrangement and Addition, and compares the relocation of the Chinese metaphor in the headline, direct quotation and reported speech in the English news reports by Chinese and Anglo-​American media. Presence is detected in representing the metaphor and its images. Abstraction helps to relocate the metaphor as quotations. Addition includes inserting the reporting verbs and surrounding words in the quotes. Arrangement extends to the ordering of textual elements related to the relocated metaphor and its original context in the unfolding reports.

Presence: transformation and representation of metaphor The representation of a Chinese political metaphor in English news discourse concerns the transformation in the way of translation. It might be argued that the English versions of President Xi’s metaphor in media discourse are not strictly translations. However, since the metaphor is not original in English but Chinese, the English versions are somehow translated from Chinese into English and therefore virtually the English translations of the Chinese metaphor. All the English versions of the metaphor “粉身碎骨” extracted from the Anglo-​ American and the Chinese media reports are illustrated in Table 4.3.The frequency of the English metaphors exceeds the number of articles since some reports also include the metaphor in the headlines or incorporate it more than once in a text. Longer extracts of the metaphors in news are shown below. In news headlines, the English versions of the metaphor quite differ in the Anglo-​ American and Chinese media discourse. Six headlines by the Anglo-​ American media (see Table 4.1) incorporate and make salient the metaphorical images “身” (bodies) or “骨” (bones).Three headlines of the Chinese media reports (see Table 4.2) foreground its intended meanings while concealing the images in the expressions like “end in vain” and “fail”.

Political metaphor in news discourse  73 TABLE 4.3  English versions of the Chinese metaphor quoted in the reports

Anglo-​American media (11 articles, 23 metaphors)

Chinese media (5 articles, 9 metaphors)

1. in crushed bodies and shattered bones/​end in shattered bones (n=13) (Reuters, The Telegraph, The Guardian, CNN, Business Insider, Fox News)

1. be/​end in vain (n=3) (China Daily, CGTN) 2. be crushed (n=2) (Xinhua, CGTN)

2.  be crushed (n=4) (Reuters, The Guardian, CNN)

3. be smashed into pieces (n=2) (China Daily)

3.  be smashed (in)to pieces (n=3) (ABC News)

4. fail (n=2) (CGTN)

4. perish, with their bodies smashed and bones ground to powder/​bodies smashed (n=2) (BBC) 5.  be ruined (n=1) (NYT)

Quotes in the Anglo-​American media: 1.

“Anyone who attempts to split any region from China will perish, with their bodies smashed and bones ground to powder”, Mr Xi said, according to a foreign ministry statement issued on Sunday. (BBC, 14 October 2019) 2. “Anyone attempting to split China in any part of the country will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones”, he told Nepal’s Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli in a meeting on Sunday, according to China’s state broadcaster CCTV. (Reuters, 13 October 2019) 3 . Xi said that “those who engage in separatist activities in any part of China will be smashed into pieces” during a meeting with the Nepalese prime minister K. P. Sharma, according to the state-​owned newspaper China Daily, […] (ABC News, 14 October 2019) 4. Chinese President Xi Jinping warned on Sunday that any attempt to divide China will be crushed, […] (Reuters, 13 October 2019) 5. “Anyone attempting to split any part of China will only be ruined”, Mr. Xi said. (NYT, 16 October 2019) The above five versions (in bold type) are identified from the 11 news reports by the Anglo-​American media since some appear in two or more articles. All expressions carry the literal meanings to varying extents. (1) and (2) are the only two word-​for-​ word versions that explicate the images “bodies” and “bones”. “Perish” and “ground to powder” in (1) seem to be an over-​translation that deviates from the original

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intents of metaphor use. Version (3) “smashed into pieces” generally conveys the images “bodies” and “bones”, which are removed in (4) and (5). Quotes in the Chinese media: 6. Those who engage in separatist activities in any part of China will be smashed into pieces, Xi said, […] (China Daily, 14 October 2019) 7. “Anyone attempting separatist activities in any part of China will be crushed …”, said the Chinese president. (Xinhua, 13 October 2019) 8. Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sunday stressed that any attempt to split China and the Chinese people in any region will be crushed […] (CGTN, 14 October 2019) 9. Chinese President Xi Jinping says any attempts to split China will fail. (CGTN, 13 October 2019) 10. He also said that any attempt by separatists to split China will be in vain. (China Daily, 14 October 2019) Four English versions are found in the Chinese media reports. They are not as literal as those in the Anglo-​American media reports. No versions preserve the images “bodies” and “bones” in a word-​for-​word way. While (6) depicts both the action “smashed” and result “into pieces”, it replaces “身” and “骨” with the general “pieces”. Unlike (6), (7) and (8) only convey the action through “be crushed”. “Fail” and “be in vain” in (9) and (10) completely exclude the metaphorical images while reproducing the intended meaning of metaphor use.

Abstraction: quotation of metaphor The presence of a Chinese political metaphor can generate varied quotations in English news on a scale of abstraction, manifested by how much of the metaphor is presented in the quotations. Whether the original metaphor is represented as a direct quotation or reported speech in news reports is linked to the degree of generality in relocating it in news discourse. A direct quotation of the metaphor attributed to Xi finds its way into five of the ten versions shown in the last section (e.g. (1) to (3), (5) and (7)), where the quotes of metaphor are enclosed in quotation marks. Among those direct quotes, “with their bodies smashed and bones ground to powder” and “end in crushed bodies and shattered bones” indicate a lower abstraction or higher concretization of the metaphorical images, while the other three versions like “crushed” and “smashed into pieces” indicate a higher degree of generality and also find some trace of the images. Indirect quotes are used in the remaining five examples ((4), (6) and (8) to (10)), where no quotation marks are included. Among them, “fail” and “be in vain” bear no trace of the metaphorical images and manifest the highest level of vagueness whereas either “crushed” or “smashed into pieces” in the other three versions indicate a lower level of abstraction.

Political metaphor in news discourse  75

It is worth noting that all the word-​for-​word translations are presented as direct quotations whereas the totally free translations are represented as indirect quotes in the reports. In terms of Abstraction, the metaphor represented in the lowest abstraction is inclined toward a direct quotation while the version with the highest abstraction tends to be manifested in an indirect quote.

Addition: reporting verbs and authorial voices Reporting verbs are added to the quotes of metaphor relocated from political speech to media reports as the intertextual cues. The reporting verbs also indicate the journalists’ evaluation towards and engagement with the quoted voice in news reporting (Martin & White, 2005;White, 2012).Table 4.4 summarizes the reporting verbs added to the quotations of metaphor in the collected reports. As Table 4.4 displays, five reporting verbs are added to the quoted metaphor: warns/​warned, says/​said, told, vows and stressed. The Anglo-​American media mostly use “warns/​warned” or “said” while the Chinese media prefer “says/​said”. According to the engagement system of AT, “warns/​warned”, “vows” and “stressed” indicate an incisive stance towards or alienation from the quotes, and “says/​said” and “told” signal a neutral reporting. While the unmarked verbs like “says/​said” project the quotes “for the reader’s consideration”, the recurring attitudinal “warns/​ warned” in the Anglo-​American media reports are likely to distance the writers from the quoted metaphors, thus attitudinally positioning the readers “to regard the proposition favorably” (White, 2012, pp. 62–​64). The quotations of metaphor may incorporate “more elaborate metacommentary” through the reporters’ “interpretive lens” to position the quoted speaker or speech in a certain light (Hodges, 2015, p. 51). Thus, the positioning of reporting verbs for quoting the metaphor can be related to the surrounding authorial comments, as underlined in the following examples. 11. Chinese President Xi Jinping warned on Sunday that any attempt to divide China will be crushed, as Beijing faces political challenges in months-​long protests in Hong Kong and U.S. criticism over its treatment of Muslim minority groups. (Reuters, 13 October 2019) In (11), “Beijing faces political challenges […]” following the quote appears to provide background information in the reporter’s voice for understanding TABLE 4.4  Reporting verbs for the English quotes of metaphors

Anglo-​American media (11 articles, 23 verbs)

Chinese media (5 articles, 9 verbs)

1. warns/​warned (n=9) 2. said (n=9) 3. told (n=3) 4. vows (n=2)

1. says/​said (n=7) 2. stressed (n=1) 3. warns/​warned (n=1)

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“be crushed” and justify the lexical choice of “warned” instead of a neutral verb. However, the addition to the quote is irrelevant to the original context of Xi’s metaphor use, after he told the Nepali PM that China appreciates Nepal’s support of the one-​China policy. Aside from the attitudinal reporting verbs, the reported speech framed by the neutral reporting verb can also be surrounded by the authorial evaluation of the quote. As shown in the following extract, the direct quotation with the unmarked “said” is preceded by the authorial voice “delivered a harsh warning against”, which may steer the interpretation of “be ruined” in line with the reporter’s evaluation. 12. Mr. Xi delivered a harsh warning against separatism on Sunday, though he did not specifically mention Hong Kong. “Anyone attempting to split any part of China will only be ruined”, Mr. Xi said. (NYT, 16 October 2019)

Arrangement: sequence of news events and allocation of the metaphor The arrangement of metaphor-​related events and the allocation of the metaphor in news discourse jointly position the political metaphor in recontextualization. Two reports respectively by China Daily and NYT are selected as samples to examine the co-​occurring cues instrumental in relocating the metaphor in news reports.The China Daily text is chosen for its lexical choices of the metaphor (see (6)) that differ from other Chinese media reports. The NYT article is selected for the irrelevance of its headline to the original context of metaphor use.

President salutes Nepal, warns separatists (China Daily, 14 October 2019) In the headline of the China Daily report, “salutes” and “warns” signal Xi’s opposing attitudes toward Nepal and separatists. The article started with introducing Xi’s visit to Nepal, followed by an indirect speech of Xi stating China’s appreciation of “Nepal’s stance of upholding the one-​China policy […]”. Then the two quotes of metaphor (e.g. (6) and (10)) show up. What follows is the Nepali PM Oli’s remarks of “his country’s support of China in safeguarding its national sovereignty and territorial integrity”. The remaining text centres on the talks between Xi and Oli, also the only quoted voices. Overall, the relation and cooperation between the two countries are the main topics of the article, serving to contrast and foreground the negative attitude towards separatism carried by the reported metaphor.

Hong Kong leader, Carrie Lam, gets jeered, tainting annual address (NYT, 16 October 2019) The NYT article reports Carrie Lam’s annual policy address on 16 October, which was interrupted by some lawmakers. Her address is quoted as “any acts that …

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threaten the country’s sovereignty, security and interest … will not be tolerated”, sharing the stance taken in Xi’s metaphor in the analysis. However, this quotation is inserted between the other six quotes that disagreed with her speech. For instance, a lawmaker is quoted “don’t count on it” while an electrician is reported to regard the speech as “something shallow”. Until close to the end of the report, Xi’s metaphor is introduced as “a harsh warning against separatism” (e.g. (12)). As Carrie Lam’s address is contested by the authorial and most attributed voices, the quote of Xi’s metaphor is also suppressed in the report where separatism is supported by more co-​occurring voices. In summary, the four strategies of recontextualizing metaphor in news discourse jointly produce the media effect of positioning the quoted metaphor in a certain light and manipulating evaluation towards the original speaker as quoted voice.

Discussion: findings and implications Findings The analysis shows that the media resort to all the four strategies in recontextualizing the Chinese president’s metaphor in English news reports and reveals the interaction of the four strategies in recontextualization.

Presence of metaphor with literal translation: distorting images The Chinese and Anglo-​American media make salient distinct aspects of the metaphor in English reports. While the Anglo-​American media prefer to make the metaphorical images “bodies” and “bones” prominent in headlines and body texts, the Chinese media remove them and highlight their connotations. The Anglo-​ American media adopt a literal or word-​for-​word translation, “crushed bodies and shattered bones” (e.g. (2)) for instance, whereas the Chinese media prefer a free translation that foregrounds the implications, “fail” (e.g. (9)) for example. A free translation seems to decipher the original intentions of metaphor use, while a literal translation might have a deterrent effect on separatism but project a brutal image onto the speaker.

Abstraction of metaphor in direct quotation: misrepresenting intentions The direct or indirect quotation of political metaphor in reporting is identified on a scale of abstraction. The direct quote of the literally translated metaphor reveals a low abstraction (e.g. (1) to (3)) while the reported speech of the connotations of metaphor reflects the highest generality (e.g. (9) and (10)). Moreover, a direct quotation of the metaphorical images might misrepresent the purposes of metaphor use in original contexts, as they may give the impression that the quote is exactly Xi’s original speech even though the representation of images is far from his real intentions.

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Addition of reporting verbs and authorial evaluations: repositioning readers The attitudinal reporting verb plus its authorial evaluative co-​text can generate added values for positioning the quoted metaphor and its speaker in media discourse. While the Chinese media prefer to embed the unmarked verbs like “say/​said”, the Anglo-​American media usually insert the attitudinally marked verbs like “warns/​ warned”. Thus, the translation of quotes is already filtered through the reporters’ lens before entering into the news contexts and directing reader’s opinions.

Arrangement of news events to frame metaphor: constructing “realities” The ordering of news events and contextual cues is also a matter of recontextualizing metaphor. The analysis of the NYT report shows that the journalists “pick up” the metaphor and put it into constructing the realities of other political issues irrelevant to the original context of Xi’s metaphor, which was contested and suppressed by varied voices in reporting. In contrast, the China Daily article recontextualizes the quoted metaphor with supportive cues signalled in both the authorial and external voices as the text focuses solely on the original context of metaphor use.

Possible factors for the variation in recontextualization The recontextualization of metaphor, as part of discourse practice further embedded in social practice, is ultimately expected to be realized by the social representation of the “reality” portraited in the news reports. This section explores the linguistic, social-​cultural and ideological differences in the rendering and recontextualization of the Chinese leader’s metaphor in English reports.

Linguistic difference: connotation and images The differing representations of the metaphor in the Chinese and the Anglo-​ American media reports reflect the varied implications generated from the original Chinese metaphorical images. The complex meaning potentials of the original metaphor give the news producers more lexical choices in representing the metaphor in English. The underlying meanings are thus subject to be renegotiated in recontextualization. Whether the images or connotations are explicated in the English reports can affect the construction or positioning of Xi’s image and his speech by the English and the Chinese media. A literal translation of “粉身碎骨”, for instance “bodies smashed and bones ground to powder”, by foregrounding its images in English reports, may construct a ruthless image of the speaker despite the deterrent effects on separatists. In contrast, the connoted meanings conveyed in the Chines media report, for example “be in vain”, might avoid arousing the negative opinions on the speaker. The unstable linguistic manifestations of the metaphor

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in English in reporting can attribute to the added value of metaphors in political communication where the metaphorical meanings are “continually contested and renegotiated” in interpretation (Musolff, 2016, p. 136).

Social differences The metaphorical images can be exploited differently in media discourse based on social-​cultural settings. Social beliefs and culture-​bounded thinking are inherent in most Chinese metaphorical expressions. The intention of Xi’s use of the metaphor in his remarks is to convey the uncompromising attitude towards separatism in China, which is stressed in “will fail” and “be in vain” in the Chinese media (e.g. (9), (10)). Even though it is argued that most cultural-​specific idioms or metaphors “cannot survive literal translation” (Glucksberg & McGlone, 2001, p. 88), most Western media prefer a literal translation without conveying the implications, partly because they intend to keep intact the images that serve to construct certain narratives with an eye-​g rabbing effect in media coverage in their target society.The process of lifting a metaphor out of its originated political context and inserting it into the news context is “tied to a particular social practice or network of social practices” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 68).

Ideological differences The translation of the metaphorical images or implications is in line with the ideological beliefs and considerations respectively held by the Chinese and the Anglo-​ American media, which assist them in telling their own “right” news stories in recontextualizing the metaphor, as shown in the analysis of the two reports by China Daily and NYT. Unlike China, which values “collectivism, harmony and cooperation”,Western countries impart values on “individuality and aggressiveness” (Pan, 2015, pp. 230–​ 231).The ideological conflict could account for the aggressive expressions in (1) and (2). Metaphor is crucial to the communication of ideology that is based on the intentions that are professed to be “right” (Charteris-​Black, 2011, p. 51), through which the metaphor-​related political issues are narrated or renegotiated in the media discourse. This is reflected in the NYT report, where the metaphor is recontextualized among the voices that show disapproval of China’s stance on the Hong Kong unrest.

Implications The media effect of recontextualizing the political metaphors results from (1) the false impression as if the words were in the speaker’s actual wording and (2) the neglect of the linguistic, social and ideological differences of the two language communities. It is thus almost illusive for the readers to take the quotations of a political metaphor from another language in news coverage as factual reporting of what the leader has said. The discussion shows that neither literal nor free translation is

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sufficient in conveying the speaker’s communicative intents. At the same time, the quotation and recontextualization of political metaphor in news discourse can be an effective way of positioning the original speakers, for instance either as being ruthlessly brutal towards the separatists shown in the word-​for-​word translation “crushed bodies and shattered bones”, or simply being confident in discouraging the separatist activities, as in the free translation “any attempt by separatists to split China will be in vain”. Although some Anglo-​American media chose to directly quote the metaphors translated by the Chinese media, the latter does not seem to reach a consensus about how the original metaphor should be represented in news coverage, perhaps due to the timeliness in news reporting. It is worth noting that some reports by the Chinese media also manifest the literal and surficial image in a rather general way, for instance, “be smashed into pieces” and “be crushed”. Such expressions might be borrowed or regarded as potential candidates for recontextualizing Xi’s metaphor in the Anglo-​American media coverage, for instance, example (3) using a direct quotation of “smashed into pieces” by China Daily. It is suggested that the translation of political metaphors should be appropriately discussed and agreed among the English media of China before spreading internationally and being referred to by the foreign media. The conflict between the surface images and the implicit messages of the Chinese metaphor “粉身碎骨” forms a translation problem in media coverage.The neglect of the implied meanings and the salience of the metaphorical images in news discourse may cast the leader as a cruel dictator and further isolate China in international relationships given the current international political climate. This may counteract China’s pursuit of cooperation and harmony and the spreading of its voice to the world through media coverage.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have borrowed the recontextualization principles and appraisal system to develop a model for examining different layers of recontextualizing a Chinese political metaphor in English news discourse. Specifically, the four strategies are identified in both the Chinese and the Anglo-​American media reports that relocate a metaphor used by the Chinese president in his 2019 Nepal visit. It is found that different ways of translating and quoting the metaphor cast the original speaker in certain image contingent on the constructed narratives in reporting. Particularly effective is a direct quotation of the literally translated metaphor plus additional reporting verbs and authorial evaluation, which jointly reinforce the media effect of positioning the metaphor and its speaker. Such an effect is strengthened by arranging news events for allocating the quoted metaphors. In this way, both the translations and quotations of a foreign political metaphor may contribute to a different conceptualization of the political reality constructed for the target news readers. It is concluded that neither literal translation nor direct quotation of a metaphor from a political speech can convey the intention of the speaker or give him a fair

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presence in a news discourse across languages and cultures. Such practice is intertextual in nature and involves the processes of transformations in transferring the political discourse into the news discourse. Since the number of Anglo-​American media and Chinese media is unequal, the comparative analysis might seem not straightforward enough. However, it is still indicative of their different tendency in representing and recontextualizing the metaphor. It is hard to determine whether the English versions by the Anglo-​ American media and the Chinese media are the results of deliberate recontextualization strategies or subconscious choices, but their differences in the intentionality of positioning the speaker are apparent and of academic interest as well as worth of news practitioners’ attention. Given the size of data and our focus on only one metaphor, such a result would have to be confirmed in research based on a larger corpus. Additionally, the proper interpretation of the selected metaphor and its media effect also depends on the reception of the target readers. It goes without saying that knowledge of the media’s guidelines and policies would be of great help in determining the institutional perspectives in such differences. Unfortunately, such information so far remains undisclosed. Even so, our case study provides a model for illustrating how the quotation and translation of metaphors in political contexts serve as a powerful device for constructing realities in the hands of news media. While the effectiveness of metaphor as a persuasive tool comes from its ability to reinforce “conventional modes of thought” and appeal to “the already-​known as a means of making sense of complex reality” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 157), such effectiveness could cease as a metaphor transferred from one discourse/​context into another, or even across the linguistic, cultural and ideological boundaries in recontextualization. As revealed in the case analysis, the political metaphor that has undergone transformations in recontextualization is not capable of such reinforcement in the target language and not appealing to the target readers as it is intended or expected in the source language. It suggests that with the change of contexts, the translation of metaphor recontextualized into the target text should not be expected to perform the same purposes as it does in the original and might even bring in unexpected misinterpretation from the target readers.

Acknowledgement This work was supported by the Guangdong Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science (GD19CYY08); Guangzhou’s Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Sciences (2019GZGJ67); the Guangdong Provincial Innovation Research Team Project (2018WCXTD002); and Guangdong University of Foreign Studies [grant number: 18SS16; 20GWCXXM-​18].

Note 1 Corresponding author.

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5 WHAT NEWSPAPERS AND PEOPLE SAY ABOUT #CHINA70 News discourse and framing through social media Zhen Troy Chen

Introduction News discourse plays an important role in shaping the image of a country. In a social media age, news comes from and goes to different platforms and terminals such as, websites, applications, tablets and more immersive and ambient news equipped with augmented/​virtual reality technologies. Are the sources of news still relevant in shaping a “national image” when cosmopolitism and globalization are being celebrated, or rather, being performed as desirable on social media? The answer is positive and almost self-​evident: “National image is the product of a complex historical process” (Peng, 2004, p. 53), influenced by many factors, such as diplomatic relations, changes in the domestic and international political and economic spheres, and symbolic representation in the mass media. Amid these complex factors, official news outlets play a significant role in portraying the national image of a particular country, and in constructing public conception of “us” and “them” (Hall, 1992). Recent research has also confirmed that the stance of official media is largely in line with national policy especially foreign policy, even in democratic countries (Bennett, 2016). China, as a “geographically distant and culturally pagan” country (Martínez-​ Robles, 2008), has long been deemed different from the West. As a conceptually tricky term, “the West” is a constructed discourse and identity that is extended from its geographical register to the cultural, ideological and ontological (sometimes essentialist) underpinnings. This chapter also uses such a dichotomy of East and West, which does not aim to continue such a conceptual or cognitive bias but to present data available from Chinese and English sources for a critical assessment. Since most tech giants and social media platforms are from the West, the news, associated events, and figures in this chapter have a close focus on the Sino–​US relationship, which “carries with it paramount implications for international order

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and stability” (Chen & Garcia, 2016, p. 79). However, this chapter does not limit analysis to the Sino–​US relationship but extends its focus on portrayals of China in a wider Sino–​western context, given the fact that discourse on de-​and post-​ Americanization is on the increase (Thussu, de Burgh, & Shi, 2018).The news from Chinese sources will also be used to form a comparative assessment on the report of China’s 70th Anniversary. In the following sections, I will first contextualize this project in relevant literature, introduce how data were collected, and present my relevant findings, followed by a conclusion.

Encounters with and representation of China across history Amid diversified and interdisciplinary literature with regards to portrayal of China in western media, China studies and sinology have a lot to offer. Influenced by post-​colonial and subaltern studies, portrayal of China or sinology more broadly faces a challenge from the “historical paradigm” where historiography is critically examined to make clear whose history, written by whom for whom and to what effect (see more in Martínez-​Robles, 2008). Therefore, it seems the representation of China has to always be contextualized in a specific historical background, in a specific culture, by and for a particular audience. This is somewhat problematic in the sense that authorship comes at play when national identities are becoming salient in an ever (de-​)globalized world and academia. To invoke Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, it is best to leave the authorship out for the time being, in order to dive deep into the critical assessment of news discourses based on clearly documented methods and sources.This project starts with a premise to let the news speak for themselves. To set the potential bias aside, portrayal of China in the western media has a long history even though the producers and/​or audience might be within quite a small and closed circle –​as ordinary American citizens tend to not be interested in news that is not related to the US (Pew Research Centre cited in Wang & Hallquist, 2011) while it is the elites who produce flagship programs that depicts foreign countries or cultures (Wang & Hallquist, 2011). Sinologist and historian Johnathon Spence might disagree and would argue that the interest and fascination with China in the West has been phenomenal (1998). According to Martínez-​Robles (2008), China’s encounters with the West has a history of more than eight centuries, contributed by both Sinophilia and Sinophobia. It started from trade and religious missionaries when first encounters were made and recorded by the Europeans. Early contact between China and Europe began with the accounts of William of Rubruck and Marco Polo, who visited the Chinese region in the late Yuan Dynasty (Wood, 1996). The scale and exotic luxuries of China fired the imagination of early Sinophiles who admired China’s social hierarchy, stability and its reliance on a set of pre-​modern values that had a lot in common with the then reformers and cultural elites in the West. China was used as a symbolic device, an imagined ideal model, to boost and advance reform within these religious regimes. Following the fall of the Yuan, China’s expansive territory shrank under the Ming Dynasty and,

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combined with various other factors in Europe, led to a gap in contact between the two regions (Spence, 1998). The re-​establishment of contact in the late sixteenth century through the Spanish and Portuguese naval expansion had brought exchanges of knowledge between China and Europe, mainly through the work of the Catholic missionaries (Wood, 2009).This knowledge exchange gave rise to a fascination in Europe with the philosophy, art, literature, politics and science of China.Yet Europe was developing and also changing rapidly through the advance of the Enlightenment and, later, through both the political and industrial revolutions. Religion had also changed dramatically, especially in western Europe, with the new protestant powers of Holland and Great Britain beginning to challenge the dominant Catholic powers of Spain and Portugal, and to exert their dominance through greater control of the seas and, consequently, of trade (Spence, 1998). These geopolitical jolts in Europe were also keenly felt in shifting attitudes towards China, with a general consensus amongst historians that the mid-​eighteenth century witnessed a transformation that would have significant consequences for China and Asia in the centuries to follow (Spence, 1998). During these historical periods, Chinese culture and goods were well received and even highly desired by the West, such as porcelain and ceramics as the “white gold” (Z. T. Chen, 2018b). Orientalism also emerged from such fascination and admiration of China but quickly turned into a pretext for colonization and imperial conquest. Such orientalist presentations of China serve as prologue for conquest in the sense that they are “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said, 1978, p. 3). The positive associations of China’s Philosopher King quickly vanished and were replaced by brutal despotism to prepare justification for the dismemberment of the imperial Qing (Ji, 2017). Martínez-​Robles (2008) did an excellent historical review of the culturalist, racist, and imperialist approaches and discourses used by the West when depicting China. It is safe to say that the image of China before the foundation of the PRC has been one-​dimensional within the binary opposition to the image of the West, which is backward, pagan (non-​Christian), weak, feminine, mysterious, dangerous and unchanging, if not, unable to change.

Recent portrayals of the new China and news framing Fast forward to contemporary China (after 1949), recent research on news mediating China also confirmed the stereotypical portrayal of China. In order to study specific portrayals and the strategy and approach employed, news framing needs some explanation, which has developed as one of many key themes of journalism studies (Kuang & Wei, 2018). It is a cognitive structure or mental schema that helps people understand socially constructed reality (see review and application in Kuang & Wang, 2020; N. X. Liu, 2017). It is achieved by prioritizing salience when selected aspects of news are presented to audience, in order to distinguish an object or its attributes from one another. Therefore, “citizens learn to construe and evaluate an

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issue by focusing on certain “frames” –​i.e. certain features and implications of the issue –​rather than others” (Chong & Druckman, 2007). It is worth pointing out that frame, both generic and (issue-​) specific, does not necessarily present an objective aspect of attribute, rather it is a representation of perceived reality. As an early scholar who defined the concept, Entman (1993) regards framing as a process to “select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient[ly] noticeable, meaningful or memorable to audiences” (pp. 52–​53). In short, framing is the central organizing idea in meaning construction and has been widely used in news analysis. At the outset, recent portrayals of China in western news contain a number of repetitive frames that are fundamentally ethnocentric. Such media bias has been widely criticized in mainstream media and academia (Willnat & Luo, 2011). While the culturalist and orientalist discourses1 on an old China were used when the Jesuits aimed to convert China, the new China falls into several different typologies. According to Peng (2004), the Red China (1949–​1979), the Green China (1979–​1989), the Dark China (1989–​1992), the Grey China (1992–​Present) fuelled the imagination of western audiences by leading western media. Such typology coincides with the transformation of China from the communist and Maoist China, to the post-​socialist China after the opening up and reform taken place from 1980 onwards. Prominent frames used were political, ideological, moral/​cultural and economic frames, while human interest frame is lacking. Rather, human interest related stories were overtly political, which connects to human rights issues. From late 1990s to early 2000s, economics and trade became the dominant frame used by American media (Page & Bouton, 2006). Page and Xie (2010) demonstrated that Americans see the benefits of China that provides cheap imports, however, not as a fair player in trade. For military coverage, a slim majority of Americans think it is necessary to take a firm stance towards and contain Chinese military power (Page & Bouton, 2006). However, only a minority would like to see the US mobilize forces against China’s magnificent military base if force was used against Taiwan (Page & Xin, 2010). Even academic papers in the West would use “contain” “control” and “the Chinese regime” when such issues are discussed. However, British media is less politically charged as its American counterparts, with some limited exceptions such as Hong Kong and Tibet (Scotto & Reifler, 2017; Willnat & Luo, 2011). Sparks (2010) also contends that the social composition of a paper’s readership plays a crucial role in shaping the sharp differences, leaning towards a reception rather than production approach. Extending the image of a grey and uncertain China, 70 years of prosperous development despite some social problems that are commonly shared among even developed countries, the Chinese government seems to still lack legitimacy in the West to some extent. The intention to “control and contain” China, for the most part, appears to be stimulated by a fear that the transforming China may go back to the Red China. However, if looking closely at the national and official discourses of both countries, “making America great again” in the US sounds exactly the same as “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” in China. Following the culturalist

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otherization of China in an attempt to convert the pagan China to Christianity (see more in Ji, 2017), whereas China was once regarded as having the potential to be “like us” (the West), the West now views China’s rise and rejuvenation as threatening even when China takes a self-​orientalist approach in making its national discourse for better development and integrating more with the world/​US. Such discourses are manifest in national strategies, such as to build a harmonious world of lasting peace and common prosperity (推动建设持久和平、共同繁荣的和谐世界) based on multiculturalism or cultural pluralism in the Hu-​Wen Administration (People.com, 2005), and to build a new international relationship and a “community with a shared future for mankind” (人类命运共同体) under Xi Jinping’s leadership (Xi, 2016). Cao (2007) argued that the culturalist bias toward China will resurface as China is tolerating, if not prompting, Chinese pragmatic nationalism, which “underpins an accommodationist foreign policy, contextualized within the ruling Communist Party’s comprehensive revamping of itself on a new culturalist basis (neo-​Confucianism)” (pp. 431–​432). At a parallel level, researchers taking a comparative approach have found evident differences on news framing of (political) events and issues in Chinese and US media, sometimes involving a third country in comparison such as South Korea (Kobland, Du, & Kwon, 1992) and Vietnam (Huang & Leung, 2005). However, such differences are consistent with stereotypical images of China in the past (see Table 5.1 for details).These include United Nations Conference on Women and the NGO Forum (Akhavan-​Majid & Ramaprasad, 1998), the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia by the US military (Parsons & Xu, 2001), and North Korea’s nuclear test (Dai & Hyun, 2010). Similarly, comparative studies have demonstrated evident differences in Chinese and US news framing of public health issues such as SARS (Tian & Stewart, 2005) and HIV/​AIDS (M. Wu, 2006). To reiterate the “China threat” discourse in Peng (2004), I find amazing but not entirely surprising intertextualities between Chinese and western scholars’ assessment of the future of China and its relationship with the world (see review in K. Liu & Chu, 2015; Yang & Liu, 2012). Following China’s ascent in the new millennium, western audiences are also expecting a tough stance their countries will take towards China (Scotto & Reifler, 2017), on top of the usual focus on “dysfunctional social events and activities of political leaders” (Willnat & Luo, 2011, p. 257). Despite the fact that some researchers presented mixed evaluations in terms of how ordinary citizens view the rising China in English-​speaking social media (Xiang, 2013), it is still predictable that China’s image will continue to evolve along the stereotypical line. It is already evident that the frames used in covering SARS and the recent COVID-​19 are almost reproductive. Even though the findings of the analyses show a more neutral and diverse China in international English-​ language social media with regards to economy, culture and technology than that in mainstream media, the “Fascinating China” and “Innovative China” depicted by international social media also uncritically reproduces stereotyped Chinese social, political, religious and ethnic images derived from and continuously produced by western mainstream media (Scotto & Reifler, 2017).

What newspapers say about #China70  89 TABLE 5.1  A review of salient frames used in portrayals of China

Issue/​events

Chinese media

Western media

Authors,Year

UN Conference on Women and NGO US military bombing Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia

Pro-​equality frame Pro-​global feminist movement

Anti-​communist frame Anti-​feminist

Akhavan-​ Majid & Ramaprasad, 1998 Parsons & Xu, 2001, p. 63

Intentional bombing Genuine apology not given American disrespect Spontaneous protests US media bombs American hegemony North Korea’s Threat and geopolitics nuclear test Negotiation principle National interest frame (globalizing vs. domesticating) SARS –​ China vs Vietnam

SARS across media

Student protests South Korea vs China

HIV/​AIDS

Foreign TV News

Accidental bombing Apology not accepted Anti-​American hysteria Choreographed protests Chinese propaganda Puppet imagery

Threat and geopolitics Dai & Hyun, War on Terror (US) 2010 Cold war frame (Korean media) National interest frame (globalizing vs. domesticating) China blamed for trying to Huang & cover up the epidemic at Leung, 2005 early stage

Vietnam praised for its open communication and cooperation with WHO No anti-​communist frame Leadership frame: defend Conflict frame: highlight leaders who try to negative economic prevent negative consequences; blame economic consequences Chinese leaders Korean government’s Anti-​communist media actions against the frames and bias against demonstrators as China –​China’s response an understandable to the 1989 Tiananmen response to the Square protests was threat of a “rebellious framed as cruel and insurrection” repressive actions against demonstrators with legitimate goals Positive: “open attitude” “dishonest” and and “concrete actions” “oppressive” government by Xinhua by AP Central focus: human A stable and safe place rights, political to live containment and Good for international economic trade business rather than as a threat

Luther & Zhou, 2004

Kobland et al., 1992

M. Wu, 2006

Willnat & Luo, 2011

(continued)

90  Zhen Troy Chen TABLE 5.1  Cont.

Issue/​events

Chinese media

Belt and Road Peace-​loving nation, Initiative an international co-​operator, and an emerging global economic and responsible power

Western media

Authors,Year

Little political news, among which the BBC most critical on Taiwan and Tibet Mixed and conflicting –​ L. Zhang & global economy impact, Wu, 2018 authoritarian state, militant and obstructive force, and a geopolitical threat

In addressing what shapes such portrayals from a public relations perspective, X. Wang and Shoemaker (2011) argue over the past 30 years, US media’s coverage of China has strong correlation with China’s political freedom, political and economic development ties and public relations efforts commissioned via American companies.This is problematic in the sense that while political freedom is hard to measure and thus has a heavy reliance on media portrayals, the article seems to suggest that buying positive exposure or cultivate “long-​term” positive commitment appears to be a possible way to go (p. 16), even though this is only indicated in its findings. While Wang and Shoemaker (2011) suggest that the political system of China, especially political freedom plays, an important role in shaping China’s image in American public opinions, Xie and Page (2013) suggest otherwise. By examining 35 countries’ views on the image of China, they refuted the common wisdom and received opinions on this issue. The authors find no significant measurable impact in terms of the extent of strategic ties between China and a given country; the political system of that country; the extent of Chinese investment in the country; and the number of Confucius institutes and classrooms in that country, despite such well-​tested projects in China’s public diplomacy literature (Thussu et al., 2018). The only macro-​level factor they find to affect China’s image in a country is that country’s level of economic and social development. When other factors are controlled, publics from poor or developing countries are much more likely to have a favourable image of China than that in economically advanced countries (Xie & Page, 2013, p. 850). On top of news reports, portrayal of other genres, such as films, novels, fashion and design, comics and American comedy are also found to reproduce an orientalist image of China (Greene, 2014; Porter, 1999), further contributing to the stereotype that “China being mysterious, authoritarian and posing as a serious threat” (Wang & Hallquist, p. 232).

What newspapers say about #China70  91

Data collection for news discourse comparison As discussed in the previous section, literature using comparative and/​or historical approaches often focused on influential and legacy media outlets such as China Daily, Peoples’ Daily, Xinhua News Agency, Associated Press, Financial Times, New York Times (Feng, Brewer, & Ley, 2012; Liss, 2003; Parsons & Xu, 2001;Yang & Liu, 2012; L. Zhang & Wu, 2018; W. Zhang, 2018) and more recently on online and social media (X. Chen & Garcia, 2016; Tian & Stewart, 2005; Xiang, 2013). However, this chapter is event-​oriented thus thematic.Therefore, I collected news and discussions from different sources across mainstream and social media. Both English and Chinese sources were included. The research design is underpinned by the rise of citizen journalism and social media as a new way to engage with a young, tech savvy and culturally aware generation, both in the West and China (Z. T. Chen, 2018a). The online or digital outlets of Xinhua News Agency, Global Times, People’s Daily, CGTN, and their western counterparts the New York Times, Washington Post, the BBC, and CNN, among other Wemedia platforms were selected given their national and international influence and their diversified ownership, partisanship and readership (Thussu, de Burgh, & Shi, 2018). Relevant twitter feeds on this event were collected and analysed to provide a twofold comparison, namely East vs West and traditional media vs social media. As for social media, I used Twitter data for international mediation of China’s 70th Anniversary given the fact that Twitter is an influential social media platform for news mediation and discussion and the methodology developed for data analysis is relatively sophisticated (Bruns & Burgess, 2012). I used the open application programming interface (API) supported by Twitter, i.e. tweepy, to search for relevant keywords and hashtags, namely #China70. However, this API only supports search results within the past seven days. Therefore, I used Python to get data from Twitter web API. The time range for data collection was from 1 January 2019 to 1 April 2020. In total, it generated 2,525 results. As for legacy news media, I tried different databases to collect relevant news articles, which include Duxiu (读秀), EBSCOhost, CaixinGlobal, WiserSearch and Google News. For Chinese media, Duxiu’s News Database is the main source. “70th Anniversary” (七十周年) were used as the sole keyword to find relevant news reports in 2019. The database returned with 44,123 results within 0.004 seconds. The top sources are state-​owned and partisan papers such as People’s Daily, Guangming Daily and other 36 provincial and municipal dailies. As for news in English, I primarily relied on the database of WiseSearch. Using keywords such as, “China 70th Anniversary”, “birthday”, “celebrates”, “70th”, and “anniversary”, I was able to find 11,064 news articles in both English (88.27%) and Chinese (10.87% simplified Chinese; 0.86% in traditional Chinese). The news about the 70th Anniversary peaked around 1 October (see Figure 5.1). A small portion of the news are associated with negative keywords, while the majority are associated with non-​negative keywords (632: 30,872, see Figure 5.2).

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FIGURE 5.1  Articles

volume across time Percent

Negative keywords Non negative keywords FIGURE 5.2  Articles

with negative keywords

Top media outlets are Xinhua News Agency, South China Morning Post, China Daily Global, Asia Times, Global Times, People’s Daily, China.org.cn, China Daily in Print, WeChat and Bloomberg, a mixture of both legacy media and social media. As can be seen from the sentiment analysis provided by Wiser (Figure 5.3), it seems that the coverage of China’s 70th Anniversary are largely positive given the fact that sources from China are normally partisan papers or state news agencies. This also demonstrates that Chinese public diplomacy initiatives, such as “telling Chinese stories into good effect” are on the increase. Through an initial open coding of the news articles, the public diplomacy endeavours by Chinese domestic media are evident. The English news with

What newspapers say about #China70  93 Top media

Top region distribution

xinhuanet.c...

Beijing

South Chin...

United States

China Daily...

Hong Kong

Asia Times...

United King...

globaltimes...

Singapore

People’s Da...

Others

China.org.c...

Canada

China Daily

GuangDong

WeChat

Shanghai

bloomberg...

India 0

FIGURE 5.3 Top

800

2K

0

2K 4K 6K 8K 10K

media and their distribution destinations

overseas distribution clearly are targeting an international audience based in and beyond (mainland) China.That is why news in English did address issues and topics that are traditionally deemed “sensitive”. However, sensitive topics are discussed with the baseline clarified from the government’s perspective. Therefore, such news from Chinese mainstream media appear unanimous and trans-​printed, a common practice in Chinese journalism. As compared to the coverage of #China70 in the Chinese sources, the unanimous positive coverage seems to have been hijacked by the coverage of the Hong Kong incident, which later became riots and vandalism. Notable examples listed in Table 5.2 will be examined in comparison with the Chinese sources in the data analysis section.

Looking through prism: one China and its many faces In the following section, I will provide a more detailed and qualitative analysis of western news from major international outlets, which fall into the stereotypical, if not perpetually so, portrayal of China with regards to its 70th Anniversary. However, before that, themes and frames that emerged from the domestic Chinese sources are worth exploring. From the database of Duxiu, 44,301 pieces of news were found within the year 2019. Domestic news in Chinese is predominately positive and festive in tone, and covered anniversary campaigns, celebrations, gatherings and poetry among other festive events. These include different stakeholders such as government bodies, the army, judicial system and also ordinary citizen’s contributions to local newspapers. Notable events are flag-​raising ceremonies, constitution law publicity campaigns, celebration galas and also city-​level historical review of the liberation and founding of the People’s Republic of China 70 years ago. This year’s celebration also

94  Zhen Troy Chen TABLE 5.2 Themes and frame emerging from the coverage of #China70

Topics

Source

Associated keywords and/​or themes

Hong Kong

China Daily

Currency manipulation China bashing; China threat Peace keeping

Internet.org

Senior military official stresses China’s adherence to peace, justice China’s central banker says yuan level “appropriate”, trade tensions risk to global economy Prejudice, arrogance toward China harms world

Bilateral ties or international (business) relations

Nuclear weapon Censorship

China Daily China Daily; CGTN Various sources

America Magazine The Washington Post

Navy escort; Indo-​Pak tension mediation Russia, Mongolia, ROK, BRI initiative, Sino-​ Africa;Vietnam, India, UN, North Korea/​DPRK, Portugal (Macao’s One Country Two systems), China–​UAE, China–​US–​Russia Triangle, Indonesia, Finland, Brussels, Romania, Toronto, Singapore, Japan, Bulgaria, Asian Development Bank (ADB), Burma, Philippines, NATO–​China Trump, China threat In China, library officials burn books that diverge from Communist Party ideology

coincided with NATO’s 70th Anniversary, where comparison was drawn between celebrations organized by two different entities. Among this abundant news, only 4,272 (9.6%) were about the military parade in Chang’an Avenue in Beijing. As for sensitive issues on the three Ts (now four) identified in the Twitter feeds, namely,Taiwan,Tibet,Tiananmen Square and Trump, domestic news also gave considerable coverage of these topics as indicated in the Duxiu database. Crosschecked with the term “70th Anniversary”, “Hong Kong”, “Taiwan”, “Macau”, “Tibet”, “Xinjiang” and “Tiananmen Square” all returned considerable results. In total, 286 new articles concentrated on Taiwan’s liberation (台湾光复) from Japan 70 years ago and relevant exhibitions were on display with ordinary citizens’ testimony to call for peaceful unification back in 2015. Some also covered such anti-​imperialist events organized by “Taiwan authorities” (台湾当局) and the subtitle “urged the Japanese government to be reflective on history”. In addition to the “unifying and inclusive frame”, there was also the leadership frame where the speeches of important Party and government leaders were either summarized or print verbatim. For example, the speeches from Yu Zhengsheng, the committee member of the political bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, and the president of the Chinese people’s political consultative conference, and Ma Xiaoguang, a spokesman for Taiwan Affairs in The State Council, where the 1992 consensus, the political base of the opposition to “Taiwan independence”, “identity mainland and Taiwan belong to One China” were emphasized. However, in 2019, only two news articles were found based on keyword search, which were

What newspapers say about #China70  95

contributed by Shenzhen Daily and Xiamen Daily where celebration and exhibition were reported. In total, 250 articles were about Hong Kong. Compared to the coverage of Taiwan, Hong Kong’s coverage were more diversified, ranging from celebrations, performances, tourism, food, business organizations and chamber of commerce, anniversary stamp circulation, etc. The Hong Kong demonstrations and their later escalation into riots were not mentioned in the news titles; however, vandalism was condemned via quotation from local Hong Kong elites such as business leaders and academics. The original news was from Xinhua Agency and got trans-​printed by many dailies across the country. A total of 126, 341 and 214 articles reported how Macau, Tibet, and Xinjiang celebrated the 70th Anniversary in a similar light. The keyword Tiananmen Square featured in 439 pieces, which were largely about celebration and parade. The primary frames used were leadership frame, human interest frames, such as stories of and testimonies from ordinary citizens, flag-​raising ceremonies and arts projects such as paper cutting. Six articles associated with 70th Anniversary and Trump merely directed to NATO, instead of China. Trump’s Twitter congratulations were left unengaged by domestic newspapers. The amount of coverage about regional and international stakeholders was surprisingly small, targeting primarily a domestic audience. Among the small amount of coverage of correspondence between heads of state, Reuters (translated back into Chinese) reported the video congratulations from Shizo Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan; however, no discussion was triggered by this on Twitter as that of Trump.This will be in turn discussed in the next section.

Repeating themes, different frames As for news in English, one important theme is with the US, and in particular, its head of state, Donald Trump.Within the data collected with a cross-​search between “China 70” and “Trump”, many pieces focused on Trump’s tweets congratulating “Xi and Chinese people” for the achievement made in the past 70 years amid the demonstration and riots in Hong Kong. Trump as an unusual figure has attracted considerable media and academic attention (Boczkowski & Papacharissi, 2018). Google Trend has shown that the keyword US peaked during the 2016 presidential campaign (top five related queries), while the search of China is relatively stable from 2004 to 2020 (Figure 5.4). The peaks have to do with Trump (“China+Trump” as related queries) since September 2015 onwards when the trade war was kicked off. The only recent and significant peak of China-​related search is coronavirus (based on Google Trend search, 2020). The breakdown by regions showing interest for the US is Japan, Russia, France,Turkey and Saudi Arabia, while China did not make the top list. This may be due to the fact that the majority of Chinese citizens read news about the US in Chinese. On the contrary, the interests in China is mostly from the domestic regions (Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai) and Southeast Asia, such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. One possible reason for Chinese to search for news about China in Google might be because Google is not available in mainland

96  Zhen Troy Chen 100 75 50 25 Average

Jan 1, 2004

FIGURE 5.4  China

Feb 1, 2010

Note Mar 1, 2016

and US in Google trend: 2004–​2020

China and some Chinese elites in metropolitan cities wanted to stay informed through reading news from different sources and perspectives.

Conflict frame and China threat: your glory, my threat With this background in mind, let’s compare similar themes with very different frames that emerged in western media’s coverage of #China70. The Washington Post, Dailymail.co.uk, Newsweek, the BBC, USA Today, all used political, ideological, leadership and conflict frames in reporting Trump’s message to China on Twitter, with substantial, if not entire, reports about Hong Kong. Lexical choices are very obvious on this front, such as “dictatorship”, “authoritarian rule”, “tighten control”, “iron grip”, “non-​toleration of political expression”, “crackdown on free speech and political dissent demonstrations”. This is all discussed in connection with the “China threat” theorem. While Trump was ridiculed as usual and scorned for his inappropriate “tone deaf ” message, Daily Mail framed a calculative Trump who made a choice to have “refrained from criticizing on human rights issues” vs “negotiating a bilateral trade deal” with China. Some accusations or criticisms of China were made via quotations, thus indirect. On one occasion, “brutality against the Chinese people” was used so as to frame the Hong Kong issue as a domestic one. Human rights were modified by “God-​ given” (at least two western pieces), which also directs to the “pagan” cultural roots of Chinese society that is non-​Christian. On another occasion, the central focus was on the “odd” Trump for him siding with or cheerleading (where such lexical choice was especially favoured in social media) the “deadliest regime”, combining the leadership and conflict frames. At this stage, the anti-​communist frame is the most salient where organizational entities such Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VCMF) were mentioned with “communist rule” in the titles or leads. In addition, “killing and expending its power” and “iron grip is strangling the people of HK” are used to publicly condemn sometimes the CCP, while other times, the Chinese government and the Hong Kong police are used.Therefore, the entity who is responsible for the issue was very vague and lacking details. Some pieces defended Trump as “rational” since the “hard-​line politics towards China” is in line with the “eleva[tion] of China to a strategic competitor in the US National Security Strategy”.

What newspapers say about #China70  97

When it comes to China’s military firepower, the frame of “Cold War-​style nuclear might” was stressed. Associations made within the leadership frame are with North Korea, with Kim, while in other pieces with Mao. In Daily Mail’s exceptionally lengthy piece, text, images and videos were used to cover the “military might” (“to hit anywhere within the US territory in 30 minutes” repeated three times in this single piece). In addition, the gun shot incident was reported with significant details, which is different from other coverage from western media. Compared to its other British and western counterparts, Daily Mail’s piece specifically reported in both text and slow-​motion video that the “anti-​government” “ ‘rioter’ beat the officer with a baton” before being shot in the chest “at close range”. By comparison, Hong Kong was not the main focus of the BBC prior to 1 October but the BBC did predict that Hong Kong will “pull the focus” during the day. Tiananmen Square was only connected to travel chaos and rebookings, while it was used as a symbol for festive celebration and pride in Chinese media. Again, lexical choices are “tight control”, “lockdown”, “tightly watched”, “inspection”, “censorship” and “totalitarianism”. This depiction is “typical” in British media as indicated by Scotto and Reifler (2017, pp. 269–​270), where they observed that compared to American media “the British public’s attitudes toward China rarely appear as a topic of conversation in media or academic journals” with one exception –​Hong Kong, as one of its former colonies. As a matter of fact, the attitude towards China in western media has been well documented in literature. In terms of media presentation and portrayals, sinologist and also historian Spence has used the analogy of “sighting” when China was first explored by westerners, by the people from afar who came from the sea. It is like looking at China from a distance using a telescope where different sightings and range were used (Spence, 1998). Film scholar Naomi Greene also observed that Hollywood films were never consistent with the image of China throughout history. She drew an analogy of a pendulum where the attitude towards China moves between two different poles. For Greene, this was largely due to the historical context, particularly the bilateral relationship between two countries, in particular, China and the USA. It is strategic and calculative in nature especially when such images and representations of China can yield beneficial results in domestic politics in the West and vice versa. When the prospect of international relations is not entirely clear for the countries involved, international public opinions tend to swing between “China Threat” and “China Opportunity” (Pavlićević, 2018).Therefore, it is understandable to see the one-​sided news depiction or “fixed sighting” of China amid the US–​China trade war. In addition, the one-​sided China is well-​rounded in a variety of aspects, situated in one of the most problematic moments in a particular historical juncture. The 70th Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China was marked on 1 October 2019. It is also a grand celebration (every five years) in terms of the military parade on Beijing’s Chang’an Avenue. For western media, the problematic aspects of China have been put together coinciding with

98  Zhen Troy Chen

the Hong Kong issue developing as early as April when the expedition bill was promulgated and later withdrawn by the local SAR government.

Twitter: a neglected conflict zone Twitter as a social media platform offers a slightly different picture in terms of the image of China. According to Bruns and Burgess (2012), hashtags work as a low hanging fruit for researchers to query and collect data. There is a hidden premise that hashtag or keyword search tend to generate the most relevant data. However, this is not always the case. This techno-​function prioritizes themes and frames and make them pre-​constructed. That is, the Twitter feeds I collected have been orchestrated, performed and broadcasted for a particular audience, while daily and conversational discussions about certain topics are outside the scope, which may render itself as a significant opinion pool. With that in mind, it is probably understandable to see a smaller sample size compared to other relevant studies, to be analysed qualitatively (Xiao & Yi, 2017). Further processed via Wordcloud.com, I generated the most salient keywords in connection with #China70 (Figure 5.5). Hashtags identified are overtly political and anti-​ China, anti-​ CCP, calling China “chinazi”. There were considerable positive comments from well-​ wishers, such as “happy birthday” posts, some of which were used sarcastically, trending with “#goodmourningchina”. Another salient and relevant theme is Hong Kong, as indicated in hashtags such as “FreeHK”, “HKPoliceState”, “hkpoliceterrorism”, “hkpolicebrutality” and “carrielamstepdown”. The third salient theme is Tibet, which was posted by dedicated accounts identified as “Tibetpeople” or “Hongkongers” who are likening

FIGURE 5.5 Word

cloud generated based on Twitter feeds: #China70

What newspapers say about #China70  99

HK to Tibet. This is also a well-​documented topic mediated in American media over the years (Cao & Xu, 2015). One common feature of such posts is that they are posted by bot-​like accounts, generating more than 87 posts per hour. Such accounts have little engagement with established followers (sometimes no followers) but tend to mention a number of mainstream media outlets. Based on a qualitative assessment of the Twitter feeds, it heavily relies on the conflict frame, criticizing China, the CCP and Hong Kong Police for their handlings in the Hong Kong issue. It almost turned itself into a one-​sided battle ground, regenerating and redirecting the attention towards their own posts, by and large for an international audience, since Twitter is inaccessible in mainland China.

Looking into the future: a more complex and transforming China? As the PRC turned 70, we see overtly positive coverage of China and CCP’s achievements within domestic media including their international wing, while significantly a one-​sided, negative and sometimes hostile portrayal of China features in the western media. What is lacking is perhaps the many faces of China, which is evident in the coverage by more liberal and pro-​market media outlets in China, such as Caixin Global. It has two detailed features about China’s economic and social transformation in the past 70 years. Overall, the reports are balanced, listing facts of both the achievements and the challenges China faces in the new historical juncture side by side. In the piece entitled “China in Charts: A 70-​Year Journey to Economic Prominence”, Caixin particularly looked at the livelihood of the Chinese people and healthcare system, pointing out that “[F]‌rom 1978 to 2018, Chinese people’s disposable income grew 165-​fold while their average medical spending surged 330-​fold”. A relevant op-​ed by Economist Wu Jinglian looks at the “Soul Searching on China’s 70-​Year Economic Evolution”, which framed the reforms that took place in China as a transforming and becoming process. As one of the most influential pro-​market economists, Wu stressed the importance of continuous marketization and rule of law began in 1978. Deepening the reforms is again called for, which referred to Xi’s 1,600 plans stipulated in the new reform era. The reform document made clear that the core issue of economic system reform is to properly handle the relationship between government and markets and allow markets to play the decisive role in resource allocation. The statement set the key principle for China’s following reform efforts. (J.Wu, 2019) This is a signal targeted for business elites in and outside China and also for “the west” to reassure a constructive and peaceful environment suitable for continuous trade and business development and cooperation. However, this complex and transforming China also fuels the problematic “self-​ orientalism” where teleology plays a central role. Teleology has been claimed as

100  Zhen Troy Chen

“western”, which views history as progressive and is bound to be become better (Martínez-​Robles, 2008). It fits the humiliation education of a calamitous China through modern history when China was weak and backward and shall continuously modernize itself according to the western standard.This discourse is a double-​ edged sword since it is becoming unacceptable for the nationalist sentiments within China (Qiu, 2015) while fitting into the western portrayal of China, making “alternative modernities” almost impossible or intolerable for the West. However, the silver lining of such a “faithful” depiction of China according to the western standard, where China will continue developing as a developing country and opening up to the outside world, perhaps serves as a tactic to respond to the paranoia of the “China threat”, which must be further tested in news discourse and international relations in the years to come.

Note 1 The orientalist approach focused on the differences between the East and the West where such differences were drawn up different sources, such as, race, culture and later ideology.

References Akhavan-​Majid, R., & Ramaprasad, J. (1998). Framing and ideology: A comparative analysis of U.S. and Chinese newspaper coverage of the fourth United Nations Conference on Women and the NGO forum. Mass Communication and Society, 1(3–​4), 131–​152. Bennett, L. (2016). Indexing theory. In G. Mazzoleni (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Political Communication (pp. 1–​5). Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell. Boczkowski, P. J., & Papacharissi, Z. (2018). Trump and the media. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Bruns, A., & Burgess, J. (2012). Researching news discussion on Twitter: New methodologies. Journalism Studies, 13(5–​6), 801–​814. Cao, Q. (2007). Confucian vision of a new world order?: Culturalist discourse, foreign policy and the press in contemporary China. International Communication Gazette, 69(5), 431–​450. Cao, Y., & Xu, J. (2015). The Tibet problem in the milieu of a rising China: Findings from a survey on Americans’ attitudes toward China. Journal of Contemporary China, 24(92), 240–​259. Chen, X., & Garcia, F. (2016). US-​China relations: A media perspective. International Journal of China Studies, 7(1), 79–​98. Chen, Z.T. (2018a). Poetic prosumption of animation, comic, game and novel in a post-​socialist China: A case of a popular video-​sharing social media Bilibili as heterotopia. Journal of Consumer Culture, Online first, 1–​21. DOI: https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​1469540518787574. Chen, Z. T. (2018b). Policy, locality and networks in a cultural and creative countryside: The case of Jingdezhen, China. In S. Luckman & N. Thomas (Eds), Craft economies: Cultural economies of the handmade. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic. Chong, D., & Druckman, J. N. (2007). A theory of framing and opinion formation in competitive elite environments. Journal of Communication, 57(1), 99–​118. Dai, J., & Hyun, K. (2010). Global risk, domestic framing: Coverage of the North Korean nuclear test by US, Chinese, and South Korean news agencies. Asian Journal of Communication, 20(3), 299–​317.

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Entman, R. (1993). Framing toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 10(2), 155–​173. Feng, M., Brewer, P. R., & Ley, B. L. (2012). Framing the Chinese baby formula scandal: A comparative analysis of US and Chinese news coverage. Asian Journal of Communication, 22(3), 253–​269. Greene, N. (2014). From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images of China in American film. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Hall, S. (1992). The West and the rest: Discourse and power. In S. Hall & B. Gieben (Eds), Formations of modernity (pp. 184–​227). Cambridge: Polity. Huang, Y., & Leung, C. C. M. (2005). Western-​led press coverage of mainland China and Vietnam during the SARS crisis: Reassessing the concept of “media representation of the other”. Asian Journal of Communication: Media, Crisis and SARS, 15(3), 302–​318. Ji, F. (2017). The West and China: Discourses, agendas and change. Critical Discourse Studies, 14(4), 325–​340. Kobland, C. E., Du, L., & Kwon, J. (1992). Influence of ideology in news reporting case study of New York Times’ coverage of student demonstrations in China and South Korea. Asian Journal of Communication, 2(2), 64–​77. Kuang, X., & Wang, H. (2020). Framing international news in China: An analysis of trans-​ edited news in Chinese newspapers, Global Media and China, 5(2), 188–​202. Kuang, X., & Wei, R. (2018). How framing of nationally and locally sensitive issues varies? A content analysis of news from party and nonparty newspapers in China. Journalism, 19(9–​10), 1435–​1451. Liss, A. (2003). Images of China in the American print media: A survey from 2000 to 2002. Journal of Contemporary China, 12(35), 299–​318. Liu, K., & Chu,Y.-​H. (2015). China’s rise through world public opinion: Editorial introduction. Journal of Contemporary China, 24(92), 197–​202. Liu, N. X. (2017). Same perspective, different effect: Framing the economy through financial news translation. Perspectives, 25(3), 452–​463. Luther, C. A., & Zhou, X. (2004). Within the boundaries of politics: News framing of SARS in China and the United States. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 82(4), 857–​872. Martínez-​Robles, D. (2008). The western representation of modern China: Orientalism, culturalism and historiographical criticism. DigitHUM, (10), 7–​16. Page, B., & Bouton, M. (2006). The foreign policy disconnect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Page, B., & Xin, T. (2010). Living with the dragon. New York: Columbia University Press. Parsons, P., & Xu, X. (2001). News framing of the Chinese embassy bombing by the People’s Daily and the New York Times. Asian Journal of Communication, 11(1), 51–​67. Pavlićević, D. (2018). “China threat” and “China opportunity”: Politics of dreams and fears in China-​Central and Eastern European relations. Journal of Contemporary China, 27(113), 688–​702. Peng, Z. (2004). Representation of China:An across time analysis of coverage in the NewYork Times and Los Angeles Times. Asian Journal of Communication, 14(1), 53–​67. People.com. (2005). To build a harmonious world of lasting peace and common prosperity 推动建设持久和平、共同繁荣的和谐世界. [Press release]. Retrieved from http://​ theory.people.com.cn/​GB/​40557/​350432/​350806/​index.html# Porter, D. (1999). Chinoiserie and the aesthetics of illegitimacy. Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Culture, 28(1), 27–​54. Qiu, J. (2015). Go Baobao! Image-​driven nationalism, generation post-​1980s, and mainland students in Hong Kong. Positions-​Asia Critique, 23(1), 145–​165.

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Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Scotto, T. J., & Reifler, J. (2017). Getting tough with the dragon? The comparative correlates of foreign policy attitudes toward China in the United States and UK. International Relations of the Asia-​Pacific, 17(2), 265–​299. Sparks, C. (2010). Coverage of China in the UK national press. Chinese Journal of Communication, 3(3), 347–​365. Spence, J. (1998). The Chan’s great continent: China in western minds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Thussu, D., de Burgh, H., & Shi, A. (2018). China’s media go global. New York: Routledge. Tian,Y., & Stewart, C. M. (2005). Framing the SARS crisis: A computer-​assisted text analysis of CNN and BBC online news reports of SARS. Asian Journal of Communication, 15(3), 289–​301. Wang, J., & Hallquist, M. (2011). The comic imagination of China: The Beijing Olympics in American TV comedy and implications for public diplomacy. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, 7(4), 232–​243. Wang, X., & Shoemaker, P. J. (2011). What shapes Americans’ opinion of China? Country characteristics, public relations and mass media. Chinese Journal of Communication, 4(1), 1–​20. Willnat, L., & Luo, Y. (2011). Watching the dragon: Global television news about China. Chinese Journal of Communication, 4(3), 255–​273. Wood, F. (1996). Why go at all? In Did Marco Polo go to China? (pp. 9–​15). Colorado, USA: Westview. Wood, F. (2009). Jesuit China. In The Lure of China (pp. 35–​45). Hong Kong, China: Joint Publishing Company. Wu, J. (2019). Wu Jinglian: Soul searching on China’s 70-​year economic evolution [Press release]. Retrieved from www.caixinglobal.com/​2019-​10-​14/​wu-​jinglian-​soul-​ searching-​on-​chinas-​70-​year-​economic-​evolution-​101470780.html Wu, M. (2006). Framing AIDS in China: A comparative analysis of US and Chinese wire news coverage of HIV/​AIDS in China. Asian Journal of Communication, 16(3), 251–​272. Xi, J. (2016). On international relations and China’s national strategy: To build a new model of international relations putting win-​ win cooperation at the core. 推动构建以合作共赢为核心的新型国际关系—​—​关于国际关系和我国外交战略 In B. Pi & A. Feng (Eds), The series of important speeches by General Secretary Xi jinping (2016)《习近平总书记系列重要讲话读本(2016年版)》. Beijing: Hongqi Press. Xiang, D. (2013). China’s image on international English language social media. The Journal of International Communication, 19(2), 252–​271. Xiao, M., & Yi, H. (2017). A thematic and sentiment analysis of China’s image on Twitter. International Communications, 2017(3), 61–​63. Xie, T., & Page, B. I. (2013). What affects China’s national image? A cross-​national study of public opinion. Journal of Contemporary China, 22(83), 850–​867 Yang,Y. E., & Liu, X. (2012). The “China threat” through the lens of US print media: 1992–​ 2006. Journal of Contemporary China, 21(76), 695–​711. Zhang, L., & Wu, D. (2018). Media representations of China: A comparison of China Daily and Financial Times in reporting on the Belt and Road Initiative. Critical Arts: South-​North Cultural and Media Studies, 31(6), 29–​43. Zhang, W. (2018). China through American eyes: Early depictions of the Chinese people and culture in the US print media. Singapore: World Scientific.

6 CHINA DAILY INFOGRAPHICS Metaphor, multimodality and the multi-​layering of news discourse Candace Veecock

Introduction This chapter examines metaphor and multimodality in China Daily infographics linked to the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China. This event was chosen as it received significant coverage in China Daily, which is the first and arguably most well-​known and authoritative English-​language daily news outlet in China. Created in 1981, launched online in 1995 and owned by the Publicity Department of the Chinese government, China Daily is often called the “Voice of China” or the “Window to China” as stated on its website. The question might be asked, why discuss infographics in this volume on Chinese news discourse? The answer may well be, why not infographics? We live in an age of information and the development of technology has facilitated the creation, distribution and access to information in increasingly varied formats and across multiple (and multiplying) platforms. In many ways, we have become insatiable informavores (Miller, 1983), consuming more information than ever before (Lankow et al., 2012). Moreover, since the advent of the Internet, news media organizations have planted seeds online that are now harvested at the forefront, and even surpassing traditional forms of news journalism in the form of printed dailies, broadsheets and tabloids. Today, we have relatively unfettered access to information in terms of space and time (the where and how of how we access information) as well as the ability to share, comment on and interact with information. In the words of Smiciklas (2012): We are in the midst of a revolution. Rapid adoption of digital tools and technology has fueled the democratization of information, exposing consumers to vast and complex streams of data. As a result, it is becoming increasingly

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difficult for individuals and organizations to get their audiences to invest the time to consume and understand their ideas and/​or marketing messages. (p. 28) Infographics then have a unique role to play in packaging, accessibility and shareability of information. As stated by Krum (2014), “[o]‌nline infographics are a powerful content tool for companies to share information, build awareness, and drive traffic to their websites” (p. 108). With a few mouse clicks or touches on a touchscreen, we are able to forward news and information on our digital devices and smartphones. Issues about the content of news journalism is another matter as both news media organizations and governments have a hand in what is communicated to citizens and indeed to the world. There is always an element of agency, which involves causation and control (Veecock, 2012), with regard to who selects what is newsworthy, what is selected as newsworthy, not to mention the when, how and to whom something is packaged and presented as newsworthy. Dick (2016) proposes three categories of scholarship on infographics in the news including “how users interact with infographics”, “the role of the visual journalist in the newsroom” and “content analyses of infographics in news” (p. 499) of which this chapter falls. The objectives of this chapter are to critically examine the multilayering of semiotic resources mobilized in infographics covering of the 70th Anniversary celebrations on the English website of China Daily. This event generated a series of 13 infographics that form a corpus around a common celebratory theme. The following research questions thus emerged: (1) What types of infographics and data visualization techniques are used in infographics commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China? (2) What types of semiotic resources are mobilized in the infographics? And (3) How are target and source domains articulated in connection with multimodal metaphors and their representation? In order to do this, I rely on the theoretical contributions on both visual /​pictorial metaphor and multimodality (Forceville, 1996; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001 & 2006; Forceville, 2009; Forceville & Urios-​Aparisi, 2009; Kress, 2010; Machin & Mayr, 2012) as well as the categorizations of infographics in the varied literature (see below) in relation to purposes, general types and specific data visualization techniques they employ. Permission to use excerpts from the series of 13 infographics was not obtained so I have utilized royalty free images for illustrative purposes and in order to represent a number of the salient features in the original China Daily infographics. In the next section, I will provide a brief overview of infographics, multimodality and metaphor.

Background The word infographics is a compound of information that has been clipped and the word graphics. According to Smiciklas (2012), “An infographic (short for information graphic) is a type of picture that blends data with design, helping individuals and organizations concisely communicate messages to their audience” (p. 3). Yin

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et al. (2014) define infographics as “visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly” (p. 2). Bogost, Ferrari and Schweizer (2010) affirm: “Data describe raw sensor readings, direct observations, and collected metrics. Information adds context and interpretation to the data, imbuing them with meaning” (p. 60). Notoriously difficult to define, information can further be conceptualized as the “facts, knowledge, news, and opinions delivered and received during people’s various interactions with different media in the surrounding environment” (Huang, 2007). Graphics are visual images which illustrate and inform and they are “geared toward performing several functions: show data, avoid distortion, present many numbers in a small space, make a large data set coherent, and induce the reader to think about the substance” (Pasternack & Utt, 1989, p. 2). Infographics, then, are a type of genre that is defined at the strict minimum as “culturally recognised grouping of texts” (Lee, 2001, p. 38). Text here is “a multimodal semiotic entity, seen as ‘having completeness’ ” according to Kress (2010, p. 148) who further emphasizes that a “text has features of internal and external cohesion and, as an integrated meaning-​entity, of coherence” (2010, p. 148). Taken together, infographics are a genre of visual texts mobilizing both written language and images and that meaningfully organize and illustrate data in order to “convey complex information to an audience in a manner that can be quickly consumed and easily understood” (Smiciklas, 2012, p. 3).

Overview of infographics –​types and functions The terminology for infographics still sees variations such as information graphics, informational graphics, data visualization, data representation, visual representation of data, classificational diagrams (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 84) and analytic image structures (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 104), etc. (see principally Tufte, 2001 and Smiciklas, 2012 among others). However, whereas the terminology has more or less stabilized, there is no definitive categorization of infographics in the form of types. Two very broad categories emerge nonetheless: static infographics and interactive infographics. Static infographics are also called 2D infographics and they figure in print or online digital. Static infographics have a long history of use in journalism. Interactive infographics, on the other hand, are relatively new and involve varying degrees of how consumers can interact with content. For a brief history on the development and use of infographics in journalism including playable infographics (as a further extension to interactive infographics) see Bogost, Ferrari and Schweizer, 2010 (pp. 35–​60), Usher, 2019 (pp. 349–​350) and Dick (2020). Static and interactive infographics are two poles on a continuum in Krum (2014, p. 31) who suggests that increasing degrees of complexity, such as zoomability, clickability, animation and video, contribute to greater interactivity and thus mark the shift away from stativity. A finer categorization of infographics may involve distinctions as to their purposes, specific type as well as the precise graphic visualization techniques mobilized. Concerning the types of infographics, there is also quite a lack of

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consensus. Neelakandan (2019), for instance, details seven types of infographics. Whereas Wiesenfeld (2017) and O’Neill (2018) both list eight different types of infographics, McGuire (2019) lists nine types of infographics and Tomboc (2018) details ten types. Krystian (2017) enumerates 12 types of infographics and Chibana (n.d.) discusses not fewer than 13 different types of infographics. So, despite a proliferation of popular works in the form of how-​to books, compilations of award-​ winning infographics as well as blogs and websites dedicated to infographics and types of infographics, scholarly publications on infographics in the news is still a budding area as discussed in Dick (2016) (see references therein). I shall, nevertheless, attempt a general categorization here of the different ways information can be visualized in infographics. The following descriptors are based on the aforementioned various lists of types, as well as Harris (1996), Tufte (2001), Kress and Van Leeuwen, (2006, pp. 79–​84), Bogost, Ferrari and Schweizer (2010, pp. 35–​60) and Smiciklas (2012): 1. Information can be presented in sequence. A sequential infographic can highlight the consecutive order or fixed step-​by-​step processing of things or events. 2. Information can be presented over time. A chronological infographic presents a historical overview of events and can show important dates on a timeline. This can be considered as a sub-​type of the sequential infographic. 3. Information can be presented by way of alternatives. A flowchart infographic presents choices and options as well as their outcomes and the further possibilities of those outcomes, etc. The flowchart infographic can be considered another sub-​type of the sequential infographic. 4. Information can be presented statistically or in the form of numbers and data. A statistical infographic highlights quantitative data and typically shows percentages and raw numbers. 5. Information can be presented topographically or geographically. A geographical infographic focuses on spatial relations, locations and mappings and can showcase more than one type of information through distributions across spaces. 6. Information can be presented via hierarchies such as pyramids and ladders. A hierarchal infographic may arrange items consistent with their relative importance, with items placed higher vertically tending to be perceived as having more importance, rank and status. 7. Information can be presented along degrees. A scalar infographic shows information along bands, ranges, scales or continuums. 8. Information can be presented comparatively or contrastively. A comparative infographic typically highlights salient similarities and differences of a given phenomenon. 9. Information can be presented in terms of systems. A relational infographic can show how items are arranged in a system, structure, web or network. 10. Information can be presented in lists. A list-​based infographic can summarize the most important pieces of information to be retained in an efficient way.

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11. Information can be presented by means of photography. A photo-​ based infographic can mobilize both real-​life and/​or artificial photographs. 12. Information can be presented through step by step instructions. An explicatory infographic can help expound or instruct on actions to be accomplished. 13. Information can be presented artistically. An artistic infographic may play upon aesthetics in their design and have greater imaginative or creative presentations. The artistic calligramme poems of Apollinaire (1980) come to mind where poems are arranged into recognizable objects such as a flowering pot, a horse or the Eiffel Tower. Artistic infographics can be considered as carrying decoration that according to Tufte can “enliven the display” (2001, p. 107) but may risk becoming “over-​busy” in the form of “debris” (2001, p. 107). 14. Information about one’s work experiences, education and training as well as skill sets can figure on infographics. Resume infographics, then, are a modern-​ day visual résumé or curriculum vitae. 15. Information can be presented in a way to facilitate interaction with its content. An interactive infographic engages users online to interact with content, including polling user opinions, playing games, offering choices, reviewing options, watching short videos, and enabling users to add, modify, show, hide or delete content, etc. 16. Information can be presented in the form of an enhanced visual article. A pictorial article infographic is essentially a written article reinforced by visuals beyond written text in the form of added icons, graphics, photos, drawings and illustrations. All of these ways in which information can be organized into infographics emerge from the varied literature. We do not pretend at exhaustivity here; however, Figure 6.1 highlights the 16 main types of infographics associated with a few key terms. In addition to the general types of infographics outlined, a second way infographics can be categorized is in terms of the specific means by which the visualization of statistical information and data are accomplished. In this perspective, some tips from Ferreira (2014) include to “showcase [the] data” and “consider more novel ways of presenting different aspects of [the] data […] rather than in a table” (p. 13). Means of showcasing data include visualizations in the form of various graphs and charts, such as pie charts, doughnut charts, line charts, bubble charts, pyramid charts, box and whisker charts, area/​stacked area charts, bar/​stacked bar charts, histograms, dot charts/​candlestick charts or scatterplots, range frames and heat maps, etc. (Harris, 1996; Tufte, 2001; Bogost, Ferrari & Schweizer, 2010; Smiciklas, 2012; Beegel, 2014; Yin et al. 2014; Dick, 2016; Durcevic, 2019; Dick, 2020). Figure 6.2 employs a doughnut chart to visualize (a non-​exhaustive) 15 types of data visualizations. A third way of classifying infographics can be from the standpoint of temporal and thematic salience, which refers to how timely and relevant an infographic may be. According to Beegel (2014), founder and president of Infographic World

108  Candace Veecock Sequential •process •order

Chronological •historical •timelines

Flowchart •options & outcomes •choices •linear

Statistical •numbers & percentages •statistics & data

Geographical •locations •spatial mappings

Hierarchal - vertical alignment •pyramids, ladders •taxonomies

Scalar - horizontal alignment •continuums •ranges

Comparative •similarities & differences •comparisons

Relational •networks, webs •systems •non-linear

List-based •checklist •inventory

Photo-based •real-life pictures •naturalistic and artificial representations

Explicatory •instructional •how-to •step-by-step

Artistic •creative •imaginative

Resume •curriculum vitae •skills, qualifications, experience

Interactive •exploratory •navigatable •playable

Pictorial article •written text augmented with imagery

FIGURE 6.1  Main

types of infographics

FIGURE 6.2 Types

of data visualizations

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in 2009, there can be timely infographics, related infographics and evergreen infographics. First, timely infographics are said to cover current events and breaking news. In other words, they are “related to topics that take place only once and have a relatively brief window in the public consciousness” (Beegel, 2014, p. 26). Second, related infographics are described as “inspired by news events, holidays or notable dates but don’t deal directly with the event” (Beegel, 2014, p. 26). Related infographics capture contemporary events, trends and patterns, however, are not considered as actual breaking news. Third, evergreen infographics are atemporal infographics and, as claimed by Beegel (2014), “aren’t related to any event or person in the news. They have no seasonal component, and they’re not tied to anything timely” (p. 26). This last type of infographic is said to have a “virtually limitless shelf life” (Beegel, 2014, p. 26). A further way to classify infographics may be in view of their purposes or possible uses. Krum (2014) considers six uses: informative, persuasive, visual explanations, advertisement, public relations and poster infographics. Bogost, Ferrari and Schweizer, 2010 propose three labels to reflect “patterns of use for infographics, both digital and non-​digital” (p. 42). As elaborated by these authors: Explanatory infographics depict specific data for simultaneous consumption. Exploratory (or free-​form) infographics allow participants to draw a variety of conclusions by manipulating data according to personal goals or ideas. And directed infographics guide readers through data in a specific way, leading to a shared experience of synthesis. (2010, p. 42) For the purposes of this chapter, China Daily infographics commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China are both public relations infographics according to Krum’s (2014) descriptors of purposes /​ use of infographics and related infographics according to Beegel’s (2014) descriptors in terms of temporal and thematic salience. Bogost, Ferrari and Schweizer’s (2010) descriptors are less transparent; however, the series of China Daily infographics commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the country can be considered on the whole as directed infographics since they lead to a synthesis of the country’s achievements over 70 years. I will discuss the types of graphic visualizations employed in the series of 13 infographics in Table 6.2 below. In the next section, I introduce multimodal metaphors and why infographics are apt to carry them.

Visual and multimodal metaphors With Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) herald the era of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), also described as the cognitive-​linguistic turn to metaphor. Breaking from traditional approaches to metaphor as instances of figurative, rhetorical and exceptional language, Lakoff and Johnson introduce the idea that metaphor is “primarily a matter of thought and action and only derivatively a

110  Candace Veecock TABLE 6.1  Labels of the two components of metaphor

Concrete concept

Abstract concept

Publication

vehicle subsidiary subject secondary subject source domain

tenor /​topic primary subject

Richards [1936] 1965 Black 1962, 1979

target domain

Lakoff and Johnson 1980

matter of language” (1980, p. 153). This is a shift away from seeing metaphor as exclusively words to understanding metaphor as “human thought processes” (1980, p. 6). Metaphors consist of two distinct parts, which involves mobilizing something to represent something else. Table 6.1 illustrates Forceville’s (1996) summary of the two components of a metaphor carrying different names in the literature. The convention to write metaphors in small capitals is followed here. For metaphors, the source domain is the concrete domain of human experience (such as a journey) whereby some salient feature or features (long travel, bumps in the road, tiring, etc.) are said to map or project onto the target domain (such as love). The often-​cited verbal metaphor love is a journey is a prime example. Forceville (1996, p. 62) mentions two criteria from Whittock’s (1990) work on metaphor in film, which is deemed “pertinent for the analysis of metaphors in advertising too” (1996, p. 62), namely that the primary subject (tenor or target domain) is considered as having a stronger denotation whereas the secondary subject (vehicle or source domain) is considered as having stronger connotations. These criteria can be useful since images, just like words, have denotation and connotation. In Forceville’s words, [f]‌or a pictorial representation to be called metaphorical, it is necessary that a “literal”, or conventional reading of the pictorial representation is felt either not to exhaust its meaning potential, or to yield an anomaly which is understood as an intentional violation of the norm rather than as an error. (1996, p. 64) Similarly, according to Machin and Mayr (2012), “where image makers need to get a specific idea across, they will rely on established connotators, carriers of connotations, which they feel confident their target audiences will understand (whether consciously or not)” (p. 57). It is then visual/​multimodal metaphors that are considered particularly “effective because they serve the practical purpose of making things easier to see and understand” (Smiciklas, 2012, p. 28). A brief clarification about the varied terminology is warranted. The term pictorial metaphor (Forceville, 1996) and to a lesser extent visual metaphor (Kogan et al. 1980) aim to designate metaphors conveyed through some form of visual representation beyond verbal /​linguistic metaphors (either written or spoken language).The term multimodal metaphor contrasts with monomodal metaphors, that

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FIGURE 6.3  Examples

of multimodal metaphor

is to say, metaphors that are mobilized through one mode. According to Forceville (2009): In contrast to monomodal metaphors, multimodal metaphors are metaphors whose target and source are each represented exclusively or predominantly in different modes.The qualification “exclusively or predominantly” is necessary because non-​verbal metaphors often have targets and/​or sources that are cued in more than one mode simultaneously. (p. 24) The metaphors justice is scales and law is a gavel can be optimally presented through simultaneous visuals in the form of images and written text as in Figure 6.3. Modes are defined as “a socially shaped and culturally given semiotic resource for making meaning” and “different modes offer different potentials for making meaning” (Kress, 2010, p. 79). While there is no single go-​to list of modes, we can identify the following meaning-​making potentials in visuals: images, photos, icons, memes, drawings, colours (hue, shade, tint, saturation, contrasts), photo perspective, foregrounding and backgrounding, layout, numbers, writing (style, font, font size, punctuation, etc.), attire, textures, grooming, accessories, personal objects, body posture, facial expressions, eye gaze, body movements and positions, gesture, sound/​ music and countless more (Harris, 1996; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001; Ware, 2004; Forceville, 2009; Forceville & Urios-​Aparisi, 2009; Kress, 2010; Machin & Mayr, 2012). All of these are linguistic and extralinguistic semiotic resources and meaning potentials thus leading to a “multimodal account of meaning” (Kress, 2010, p. 59), which is needed for analysis of infographics.

Data collection, methodology and analysis The data for analysis in this study include 13 China Daily infographics related to the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China. The 13 infographics were published between 22 August and 1 October 2019 and are found on the China Daily website in the infographic special coverage section. Themes include China’s achievements over 70 years in terms of economic achievements, rural revitalization, urbanization, improvements for a better life, global rankings,

112  Candace Veecock

countries that established diplomatic relations after the founding of the country, international trade, transportation, poverty reduction, human rights, consumption and highlights of the military parade. In the first phase, the 13 infographics were categorized according to their general type of infographic and according to the type of graphic visualizations employed to convey numerical data, if any. A third classification was required to identify other types of visualizations employed for non-​numerical data (see Table 6.2). In the second phase, each infographic was analysed according to multimodal metaphor with the identification of source and target domains for each metaphor. The results in Table 6.2 show that 11 out of 13 infographics in the series are statistical infographics (84.6%). The purpose of this type of infographic is to make statistical data, such as raw numbers and percentages, much easier to grasp and thus more memorable. China, being big by all accounts, quite naturally has a lot of data about itself. Infographics, then, are a great news choice for packaging China by the numbers concerning her different domains of activity. Table 6.2 also summarizes the types of infographics and specific data visualization techniques as well as other visualizations used across the series of 13 infographics. The second most common type of infographic in the series is the pictorial article infographic. This type of infographic is essentially a news article that has been enhanced with the incorporation of imagery or in some cases limited or non-​ existent statistics.The pictorial article infographic was employed once in standalone format, with statistical data completely absent such as in the second infographic in the series entitled Highlights of China’s upcoming 70th anniversary celebrations. A second occurrence of the pictorial article type of infographic appears in a blended format in the last infographic of the series Highlights of military parade, which incorporates selected statistical data in what is otherwise a pictorial article. The three main types of salient visual enhancements in the series of infographics were icons (which were used in all infographics, or 100%), directional arrows indicating increases in numerical values (used in six infographics, or 46%), photos (in four infographics, or 30.7%) and lists (used in three infographics, or 23%). These results offer some insights into how infographics can be conceptualized and categorized. Icons form the basis of this series of infographics regardless of the statistical status of the information that the infographic carries. This means that even though all of these infographics included icons, they cannot be classified as icon-​ based infographics since other salient items and features take precedence, such as the statistical information which is foregrounded. Icons thus have a special role as enhancers of information and this is consistent with Ferreira (2014) who states that icons have the potential to “represent some of the data” (p. 14). The use of icons in combination with directional arrows figures prominently across the series of infographics. Placement is another important semiotic resource. Side-​by-​side comparisons of two dates or icons tend to situate the increase on the right-​hand side. Increases in quantity or extent are also regularly marked by upward flowing arrows from the smaller value to the larger one, be it raw numerical data or proportional circles or other icons. Increases can also be further signified with

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TABLE 6.2  Graphic visualizations in China Daily infographics covering the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China

#

Date

Infographic title

Type of infographic

Data /​graphic visualizations

Other salient visualizations

1.

22-​08-​2019

China’s economic achievements over 70 years

Statistical

2.

02-​09-​2019

3.

03-​09-​2019

Highlights of China’s upcoming 70th anniversary Pictorial article celebrations 70 years on: Striding toward rural revitalization Statistical

Pie chart (2) Column (1) n/​a

Icons Directional arrows Icons Photos Icons Photos

4.

11-​09-​2019

China’s achievements in urbanization over 70 years

Statistical

5.

18-​09-​2019

Statistical

n/​a

6.

20-​09-​2019

70 years on: Striding toward better life in the new era China rises in global rankings over 70 years

Statistical

Bar chart (3) Column chart (5)

7.

20-​09-​2019 25-​09-​2019

Chronological List-​based Statistical

n/​a

8.

Countries that established diplomatic relations with PRC in 1949 China’s achievements in international trade over 70 years

9.

27-​09-​2019

70 years on: Zooming forward in transportation

Statistical

Column chart (2) Doughnut chart (1) Bar chart (1) Column chart (2) Bar chart (1)

Icons Lists & chronological lists Directional arrow Photos Icons Icons Lists Directional arrow Icons (continued)

China Daily infographics  113

Column chart (6) Pie chart (1) Doughnut chart (4) Column chart (6) Bar chart (4)

Icons Proportional circles Directional arrows Pointers Icons

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#

Date

Infographic title

Type of infographic

Data /​graphic visualizations

Other salient visualizations

10.

28-​09-​2019

70 years on: China’s achievements in poverty reduction

Statistical

Icons Directional arrows

11. 12.

29-​09-​2019 30-​09-​2019

Progress of human rights in China since 1949 Statistical Consumption in China by numbers over 70 years Statistical

Column chart (4) Area chart (1) Line chart (1) Column chart (2) Bar chart (3) Doughnut chart (5)

13.

01-​10-​2019

Highlights of military parade

Pictorial article

n/​a

Icons Icons Directional arrow Proportional circles Icons Photos Lists

114  Candace Veecock

TABLE 6.2  Cont.

China Daily infographics  115

FIGURE 6.4  Directional

arrows as semiotic resources

images of more people represented, higher stacks of coins shown and perceptively larger bags of money, etc. and depicted on the right as shown in Figure 6.4. All of these juxtaposed images play upon physical quantities and sizing dimensions to capture increase, growth and improvement. Labels and captions with numerical data highlighted in boldface, in a larger font or in a different colour, also figure prominently and represent other modes and semiotic resources for making meaning. Harris (1996) discusses how colour “is a powerful tool to use with infographics” (p. 78) and outlines numerous applications of colour, including but not limited to its ability to differentiate data, encode information, provide emphasis, signify changes, improve the appearance of charts and the infographic as a whole, as well as alert the viewer, hold their attention and facilitate retention of information, etc. (1996, pp. 78–​79). In terms of data /​graphic visualizations, there were 55 occurrences of charts across the series of infographics which Figure 6.5 shows. The column chart was the predominant data visualization (n = 28 or 50.9%). Following Harris (1996):“Because the tops of a column are so pronounced, this type of graph is one of the best for showing specific value. Because of the stand-​alone nature of the columns, it is also well suited for representing discrete data” (p. 80). Other charts used were bar charts (n = 12 or 21.8%), doughnut charts (n =10 or 18.2%), pie charts (3 or 5.5%) and one occurrence each of an area chart and a line chart. It is also observed that the use of data visualizations was higher in the infographics covering international trade (11 data visualizations), transportation (10 data visualizations) and consumption and global ranking (8 data visualizations each).

Multimodal metaphor Metaphorical mappings across the series of infographics are constructed principally through the use of written language for target domains whereas pictorial

116  Candace Veecock Data visualizations in the series of 70th anniversary infographics

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representations are used for the source domains. This is not unusual as the source domain is usually more concrete and the target more abstract, being less apt to be the object of a pictorial visualization. There is, however, a multilayering of metaphors with primary and secondary target domains emerging as well as a doubling of source domains (both written and pictorial image). Due to limitations in space for this chapter, I will illustrate how metaphors are both multimodal and multi-​layered throughout the first infographic of the series of 13 infographics. The infographic China’s economic achievements over 70 years (22 August 2019) is a statistical infographic. Numbers dominate this infographic against a light blue background with yellow and orange highlights. All pictorial signs in this infographic are iconic and not real-​life photo-​based. There is an editor’s note forming part of the header and announcing the numbers behind the “miracle”. What follows, then, is the extended metaphor of revealing the numbers “behind” the “miracle”, which is foregrounded. All icons in Table 6.3 below are by FreePik from Flaticon and are purely for illustrative purposes to approximate the actual icons used by China Daily for which we do not have copyright permission to reproduce here. Table 6.3 summarizes target and source domain elements of the multimodal metaphors in this infographic: Here we can see that the primary target domain is “economic achievements”, which is also the title and theme of the infographic. There is, however, a reinforced source domain since it is expressed both in written language and with visual imagery. These examples also demonstrate how multimodal metaphor can be layered, namely with visual imagery serving as source domain for both the primary target domain and also an intermediary secondary target domain. In terms of the primary metaphorical relationship, the source domains are consistently depicted

China Daily infographics  117 TABLE 6.3  Examples of multimodal metaphor in the infographic “China’s economic

achievements over 70 Years” Primary target domain

Source domains

Economic achievements

Verbal–​written (secondary target domain)

Metonymic and metaphor priming Sample salient pictorial-​image

(1)

Grain output

grain output is wheat

(2)

Irrigated farmland

irrigation is a water tap

(3)

Raw coal production

raw coal is a cargo train

(4)

Steel production

STEEL production is smelting

(5)

Cement production

cement is a truck

(6)

Railway infrastructure

infrastructure is a train

(7)

Highway mileage

mileage is a car

(8)

Inland waterway mileage

waterways are cargo ships

(9)

Scheduled flights mileage

flights are airplanes

(10)

Postal outlets

postal service is a post office

(11)

Mobile broadband users

broadband is a smart phone (continued)

118  Candace Veecock TABLE 6.3  Cont.

Primary target domain

Source domains

Economic achievements

Verbal–​written (secondary target domain)

Metonymic and metaphor priming Sample salient pictorial-​image

(12)

Research

research is a microscope

(13)

Patents

patents are certificates

(14)

Primary, junior and high school enrolment rates

schools are buildings

(15)

Higher education enrolment

higher education is a graduation cap

(16)

Number of public libraries

libraries are books

(17)

Television coverage of the population

television coverage is a tv

(18)

Life expectancy

life expectancy is an old man

(19)

2008 Beijing Olympic Games –​topped the medals list

Olympics are gold medals

(20)

Clean energy consumption

clean energy is a windmill

(21)

Urban employed population

employment is man (men) in a tie

China Daily infographics  119

through pictorial representation and the target domain is named through written language. Imagery here plays a central role is triggering the metaphor as it again enables the visual representation of the typically more concrete source domain of metaphors. It is arguably much easier to visually represent a microscope (12) than it is to depict research and also a book (16) than it is a library. The icons used in the pictorial source domains in Table 6.3 are established connotators. As stated by Forceville (2009), “it is connotations rather than denotations of source domains that get mapped in metaphors” (p. 29). Machin and Mayr (2012) state: “Of course we could argue that there is no neutral denotation, all images connote something for us” (p. 50). Consequently, we can also observe that the attributes of the represented objects and how they are represented (Machin and Mayr, 2012, p. 57) contribute to further cueing or signalling of the metaphors. Strong connotators are said to mobilize attributes of objects, settings and salience (Machin and Mayr, 2012). The image of an old man in example (18) connotes living for a long time, for instance. The metaphor life expectancy is an old man, which is signalled through the features +glasses, +grey hair and +balding.The combined affordances of these aforementioned attributes thus facilitate the meaning of ageing. Following Kress (2010), signs are motivated and apt to convey meaning, that is to say, having “the requisite features to be the carrier of the meaning” (p. 55). Thus, when associated, these three carriers of meaning become even more salient and make the metaphor life expectancy is an old man possible. Metonymy is also another form of analogy where one thing is conceptualized by means of something else. Metonymy is prevalent through visuals when there is a close logical relationship between the source domain and the target domain. Contrary to metaphor, however, metonymy is said to involve contiguity, in that there is sequential, spatial, temporal or some attributive relationship between the two concepts being mobilized. As such, flights take place on aircraft so this is both a logical spatial and temporal connection between the visual of an aircraft and the written word flights in the infographics (­example 9 above). Similarly, cement is associated with a cement truck (­example 12) as one of its most well-​known containers. Furthermore, gold medals are unavoidably associated with the Olympics (­example 19), and more so than any other colour of medal. Whether metaphorical or metonymic, Forceville and Urios-​Aparisi (2009) emphasize: “It is impossible to study metaphor without addressing metonymy” (p. 12). As anticipated, “each property or feature that is mapped from a source to a target must first have been metonymically related to that source” (2009, p. 12). This means that an underlying metonym is possible when discussing metaphor. Several other authors see metonymy as more primary and, in fact, a precursor to metaphor with metaphor and metonymy on a continuum of the similar underlying processes (Dirven and Porings, 2002; Kövecses, 2014).

Discussion and implications Our brief overview of selected semiotic resources and multimodal metaphors in China Daily’s series of infographics commemorating the 70th Anniversary of

120  Candace Veecock

the Founding of the People’s Republic of China scratches the surface of a full cataloguing of all semiotic resources (in particular, less salient ones) in a given infographic and across all infographics in the series. Colour and font choices, background and decorative aspects may well be culturally anchored and even though apparently less salient, also requires investigation. Moreover, how international and Anglophone audiences perceive the series of infographics commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China merits further inquiry.This can be broken down into how audiences recognize and retrieve salient information amidst aesthetics as well as how they appraise and evaluate the information communicated by the infographics. Following Lankow et al. (2012), how reputable, reliable and relevant the source of the data and information is can be an essential factor in its reception. Data integrity, according to Krum (2014), and “[c]‌redibility plays a huge part in the success of an infographic” (p. 296). Krum (2014) also discusses how readers may be interested in knowing where data comes from, how old it is, as well as how credible the data and the infographic are (p. 296). The main source of data for the series of 13 infographics is the (Chinese) National Bureau of Statistics, which is referenced 8 out of 13 times (61.5%). Other sources of data include the Ministry of Education (1), The People’s Government of Beijing Municipality (1), Shenzhen Statistics Bureau (1), Guangzhou Statistics Bureau (1), people.cn (1), Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1), Xinhua (2), General Administration of Customs (1) and China Daily (2). In short, 85% of the infographics are attributed to an authoritative source of data with only two infographics not providing the source of the information they include. Whether Chinese and non-​Chinese readers are attuned to the source of the data and information in an infographic as well as how reputable the source of data is, is yet another area to consider in Chinese news infographics.

Future research directions Other areas for future research can examine infographics on timely global and national events from the perspectives of their creators in addition to considering the perspective of various audiences. How do designers of news infographics in general, and in Chinese news specifically, cater to domestic and/​or international audiences? What is the nature of the agency and interagentive work of news journalists with visual graphic designers? How is agency operating at different stages from conceptualization, selection of data to include, selection of reputable sources of data, packaging of data into units of information and inclusion of specific data visualization techniques? Finally, design choices are being made in terms of layout, organization and aesthetics. Further multimodal discourse analysis tools specific to news infographics can also be elaborated in order to refine analyses in terms of salience and saliency. It was observed that the use of icons, more so than of photos, is the mainstay of the series of infographics commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China.Yet, of note, an infographic can still be considered

China Daily infographics  121

a statistical infographic without specific data visualizations in the form of charts. Numbers, percentages and statistics can be presented through heterogeneous modes such as in boldface, in a different font, a different font size or font colour as well as in juxtaposition to icons, images or short captions, etc. In short, even without graphic data visualizations (in the form of various charts), when numbers dominate an infographic, it is a still a statistical infographic because the numbers are salient. According to Landragin (2011), visual salience and linguistic salience are analogous. Landragin (2011) elaborates that visual salience can be defined along three criteria: (1) intrinsic physical criteria of the object (size, colour, texture, etc.); (2) cognitive criteria such as our physiological and psychological mechanisms of perception, attention and memory; and (3) cultural criteria that prime individuals to be sensitive to certain stimuli, colours and even criteria for saliency (Landragin, 2011, pp. 81–​82). Saliency, then, is not reduced to the simple property of a represented object but emerges across multiple criteria. It is likely in this direction that research on infographics used in journalism and the media can find a robust framework for analysis.

Conclusion The 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China is a significant milestone in the country’s history and coverage of this event extended beyond regular news reporting to include a special coverage series of 13 infographics. China is large by all numbers (Bloom, 2019), including but not limited to geographically, demographically and economically, etc. Communicating China by the numbers is a pharaonic task and will inevitably involve the Chinese National Statistics Bureau. It should not be surprising then that the dominant type of infographic was the statistical infographic. Instead of dry statistics on China’s achievements over the past 70 years, the visual mode and specifically the use of graphic visualizations and salient icons, mobilizes multimodal metaphors and contributes to the multi-​layering of the news discourse. How Chinese news media outlets cover both national and international news and package it into infographics is an interesting and pertinent area of research on news discourse. Multimodality and metaphor will inevitably play central roles due to the illustration of numerical information, if any, as well as the varied other visualizations contributing to further layers of information on a given newsworthy event. With the development of digital infographics as a genre and as a technique to communicate information succinctly, the existing categories of infographics will need to be continuously revisited. What we have observed is that infographics mobilize many different data visualization techniques and thus cannot always be conveniently classified according to one type. Further research on infographics in the news media in general is needed through the lens of how the visualization of statistical data, images and visuals as well as multimodal metaphor are interwoven and contribute to layering of news discourses. As stated by Thibodeau, “metaphors

122  Candace Veecock

can shape how people think about complex issues” (2017, p. 273) and this is pertinent for online news. Smiciklas (2012) cannot be wrong when he says that a well-​placed, self-​contained infographic addresses our need to be confident about the content we’re sharing. Infographics relay the gist of your information quickly, increasing the chance for it to be shared and fueling its spread across a wide variety of digital channels. (p. 15) If our “human brains are essentially hard-​wired for visuals” (Dunlap & Lowenthal, 2016) and messages are more likely to be remembered through visuals (Ware, 2004; Smiciklas, 2012), it can be said that infographics have a privileged position in the current attention economy (Simon, 1971). Yet, infographics as “[v]‌isual communication can bridge cultures” (Beegel, 2014, p. 7). The news outlet China Daily is metaphorically a “Window to China”, as mentioned in the beginning of this chapter and as the country’s most authoritative English-​language daily newspaper, it is in a unique position to bridge Chinese culture to the anglophone speaking world and beyond. China Daily infographics thus have a unique role to play as part of China’s external communication to the world. In terms of public relations, the use of infographics is not only a modern form of communication, but can also increase both the speed, ease and effectiveness of communication. This is a good strategy for communicating China’s news to the world.

Icon attributions The “tree map” icon in Figure 6.2 is an original created icon. All other icons used in this chapter are by FreePik from Flaticon.

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China Daily infographics 2019-​08-​22 China’s economic achievements over 70 years Retrieved 04 April 2020 from www.chinadaily.com.cn/​china/​special_​coverage/​5caabb9da 3104842260b4e51 2019-​09-​02 Highlights of China’s upcoming 70th anniversary celebrations Retrieved 04 April 2020 from www.chinadaily.com.cn/​a/​201909/​02/​WS5d6cdbfda 310cf3e355693fd.html

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2019-​09-​03 70 years on: Striding toward rural revitalization Retrieved 04 April 2020 from www.chinadaily.com.cn/​a/​201909/​03/​WS5d6d97e9a 310cf3e35569488.html 2019-​09-​11 China’s achievements in urbanization over 70 year Retrieved 04 April 2020 from www.chinadaily.com.cn/​a/​201909/​11/​WS5d782640a 310cf3e3556adb5.html 2019-​09-​18 70 years on: Striding toward better life in the new era Retrieved 04 April 2020 from www.chinadaily.com.cn/​a/​201909/​18/​WS5d815e68a310 cf3e3556c053.html 2019-​09-​20 China rises in global rankings over 70 years Retrieved 04 April 2020 from www.chinadaily.com.cn/​a/​201909/​20/​WS5d8403caa310 cf3e3556c7bf.html 2019-​09-​20 Countries that established diplomatic relations with PRC in 1949 Retrieved 04 April 2020 from www.chinadaily.com.cn/​a/​201909/​20/​WS5d840870a310 cf3e3556c7c6.html 2019-​09-​25 China’s achievements in international trade over 70 years Retrieved 04 April 2020 from www.chinadaily.com.cn/​a/​201909/​25/​WS5d8a9b40a310 cf3e3556d43b.html 2019-​09-​27 70 years on: Zooming forward in transportation Retrieved 04 April 2020 from www.chinadaily.com.cn/​a/​201909/​27/​WS5d8d3bf5a310 cf3e3556db8b.html 2019-​09-​28 70 years on: China’s achievements in poverty reduction Retrieved 04 April 2020 from www.chinadaily.com.cn/​a/​201909/​28/​WS5d8e8d68a310 cf3e3556dfc0.html 2019-​09-​29 Progress of human rights in China since 1949 Retrieved 04 April 2020 from www.chinadaily.com.cn/​a/​201909/​29/​WS5d8fe141a310 cf3e3556e104.html 2019-​09-​30 Consumption in China by numbers over 70 years Retrieved 04 April 2020 from www.chinadaily.com.cn/​a/​201909/​30/​WS5d9132c0a310 cf3e3556e371.html 2019-​10-​01 Highlights of military parade Retrieved 04 April 2020 from www.chinadaily.com.cn/​a/​201910/​01/​WS5d930b07a310 cf3e3556e7bb.html

PART III

News translation pedagogy

7 NEWS TRANSLATION STRATEGIES ADOPTED BY NOVICE AND EXPERT TRANSLATORS Implications for translation pedagogy Wan Hu

Introduction As translation becomes more frequent, essential and necessary in international communications and with the proliferation of translation programmes around the world, the demand for high calibre translators grows. In response to this growing demand, many educators have proposed and developed possible approaches to train future translators with high competency. Their efforts mainly revolve around two key issues: what to teach and how to teach (Kelly, 2005; Kiraly, 1995; Li, Zhang & He, 2015). In answering the question “what to teach”, professional needs, materials, and methods are suggested to be incorporated in translation and interpreting (T&I) classrooms. For instance, using authentic or quasi-​professional materials in the translation classroom has become a consensus among many scholars (González Davis, 2004; Huertas Barros, 2011; Kelly, 2005). Others also stress that the teaching and assessing content ought to be more responsive to the needs of the markets to raise students’ awareness of future job requirements (Abdel Latif, 2018; Anderman & Rogers, 2000; Hu, 2018). Moreover, with the aim to understand the thinking patterns and work habits of the professional translators and interpreters, researchers have conducted experiments between trainee and professional translators to compare their strategies used in consecutive interpreting and possible reasons for the differences. For example,Wang and Li (2015) have adopted a think-​aloud approach in a context of English–​Chinese consecutive interpreting and gathered the evidence of interpreting strategies used by student and professional interpreters, respectively. They find that professional interpreters are more proactive in using strategies. With the help of interpreting strategies, professional interpreters are proficient in delivering the critical information of the source text (ST) to the audience. The students, however, tend to treat

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strategy as a last resort due to their cognitive process constrains.This chapter reports the performative gap between trainee and professional interpreters and suggests that the effective strategies used by professional interpreters should be taught in class to help improve students’ performance. As regards “how to teach”, educators have been actively seeking innovative approaches in T&I teaching, advocating more student-​ centred, collaborative-​ oriented, and realistic, practice-​led teaching and learning methods. Differing from the conventional teacher-​ oriented approach, mainly transmitting knowledge, “student-​centred classes will favour interaction and will provide a stimulus for learner autonomy” (González Davies, 2005, p. 70). Students are better involved in learning and then become active participants. Translation is somewhat a complicated process dealing with languages, clients, authors, readers, and even resources. In this vein, many educators adopt collaborative-​ based translation projects in translation classrooms (AI-​Shehari, 2017; González & Díaz, 2015; Kiraly, 2005, 2012, 2014). This approach aims to provide students with a more dynamic and interactive environment for learning and engage them in the investigation. Within this framework, “students are to accomplish certain tasks under particular time constraints” (Li, Zhang & He, 2015, p. 3). They can “work collaboratively to find their own sub-​tasks in these complex situations, and can learn to make their own meanings” (Kiraly, 2014, p. 22). The realistic, practice-​led teaching approach is welcomed and applied in many interpreting classrooms. This approach includes activities such as role-​plays, mock conferences, highly simulated consecutive or simultaneous interpreting tasks in the school, dummy booth practice in international organizations, as well as conference observations. These carefully designed real-​life activities aim to provide students with opportunities to enhance their interpreting skills and to develop their job-​ related competences. Most students’ feedback does prove the effectiveness of such activities (Chouc and Conde, 2016; Pan, 2016; Wadensjö, 2014). The above studies have discussed the changing attitudes and methods of translator and interpreter training and have provided examples on the introduction of professional elements into teaching. However, there has been less research on the comparison of news translation strategies between novice and expert translators. Moreover, the advocated links between translation classroom and the translation profession are not close enough, lacking an integrative model between academia and industry. Further, little attention has been paid to individual differences in the translating process, especially how these differences may affect teaching and learning. Therefore, this chapter aims to explore how novice and expert translators behave differently when translating business news. Apart from summarizing the shared translation patterns of each group, this research also analyses learner factors with the help of in-​depth interview, seeking to investigate how learners’ prior knowledge, professional experience, subject expertise and motivation affect their translation decision-​making processes. It is hoped that the findings from this research will enlighten both translation pedagogy and translation research.

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Research questions This research aims to answer the following two questions: RQ1: What are the different patterns of news translation strategies used by novice and expert translators, respectively? RQ2: How do individual differences affect translators’ choices of translation strategies in translating specialized news in a collaborative community?

Participants Ten students from a national key university in Beijing and one editor from a well-​ known news agency participate in this study. In the group of student participants, 20% are men, and 80% are women; 30% are year-​three undergraduates, and 30% are year-​two undergraduates; 40% are master’s students. The reasons for selecting these students are mainly threefold. First, all of them have finished learning the core module of “Translation of Business News”1 before taking part in this research. Second, they were the translators of the selected texts in this research, and they are the representative of the novice translators. Third, student participants who are at the different levels of learning can increase the diversity of the research. The editor, defined as another group in this research, has been devoted to news reporting and trans-​editing in a national news agency for more than ten years. In addition to global news reporting, he is in charge of an online crowdsourcing translation platform. This platform recruits student interns regularly. Before the current role, the editor worked as a translator for the Beijing Olympic Games and a municipal bank. The profiles of all the participants are presented in Table 7.1, providing details about their educational backgrounds and professional experience. TABLE 7.1  Participants’ profile

Initials

Gender

Education profile

Professional experience

XF JZ MF ZL CC AD ZH YJ ZS YY XW

F F F F F F M M F F M

Y3; BA Trans Y2; BA Trans Y2; BA Trans PG; BA/​MA Trans PG; BA/​MA Trans PG; BA Finance/​MA Trans Y3; BA Trans PG; BA Food Science/​MA Trans Y2; BA Trans Y3; BA Trans Journalist/​Editor: 10 years

In class translation exercise Subtitle translation In class translation exercise Intern: news trans-​editor Scientific and technical trans Exam-​based trans texts In class translation exercise Exam-​based trans texts In class translation exercise Website translation project In house translator: 5 years

Note: Considering the constraints of space, several acronyms are used in the table. Specifically,Y3/​Y2 refer to undergraduate year 3 and year 2, PG represents postgraduate, and Trans is short for translation.

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Data collection and analysis This research uses a qualitative approach to investigate translators’ preferred strategies when translating business news, as well as their differences in the decision-​ making processes. The raw data of this research have been obtained from three sources. The primary source is the ten translated business news. The second data source is students’ reflective learning reports. The third data source is one-​to-​one interviews with 11 participants. The selected ten news texts cover a broad range of sub-​topics in business, including business and management, investment, economic development, trade, and financial markets (see Table 7.2 in Appendix 7.1 for the full list of texts). All these texts have been translated by students (including the participants in this study) as module assignments. They have then been revised by the editor before being published as international news.2 It is, therefore, reasonable to use these texts as samples to identify the different strategies used by students and professionals. Students’ reflective learning reports include “the entire translating process, the translation challenges encountered and the students’ accompanying strategies” (Hu, 2019, p. 249). Also, students compare their work with the editor’s revisions and analyse the underlying reasons. These are relevant references to understand students’ translating processes as well as their thinking patterns. The interviews were conducted over the social media WeChat. Compared with face-​to-​face interviews, the social media-​mediated method breaks the restrictions of time and space, and allows the participants to intensively describe their feelings and translation routines.The interview is formed with seven open-​ended questions, revolving around the correlation between participants’ prior experience and their choices of strategies in translating financial news. The sample interview questions are presented in Appendix 7.2. In the following step, the researcher carefully analyses the collected data and marks all the essential content. When coding the interviews, all the participants are anonymous, and their names are replaced with initials, such as XF, CC, or ZS.

Different translation strategies between novice and expert news translator As demonstrated in many studies on English–​Chinese news translation strategies, the frequently used strategies are: selective translation, omission, addition, generalization, and specification (Cheng, 2011; Qin and Zhang, 2018). Different from these content analyses on the published news, this study attempts to investigate how news translators in various stage of expertise choose their translation strategies. After undertaking a textual analysis of the target text (TT) produced by students and the editor, as well as reading carefully about students’ reflective learning reports, it is summarized that the differences are mainly structured around the following

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three perceptions: translating words, translating sentences and paragraphs, and translation quality.

Perceptions of translating vocabularies At the word level, students pay much attention to technical terms, polysemy and paraphrased usage. First, students take serious account of terminologies in the broad areas of business and finance. They often consult dictionaries, official websites or experts to understand their meanings. However, due to the lack of understanding context and business jargon, the vocabularies are sometimes mistranslated by students. For example, in a news report regarding the UK’s economic trends, the author quotes the economists’ opinions from the “City of London” but writes a shorter form “City economist” in the article. Many students did not recognize the connotation of the term “City” in this context, resulting in translation errors. In some cases, students can translate English technical terms correctly into the Chinese language, but fail to give further explanation, which might cause clumsiness in meaning. The phrase “test of relevance” is such an example. In a piece of business news reporting the development route of two Asian companies: AIA and Prudential, the journalist says that these two groups “pass the key tests of relevance”. The vast majority of the students use the strategy of literal translation, and translate this sentence into “他们通过了重要的关联性测试” (back translation: They have passed the crucial tests of relevance). However, the readers, especially those who have little knowledge in financial services, might be curious about the type and content of the tests and the reasons why they are relevant. In fact, “test of relevance” is a performance evaluation of a company’s financial position. It is often conducted in the merger and acquisition activities or evaluated for strategic development. Therefore, in order to help target readers better understand the full story, both the editor and the teacher advise students to use the translation technique of compensation, adding a “bracelet” with an explanation of the test to make this phrase clearer and more explicit to understand.3 Second, it is noted in the students’ reflective learning reports that polysemy in financial news should be carefully dealt with when rendered in the target text. They argue that some familiar words may have their unique meanings in economic news. In this context, these words cannot be translated into their ordinary purposes. Students report that in rendering such terms, the frequently used strategy is to consult the bilingual dictionary to grasp the meaning of words. Some students also claim that they would read the whole passage to check the meaning of these words in context. For instance, the term “weaker” in “the weaker pound” cannot be rendered into “not good enough”, but specifically refers to “the slide of currency”. Examples like this should be carefully dealt with according to students. Third, different cultures have different linguistic styles, structures and writing conventions, and these are essential elements for translators to consider how to adapt them in the target culture (Holland, 2013). For example, using the definite article “the” plus different words to repeat previously written events or people is a typical

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English journalistic style. For instance, in the news covering Starbuck’s business strategy in the Chinese market, the journalist uses “the world’s largest coffee chain store operator” to indicate “Starbucks”, and uses “the Shanghai outlet” to replace Starbucks’ high-​end brand “the Shanghai Roastery”. Translators are therefore faced with challenges of rendering these paraphrases accurately and appropriately in the target texts. Students report that they usually treat these different sayings of the same issue carefully and try to translate them into the original names. But they also admit that they cannot successfully recognize all of them, and this sometimes inevitably result in translation errors. Unlike student translators, linguistic constraints and financial knowledge are not a significant issue for the editor. As the editor’s areas of expertise are finance (including fintech), corporate acquisition and stock market analysis, he is familiar with the terminologies in these areas and is good at rendering them accurately and professionally. Additionally, his work experience in both translation and journalism sectors make him skilful in “interpreting the underlying semantic relations of a text” (Hu, 2018, p. 182). According to the editor’s revision principles demonstrated in a previous research project,4 it is clear that the editor pays equal attention to accuracy and readability. But in the final analysis, he prefers to tailor language to readers to have more effective communication with the target audience. When making linguistic corrections, the editor changes factual errors or significant mistranslations.The prerequisite for such corrections is that the pursuit of the fluency of the linguistic forms should not change the meaning, or cause contradiction.

Perceptions of translating sentences and paragraphs At the levels of sentences and paragraphs, the most frequent translation strategies used by students are semantic translation, addition and modulation. Students prefer to transmit the semantic meaning of every single word of a sentence in order not to omit any information. They, in many cases, follow carefully with the writing styles and syntax of English news.Therefore, their forms of the target language look more complex and detailed, tending to focus on the accuracy of the reproduction of the meaning of the source text (Munday, 2016, p. 72). One possible risk of such preferences is that the connections between sentences or paragraphs are overlooked. The following short section is such an example: ST: A person involved in the discussions said Yahoo Japan, an internet portal affiliated with SoftBank Group Corp., and Line Corp. were likely to reach a merger deal this month. The companies confirmed merger talks and said nothing has been decided. TT: 一位参与讨论的人士称，作为隶属于软银集团的门户网站，雅虎 将在本月和Line达成合并协议。两家公司证实了合并商谈一事，但表 示尚未做出任何决定。

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The first sentence of this paragraph is long and complicated. It contains several layers of information. The assigned student group who translate this sentence into Chinese make two small adjustments, and mostly follow the original structural relations. One change is to move the parenthesis “an internet portal affiliated with SoftBank Group Corp.” to the front of Yahoo Japan, which is more in line with the Chinese writing conventions. The other adjustment goes to “The companies”. Students decide to make the phrase “The companies” more explicit and then translate it into “The two companies”, referring clearly to Yahoo Japan and Line Corp. However, a piece of important information is not identified by students, that is “a person involved in the discussions”. In this news report, “the discussions” are not general activities in which people talk about something, but specifically refer to the business negotiations between Yahoo Japan and Line Corp regarding their plan of merger. Considering coherence and readability in the TT, “the discussions” in the English text are then advised to be rendered explicit in Chinese: “据参与合并谈判的人士透露” (back translation: a person involved in the discussions of a merger plan). Another frequently used strategy by students is addition or amplification. The addition includes typically principles, ideas or background information. In preparing business news, market analysts or managers are often interviewed to express their opinions or commentaries. Both their views and their affiliations are included as quotes in the news stories. Students report that they pay special attention to these affiliations, trying to add a brief introduction to each one. For example, in translating the quote: “… said Ryotaro Sawada, an analyst at Ace Research Institute”, students add a short phrase to explain the business scope of Ace Research Institute. The same is true with “IHS Markit”. Students add “a consultancy firm” in Chinese to further explain the profile of this organization. Due to the differences of structural means and journalistic norms between the ST and the TT, some students also demonstrate that they sometimes use the method of modulation to change “the semantics and point of view of the ST” (Munday, 2016, p. 90). The following paragraph is an example of modulation: AIA was founded in Shanghai in 1919 by an adventurer called Cornelius Vander Starr, and went on to be folded into AIG, a huge, rogue American financial conglomerate that got bailed out in 2008. AIA was spun out in 2010. In rendering this paragraph, students make small changes of the ST, restructuring and recomposing this paragraph in the TT according to the timeline (underlined parts “in 1919”, “in 2008”, “in 2010”). They believe that stressing the timeline can show the time and order in which these events have happened. It provides target readers with a clearer picture of the development of AIA, which is also more explicit in connecting previous and later parts. In contrast, the editor prefers to use the strategies of reformulation, abridgement and synthesis. Unlike students, the editor’s translating process has not been affected too much by the syntactic structures of the ST. If the potential target text seemed

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to be awkward, clumsy, or illogical, the editor would adjust or recontextualize the ST sentences to the target text norms. For example: ST: TOYOTA, Unilever, Barclays, Amazon, Tata. (1) There are 71,000 listed firms in the world (2), but only a few hundred that many people know at least a little about (3). TT: 全球有71000家上市公司 (2)，为人所知的却只有几百家 (3)，如丰 田、联合利华、巴克莱、亚马逊和塔塔。(1) The underlined sentence in the ST illustrates five well-​established examples of listed firms worldwide, but the logical relation between this part and the other two sentences is not clearly presented. In rendering this into Chinese, the editor re-​organizes the sequence of this paragraph and uses “for example” to clarify the relationship between TOYOTA and, for example, Unilever, Barclays, Amazon and Tata and the 71,000 listed firms. As reported in a previous research project, “highlighting the key points while removing secondary information” is another preferred strategy used by the editor (Hu, 2018, p. 182).This strategy is not only evident in deleting extra or unnecessary explanations to achieve conciseness, but is also frequently used to allow the target readers to relate what they have already known to the knowledge presented in the text. The translation of the following paragraph is a case in point: Vanke Service Co., Ltd., a leading provider of property management services in China, has launched a standalone sub-​brand for its commercial property management services, as part of the company’s growing effort to make headway in this booming sector in China. This paragraph is the second part of a news article reporting the new business strategy initiated by Vanke Service. As the profile of Vanke Service and its launch of a new sub-​brand have just been mentioned in the news lead (the first paragraph), the editor then deletes these descriptions to avoid repetition and to adjust the English item to a proper length. Further, as many Chinese readers know that Vanke Service is a leader in China’s property management industry, there is no need to repeat this information in the target text. This selective translation method allows the editor to obliterate the information he deems irrelevant or not important. Moreover, the selected part may accentuate target readers’ concern over the recent efforts and achievements made by Vanke Services (Cheng, 2011, p. 225). Some business news reports may include the comparison of the economic performances between different countries or conduct competitors’ analysis between companies. For example, in a news article issued by The Guardian covering Britain’s economic activity, the reporter wrote about the estimates for GDP in 2017 for four comparable countries, including the UK, US, France, and Spain. In addition to countries and figures, the reporter also made comments on each country’s economic growth prospect. In rendering this type of information, the primary strategy

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adopted by the editor is synthesis and re-​composition. To be more specific, he splits the countries into different groups with their estimated GDPs and the economic growth rates and re-​organizes them in Chinese without altering the meaning of the ST. The aim of translating in this way is to make this comparison clearly and logically presented, and to produce “suitable” and “acceptable” target texts to meet the target readers’ expectations (Chen, 2009, p. 203).

Perceptions of the translation quality From the perspective of accuracy, students’ target texts demonstrate good comprehension of the source text. They can correctly transfer the information of the source text in most cases, paying particular attention to words and grammatical units. However, their translations contain occasional distortions in rendering the implicit source text meaning due to their lack of the subject matter or technical terminologies. In terms of translation quality, students’ translations can be deemed acceptable and usable by target readers, although some editing and revision would be required to bring them to a more professional standard. It can be identified from students’ translating process that they are striking a balance between using translation to generate a product and as a language learning tool. As nearly all the translation learners have been, and still are, language learners, it is not surprising they focus on the details and language points (such as words, terminologies) when they are translating. The target texts produced or revised by the editor provide evidence of in-​ depth familiarity with the sense and materials of the source texts. As evident in the students’ reflective learning reports, they all thought highly of the revisions made by the editor. They believe that his work could be regarded as excellent by the target newsreaders, reading like an original target-​language text. More importantly, there is always a logical thread running through the text. The editor, following the guidelines of his news agency and journalistic translation norms, goes beyond word-​for-​word replacements between the ST and the TT but is concerned more about target audiences’ responses as well as the target news organization’s conventions (Chen, 2009;Valdeón, 2014). In this sense, he adopts the essence of communicative translation, using the strategies of translating, adapting, rewriting and editing (Tsai, 2009).

Individual differences in translating business news The previous findings have summarized that the individuals in similar groups may have shared patterns when translating business news. However, beyond these standard features, there will be significant differences between people, not only their age or learning levels (Scrivener, 2011). Learners’ or professionals’ perceptions of translation and corresponding strategies are, in fact, shaped mainly by their previous learning or work experience (Ashwin and Trigwell, 2012). Therefore, this section is designed to find out what the individual differences are when translating

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business news, and to what extent can these differences affect translators’ decision-​ making processes.

The relationship between prior learning/​work experience and translation strategy choice In reviewing all the participants’ answers towards their learning, translation and professional experience as well as re-​checking their translated texts, this study shows that both students and the trans-​editor have their translation habits or routines when translating business news. These habits can consciously or unconsciously influence translators’ strategy choices. One student (JZ) reports that she has practised translating short literary texts in other modules before learning business news translation. When translating literary texts, she seeks to communicate the same impression in the TT from what she received from the ST and tries to achieve the aesthetic effect in translation. Such translation strategies for literary texts have also been transferred in the business news, although she has an awareness of different routines in translating news. One prominent example is that she tries very hard to find and use elegant Chinese words to represent the English equivalents. This method, sometimes, causes the problem of “over translation”. JZ’s fellow student MF has echoed her strategy. MF claims that her prior learning experience has had an impact on translating business news: I am good at translating poetries in my class. I also like translating prose because I can feel the sense of creation. My frequently used translation strategies for these two texts include transposition, modulation, reformulation, addition, and omission. I think these methods are appropriate for nearly all the documents, including business news. One tiny difference is that business news requires attention to language style and terminology translation. (MF) As observed from her translation assignments, she is skilful in translating long and complex English sentences into Chinese and is good at using connectors to make renditions logical. Her translated news is also concise and neat. Her performance demonstrates that the practice of translating poetries and proses has a positive impact on other text types. Another student (YJ), who had no direct translation experience before enrolling the module of business news translation, believes that considering readers’ response is the most important factor for translation: In terms of financial news translation, the prerequisite is to convey the information precisely. Once this has been achieved, I will consider readership: let

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readers comprehend the news and be willing to read the stories. Therefore, I try to produce readable financial news, naturally or [even] unconsciously. (YJ) Although this student has not received enough training for translation skills, his understanding of translation provides justifications for his choices of strategy. It is apparent in this research that personal experience also influences translation choices for professional translators. The trans-​editor (XW) who participated in our study prefers to “make use of the theory of communication and the audience-​based purpose theory in news trans-​editing, while translating is used as a tool to collect necessary materials”. According to him, translating business news requires much more know-​how of economics and finance than translation strategies and skills. These preferences may be strongly related to his career path: first as a professional translator in the language services industry, then an in-​house financial translator in a state-​owned bank and now an expert in charge of business news reporting. Such work experience enables him to consider much about the readers’ responses and the translation quality. Furthermore, as he explains in the interview, his accumulation of knowledge in the financial sector makes him proficient in translating or writing a stock-​market analysis and corporate news. Therefore, it is not surprising to find out that, in many cases, his revised versions of students’ translations “can be directly used as news reports from a foreign source” (Hu, 2018, p. 183).

The role of subject area knowledge in the translating process From the interview answers given by ten student participants, it is clear that subject area knowledge plays a crucial role in producing specialized news translation. 80% (8 out of 10) of the participants argue that the most challenging parts of translating business news are terminologies and subject area knowledge: There are many terminologies in business news. In some cases, there might be slight differences between languages, but for us students, we find it challenging to identify these differences.When we are translating, we may use the term in an opposite way or in a way that was not intended. (CC) Some words or terminologies have different meanings in the area of business, finance and economics. Without checking dictionaries or prior knowledge, it would be prevalent for us to mistranslate these words. For example, “float” has a meaning of “starting selling shares in a business or company for the first time”, which is quite specific in the chosen text. But many of us mistranslated this word into “fluctuate”, referring to the change of a company’s share prices. (ZS)

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Regarding financial news, the translator may face the problem of lacking background information, and this may cause many problems and difficulties in the translating process. (XF) They also agree that the sufficient acquisition of knowledge in business, finance and economics will help them make better choices in the translating process, improve translation accuracy and increase professionalism: Mastering financial knowledge will be helpful to my choices of vocabularies and fixed expressions, which will then make my translations professionally expressed. (ZL) I have been learning economics, finance, and accounting modules for my Minor Degree Course of Finance. My knowledge of the broad area of business is beneficial for my translation of business news. More specifically, as I’ve learned the meanings of specific terminologies, complicated concepts and theoretical financial models, I have a good understanding of the source texts. I can then find appropriate approaches to deal with the translating process. (YY) It is worth noting that student participants who had a better understanding of the specialized areas of business and finance perform more professional in their translations. One student participant (AD), who has a BSc in Finance, is very proficient in using the idiomatic expressions of terminologies and business concepts, in particular with the topic of Merger & Acquisition, as well as stories regarding companies’ fiscal reports. She reports that she is good at translating economics-​related texts. An important reason is that she is familiar with those technical terms and concepts, so she is not afraid of translating these texts psychologically. Another student shares similar feelings and presents his translating strategies in dealing with business news: I like translating business texts, and I am good at explaining them compared with other text types. The reasons are mainly twofold. First, I have many opportunities to learn knowledge of business and finance in my university, not only from my modules and minor degree course but also from my daily accumulation. In this case, I am very familiar with topics covered in business news. Second, unlike literary texts, translating business news are more rule-​ based. I can formulate my system of translation strategies. My strategies of translating business news include the following steps: 1) I will read carefully about the source text and acquire the background information to achieve a deep understanding of the content; 2) I will try to translate the text in a

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natural way. When it comes to technical terms beyond my knowledge, I will refer to dictionaries, encyclopaedia platforms, the official websites, or other online resources to search for explanations and relevant expressions; 3) After completing the basic semantic translation, I will then adjust the sentence structure, and strive to express in line with the target readers’ reading habits; 4) I will delete the repetitions [here refers to trans-​editing] to make target texts more concise, clear and readable. (ZH) ZH’s case demonstrates that subject area knowledge does not hinder his translation choices; instead, his keen interest and understanding of relevant topics provide illuminating resources for the whole translating process and play a decisive role in making decisions. Given his translation assignments, the best-​performed topics are economic policy and economic trends. It is also clear that he has his own philosophy in translating and problem-​solving, such as the order of translational actions and how to deal with unforeseen issues. The editor, from the perspective of an industry insider, also stresses the importance of subject area knowledge in translating business news: As a part of the most dynamic sector, financial news could somehow be seen as a branch of finance other than news reporting merely.Then, the financial news reporter is not just a person who finds a way to transfer the information about the financial news to audience but has to offer much more know-​how of the finance, especially for the those who are participating in the international financing and trade.Then, it will be a better way to provide more background and more in-​depth information in addition to what happens around. Also, economic theories could be seen and even applied to the financial sector.The journalists have to be a kind of expert in the business field. They should be insightful to this field as they can dig out anything valuable for their audience. (XW) Such understanding is also reflected in the editor’s daily work. As he mentions, he has spent much time learning the knowledge of fintech, banking and the stock market. This knowledge was of great importance when his career shifted from translation services to journalism. As shown in his revisions on students’ translation work, it is evident that he pays much attention to the appropriateness to the style of a newspaper, as well as to the accurate and professional use of terminologies in specific subject areas.

The impact of practical translation experience on the choices of translation strategy Another interesting finding is that student participants who have previous experience in translation or journalism are more professional than their peers. One student

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(ZL) has systematically studied translation-​related modules (both theoretical and practical) and has worked as an intern in a well-​established news agency before learning business news translation. Her learning and work placement experiences have equipped her with a better understanding of the translation workflow. She has also developed the competence of summarizing theories and strategies from previous practice and then to apply them in current and future assignments: My previous translation experience and the knowledge of translation theories help me do an excellent job of pre-​translating preparation, such as analysing the translation purpose and the features of the source text. In this way, the following translating process could be smoother. Additionally, the specific translation strategies and techniques learned in the translation theory module can be directly used in my practice of translating business news. For example, if my drafted translation cannot give a complete transcript of the ideas of the original text, I would recall some translation strategies and then use them to revise my work. Finally, these learning outcomes have increased my speed of translating news and improved my translation quality. (ZL) Another student participant (YY) once worked as a team leader for the university’s website translation projects before taking up the module of business translation. She believes these activities have provided her with a solid foundation for translating other texts and prepared her to become a more effective junior translator: The project-​ based translation activities for the university’s website have provided me with learning and practice opportunities to understand the diversity and complexity of translation activities and to master the necessary skills for doing the translation. The steps involved in the translation projects, such as allocating tasks, translating, editing, and reflecting, can also be transferrable to the process of translating business news. I can quickly get familiar with such work routines. Besides, the previous translation practice has raised my awareness of translation strategies with insight into translation problems and appropriate solutions. This has influenced my way of learning business news translation consciously and actively. (YY) Based on her professional translation practice,YY distinguishes herself as a competent student translator either in translating texts and in coordinating group projects. The quality of her translation assignments is always at the top level among her fellow students. As regards the editor, his 15-​year experience of working in the translation and journalism industries has empowered him with a comprehensive understanding

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of the professional characteristics and quality standards in the related industries, including key specialist areas such as business journalism. He is also proficient in applying these principles and techniques to the working environments of translators, trans-​editors and journalists. Influenced by his practical experience, his approaches to translation or trans-​editing focus on purpose-​driven and response-​based strategies, as well as the importance of readership, financial knowledge and functional adequacy (Hu, 2018). To sum up, this section has mapped the participants’ different individual translation strategies. It is interesting to find that even with learners from the same university, their approaches vary. The reasons for these differences are manyfold. First, participants’ academic backgrounds influence their perceptions of financial news translation to some extent, while their previous learning experience in other modules has helped them develop some routines that are difficult to change (see participants JZ and MF). Second, learning motivations can considerably influence participants’ translation attitudes and, consequently, translation outcomes. For example, both participant ZH and the editor are highly motivated learners in the subject knowledge of business and finance. Due to their interests and willingness, it is not difficult for them to make reasoned translation decisions. Third, mastering targeted subject knowledge is proved to be effective in financial news translation. Those who had prior experience in business, economics or finance have a better idea of the conventions of a translated financial news article and are more proficient in proposing terminologies as translation solutions. Last but not least, previous professional translation experience plays a decisive role in translating business news. For example, both participants ZL and YY had relevant experience in translation projects; they are, therefore, developing a stronger awareness of the macro translation strategy than their peers.

Conclusion Findings drawn from this empirical study highlight the translation strategies adopted by novice and expert translators when translating business news. Both groups have their shared patterns in translation problem-​solving activities. For instance, students use an ST-​oriented strategy, seeking to transfer the whole ideas and details of the original texts into the target ones. The editor, on the contrary, uses communicative translation strategies, taking account of the news agency’s guidelines, readers’ responses and translation quality. Even though each group has its preferred translation strategies, it is evident in this research that individual differences in uptake of translation strategies do exist and do matter. Possible factors influencing these differences include academic backgrounds, translation routines, previous learning or working styles, learning motivations, subject area knowledge and professional translation practice. This study contributes to the literature and practice in translator training. Students’ frequently used translation strategies and their translation products can

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provide trainers with a clear picture of their strength and weakness. The editor’s trans-​editing principles are essential references for both trainers and learners to understand the journalistic translation norms required in professional settings.These acknowledgements will help trainers choose more appropriate teaching materials to balance course plans, professional conventions and learners’ needs. Moreover, the individual differences analysed in this research and the possible reasons for these differences may shed some light on translation teaching. It is identified from the present investigation that the traditional assumption of working with the class “as a whole” may be unsuitable for some members of the course.Therefore, teachers may need to extend or modify the approach of many learners and to take individuals into account (Fry, Ketteridge & Marshall, 2003, pp. 37–​38). Due to the particular context and the limited scope of the present study, more research will be needed. For example, corpus-​driven studies on the translation products produced by both students and professionals can be adopted to identify more typical features of their translation strategies. Further, the analysing process of English–​Chinese translation strategies can also apply to other language pairs to provide findings in a broader social context.

Acknowledgements This research was supported by Beijing Research Centre of Intercultural Communication [grant number WHCB19A001].

Notes 1 The university that this study was set in is a national key university specialized in the areas of finance and economics. The module “Translation of Business News” is a compulsory one for both undergraduates and postgraduates who study translation. 2 The module “Translation of Business News” is delivered through university-​industry collaboration. The editor actively participates in preparing the teaching materials and quality assuring students’ translation assignments. More details of this module can be found in the article “Balancing University Teaching and Media Industry Needs: A Case Study of Teaching Finance and Economics Translation” (Hu, 2019). 3 The revised Chinese version can be presented in this way: 这两家企业（在财 务实力评估中）通过了重要的关联性测试。Back translation: These two companies pass the critical tests of relevance regarding their financial positions. 4 The editor shared his revision principles to the author in a research project regarding the evaluation criteria in news translation. His criteria include: “(1) the translation should offer a complete rendering of the words, expressions and ideas of the source text; (2) the translation should be entirely appropriate to the style of a newspaper, and the terminologies in certain subject areas should be rendered accurately and professionally; (3) the translation should have logical links between paragraphs; (4) the style and manner of the writing should be localised within target culture conventions; (5) the translation should read like an original piece written in the target language; (6) the translation should maintain optimal relevance with the target text readers when necessary” (Hu, 2018, p. 180).

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Appendix 7.1 TABLE 7.2 The texts that are selected as data for analysis

No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Title

Area

Vanke Service Launches Sub-​brand for Commercial Property Management Services Starbucks Laser-​Focused on China Market Amazon Raises Minimum Wage for US and UK employees Hilton Unveils Sale for 25% Stake to China’s HNA Microsoft to Buy LinkedIn for $26 Billion Yahoo-​Line Merger Plan Raises Hopes for Japanese ‘Super App’ Inflation Puts the Brakes on Britain’s Economic Activity China’s Exports and Imports both Grow More than Expected in October Metamorphosis: Two Asian Financial Giants Deserve to Be Better Known The Chinese Yuan is Going Global

Business & Management Business & Management Business & Management Merger & Acquisition Merger & Acquisition Merger & Acquisition Economics Economics Financial Markets Trade

Appendix 7.2 Sample interview questions 1.

Please can you share what translation experiences you have had before translating financial news? 2. Based on your previous translation experience, can you elaborate on your strength/​area of expertise as a translator? 3. What translation strategies do you often use when translating texts as mentioned above? 4. Did you have any financial or journalism knowledge before translating financial news? 5. What translation strategies do you use in translating financial news? 6. What are the most difficult parts when you are translating financial news? Please list several examples. 7. Do you think your prior experience (translation and or knowledge) has an impact on your choice of translation strategies in translating financial news? If yes, can you share a few examples?

References Abdel Latif, M. M. M. (2018). Towards a typology of pedagogy-​oriented translation and interpreting research. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 12(3), 322–​345. AI-​Shehari, K. (2017). Collaborative learning:Trainee translators tasked to translate Wikipedia entries from English into Arabic. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 11(4), 357–​372. Anderman, G. & Roger, M. (2000). Translator training between academic and profession: A Europe perspective. In C. Schäffner & B. Adab (Eds). Developing translation competence (pp. 63–​73). Amsterdam/​Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Ashwin, P. & Trigwell, K. (2012). Evoked prior experience in first-​year university student learning. Higher Education Research & Development, 31(4), 449–​463. Chen,Y. (2009). Quotation as a key to the investigation of ideological manipulation in news trans-​editing in the Taiwanese press. TTR, 22(2), 203–​238. Cheng, W. (2011). Innovative subjectivity of transeditors in intercultural communication –​a case study of the translated news of the 2008 Olympic Games. Language and Intercultural Communication. 11(3), 215–​231. Chouc, F., & Conde, J. M. (2016). Enhancing the learning experience of interpreting students outside the classroom. A study of the benefits of situated learning at the Scottish Parliament, The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 10(1), 92-​106. Fry, H., Ketteridge, S. & Marshall, S. (2003). Understanding student learning. In H. Fry, S. Ketteridge & S. Marshall (Eds.) A handbook for teaching & learning in higher education (2nd edition). GB and US: Kogan Page Limited. González Davies, M. (2004). Multiple voices in the translation classroom. Amsterdam/​ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. González Davies, M. (2005). Minding the process, improving the product: Alternatives to traditional translator training. In M.Tennent (Ed.) Training for New Millennium (pp. 67-​82). Amsterdam/​Philadelphia: John Benjamins. González, M. G., & Díaz, M. T. V. (2015). Guided inquiry and project-​based learning in the field of specialised translation: a description of two learning experiences, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, 23(1), 107–​123. Holland, R. (2013). News translation. In C. Millán & F. Bartina (Eds). The Routledge handbook of translation studies (pp. 332–​346). London and New York: Routledge. Hu, W. (2018). Revisiting translation quality assurance: A comparative analysis of evaluation principles between student translators and the professional trans-​editor. World Journal of Education, 8(6), 176–​186. Hu, W. (2019). Balancing university teaching and media industry needs: A case study of teaching business news translation. International Journal of Higher Education, 8(3), 247–​256. Huertas Barros, E. (2011). Collaborative learning in the translation classroom: Preliminary survey results. The Journal of Specialised Translation, 16, 42–​60. Kelly, D. (2005). A handbook for translator trainers. Manchester: St Jerome. Kiraly, D. (1995). Pathways to translation: Pedagogy and process. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press. Kiraly, D. (2005). Project-​ based learning: A case for situated translation. Meta, 50(4), 1098–​1111. Kiraly, D. (2012). Growing a project-​based translation pedagogy: A fractal perspective. Meta, 57(1), 82–​95. Kiraly, D. (2014). A social constructivist approach to translator education: Empowerment from theory to practice. London and New York: Routledge. Li, D., Zhang, C. & He, Y. (2015). Project-​based learning in teaching translation: Students’ perceptions. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 9(1). 1–​19. Munday, J. (2016). Introducing translation studies: Theories and applications (4th Edition). London and New York: Routledge. Pan, J. (2016). Linking classroom exercises to real-​life practice: A case of situated simultaneous interpreting learning. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 10(1), 107–​132. Qin, B. & Zhang, M. (2018). Reframing translated news for target readers: A narrative account of news translation in Snowden’s discourses. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, 26(2), 261–​276. Scrivener, J. (2011). Learning teaching:The essential guide to English language teaching (3rd Edition). London: Macmillan Education.

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Tsai, C. (2009). Inside the television newsroom: An insider’s view of international news translation in Taiwan. Language and Intercultural Communication, 5(2), 145–​153. Valdeón, R. A. (2014). From adaptation to appropriation: Framing the world through news translation. Linguaculture, 1(1), 51–​62. Wadensjö, C. (2014). Perspectives on role-​ play: Analysis, training and assessments. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 8(4), 437–​451. Wang, W. & Li, D. (2015). How student and professional interpreters in Chinese-​English consecutive interpreting differ in their choice of interpreting strategies. The Chinese Translators’ Journal, 6, 41–​47.

8 A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH TO ACQUIRING INTERNATIONAL NEWS TRANSLATION NORMS IN CHINA Empowering students in a restrained environment Emma Huizhen Du

Introduction The past two decades have seen increasing research on censorship and translation, thanks to easier access to archives (Merkle, 2018). The growing field has brought changes to our understanding of censorship from a simplistic view to one that is more complex and nuanced. For instance, the “new censorship” model, which includes “institutional, interventionist and regulatory” types, regards censorship as “inevitable”, regardless of the socio-​political context (Müller, 2004, p. 1). Despite its pervasiveness, censorship is almost taboo as a subject in China. My students appeared nervous when I addressed this issue. Since professional news translators in China inevitably come across and live with censorship and ideology in their daily practices, it would be irresponsible not to prepare my students for the possible constraints in their future journalistic jobs. How can I make my students aware of the restraining norms and come up with coping strategies in news translation without discouraging them? I struggled with this ethical dilemma until I read Don Kiraly’s monograph, A Social Constructivist Approach to Translator Education, subtitled “Empowerment from Theory to Practice”. Guided by Kiraly’s social constructivist approach, this study is an action research of my attempt to resolve the ethical dilemma encountered in teaching ideology and censorship. It aims to implement an explorative pedagogic design for an effective, empowering translation class to deal with the almost taboo subject of self-​ censorship in news translation norms. Since Kiraly opposes the “rigid, dogmatic reading of constructivism”, I follow his advice to focus more on empowerment, which will be “a cornerstone of the method, guiding approach and design as well as procedures” (Kiraly, 2000, p. 19).

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This chapter introduces international news translation norms in China; then explains the framework of social constructivist approach-​design-​procedures and the methodology of action research. Later, it presents findings and discusses their implications for future teaching.

International news translation norms in China Censorship in China is seldom openly discussed and rarely researched. Limited studies on censorship and translation reveal that “the norm of faithfulness is overruled by ideological norms and the trend of censorship show the loosening of the control over sex description while the political and ideological issues still remain sensitive” (Wong, 2017, p. 223). Relevant laws and regulations serve as rules for censorship. A list of 15 sensitive topics covers major areas of censorship including “politics, ideology, culture, religion, ethnicity, national security, national interests, morality, etc” (Ibid, pp. 224–​227). Translation norms can dictate choices made by translators (Toury, 1995). “When it comes to the role played by censorship in Chinese translation, norms will inform censors what to delete or to alter in a manuscript to be published in Mainland China” (Wong, 2017, p. 239). Censorship determines that translators must comply with the target norms at the cost of source norms. “In this way, adequacy has to give way to acceptability (which is politically conditioned), and a large amount of changes such as omissions are thus made accordingly” (Ibid, p. 239). Translation norms in international news practice bear similarities to other media practices but are less visible to outsiders. They are vaguely referred to as “news discipline” or “discipline” by practitioners. For example, a veteran Chinese journalist for China Central Television, Zhang Sen, wrote The Editor’s Handbook on International TV News. He emphasized that journalists must comply as strictly with discipline as if they were in the army and criticized those who ignore the discipline. All governments control international communication. Some fresh journalism graduates find it hard to understand this reality. Besides, they often judge Chinese journalism based on their idealized and unrealistic imagination. Therefore they may become disappointed, angry and grumpy. This is the consequence of Chinese journalism education disjointed from China’s journalistic practices. (Zhang, 2006, pp. 3–​4) Zhang’s criticism sent a warning to educators responsible for teaching students about professional journalistic norms, which can save them from disillusionment caused by ignorance. Besides ideological constraints, international news translation in China is in a state of flux, diminishing in the local press but flourishing on social media. International news often becomes the first casualty when the press suffers from

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economic downturn and tightened ideological control. Newspapers have become slimmer with fewer pages and space, especially for international news.When international news pages are reduced from 3 pages to 1 or half a page per day, there is far less demand for news translation. Many local newspapers abolished their international news departments. Guangzhou Daily’s international news department formerly had 13 staff members –​two senior editors, six editors and five news translators. Now, the whole department is gone. Only two editors work on the international desk filling one page daily. This single page may be reduced to half a page or used for other new or advertising (Journalist G, personal communication, 1 September 2018). Because of space and staff shortages, local newspapers reprint international news distributed by State News Agency Xinhua. In-​house news translation is thus disappearing. It is considered safer just to reprint Xinhua’s international news. Few journalists take the initiative to translate international news themselves. In contrast to the diminishing news translation in the local press, the flourishing of we-​media on social media platforms has led to an increasing demand for, and big expansion in, international news translation, which is rarely hard political news but soft news in specialized fields. Social media differ from legacy media in gatekeeping –​a mixed blessing for new entrants to the profession. If they are not made aware of the changing demands and norms of news translation, they will be disoriented, ill-​prepared and even frustrated. In the first two years of teaching International News Trans-​editing, I adopted a case study of self-​censorship. My former journalism student, Mayflower, rose to fame overnight after exposing the prevalent but unspoken self-​censorship in translating foreign news for Chinese readers. His article, “The Truth: Is The Paper’s News Translation Credible?” went viral online. He accused the new media outlet, The Paper, of misleading readers through “selective translation” that abruptly distorted the meaning of the original cover story, “What China Wants”, published by The Economist. Mayflower acted like the child who cried out in The Emperor’s New Clothes. His truth-​telling article was widely read and commented upon. He was interviewed by a Foreign Policy reporter who wrote Found in Translation (Allen-​ Ebrahimian, 2014). An August 25 post on the popular mobile chat platform WeChat by a public account called Mayflower Report demonstrates how translators neatly excised negative conclusions and ominous predictions about trouble China may be creating for itself in the future. Mayflower’s exposure of selective translation as a form of self-​censorship triggered heated online debate on media and translation ethics, freedom of speech, international news reporting, China’s rise and its attitude toward foreign dissent. Though Mayflower (2014) predicted such selective translation practice could not be changed fundamentally in the media, he argued that “making more people

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aware of such practice can benefit our society”. I shared his view and presented his case to my students, highlighting self-​censorship in news translation. I thought the case was instructive in alerting my students to news translation norms until I read Kiraly’s depiction of “transmissionist” teaching techniques of transferring knowledge from the teacher who knows more to the students who know less. I realized my previous approach was a kind of “reductionism”, reducing complex news translation norms into “simple facts and rules”. I presented the case without offering students the opportunity “to experience the messy, complicated real world for themselves” (Kiraly, 2015, p. 13). I did not empower my students with viable solutions. They fell silent each time I presented the case. Kiraly’s empowerment via a social constructivist approach struck a chord with me because my research interest has been on the “tension between the constraints of structure and the exercise of agency” (to borrow Polumbaum’s term). My PhD research project, The Changing Strategies of Media Control in China’s Reform Era (Du, 2010), corroborated Judy Polumbaum’s view that “in the Chinese system, with its overt political controls, individual agency often plays a crucial role in surmounting limits on news coverage” (2010, p. 569).

The social-​constructivist approach Translation pedagogy as “a relatively new sub-​ field” has undergone significant changes in the recent decades, with paradigm shifts from a transmissionist teacher-​ centred approach to a transformationist student-​ centred approach (Li, 2018; Piotrowska & Tyupa, 2014). Such pedagogical change resulted from changing views of learning, from “knowledge acquisition” to “participation in a social community” and “knowledge creation” (Paavola, Lipponen & Hakkarainen, 2004). The social constructivist approach advocated by Kiraly (2000) has been revolutionary. It redefined the roles of teachers and students and provided a new perspective on translation education’s objectives, teaching methods and assessment. Kiraly regards the social constructivist approach as “the empowerment method” because it promotes “teaching methods that foster responsibility, independence, and the ability to see alternatives” (Kiraly, 2000, p. 33).

The key principles To elucidate the underpinnings of his social constructivist approach, Kiraly devoted a chapter in his book to nine key principles: multiple realities and multiple perspectives, collaborative/​cooperative learning, appropriation, the zone of proximal development, situating learning, viability, scaffolding, socio-​cognitive apprenticeship and the acquisition of translator competence (2000, pp. 34–​50). These principles are the infusion of Kiraly’s personal understanding of the relevant literature and his teaching experience. Among those social constructivist principles, Kiraly highlighted six he applied in his own teaching as shown in Table 8.1.

152  Emma Huizhen Du TABLE 8.1 The key principles of social constructivist approach

Social constructivist principles

Application in translator education

1. To situate learning in the real world

To create authentic learning situation; To use a realistic translation assignment; To secure real translation projects for students. 2. To be imbued with multiple To encourage students to develop a set of viable perspectives translations; To have students work in groups so different perspectives emerge; To select the most viable one after weighing the advantages and disadvantages of different perspectives. 3. Truly collaborative work Students share and exchange ideas on translation problems and solutions, appropriate existing norms and conventions or come up with new ones; Students work cooperatively with each other to foster interdependence and share responsibility and individual accountability. 4. To construct multiple and Not only must students be aware of societal norms, but viable solutions to problems they must also know how and when to break them that emerge naturally from when necessary; authentic projects To develop decision-​making capability through peer work; Translation is always a give-​and-​take process, something is always lost and also gained. 5. To scaffold learning Provide substantial support for knowledge construction early in the course and gradually relinquish control over the learning environment to the students themselves. 6. Socio-​cognitive The teacher acts as the facilitator of learning, modelling apprenticeship workshop expert translation processes for the students, trying to raise their awareness of potential translation problems, norms and conventions from the perspective of the community of professional translators. Source: Kiraly (2000, pp. 65–​74).

A socio-​constructivist class design and procedures Kiraly’s three-​element educational framework consists three elements: approach, design and procedures. An approach serves as the foundation for the principles of learning and teaching. “Design is the link between an approach and pedagogical procedures” (2000, p. 5). Design is the planning stage, determining how best to match teaching philosophy with objectives, syllabus, learning tasks and teaching activities, and roles of teachers and learners.The social constructive approach favours “student-​ centred, collaborative, project-​ based, and process-​ oriented teaching

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methods”, which reflect Kiraly’s design of classroom interaction (2000). Procedures are the implementation stage of a theoretical approach. Kiraly adopts the workshop as the fundamental procedural format for his courses, creating “a venue where authentic practice can occur among peers learning with (not from) a facilitator to construct their own understandings of social phenomena” (2000, p. 63). The workshop format is applicable in a translation program. Kiraly encouraged translation educators to “seek out links and inspiration from parallel fields and strands of research” (2000, p. 63). I borrowed the concept and practice of reflection from journalism education where being a reflective practitioner has become an important goal. The media scholar Mark Deuze wrote, If one would accept the proposition that both the ability to understand and explain one’s environment (theory) as well as successfully coping with that environment (practice) can be helped, improved and inspired through (critical) reflection, one needs to examine how to educate students to be reflective. (2000, p. 146) Like Kiraly, Deuze favours a project-​and student-​ based educational program because it is “more effective than a top-​down product-​based education” and reflection cannot be taught by direct knowledge transfer (Deuze, 2000, pp. 146–​147). The constructivist approach to assessment differs from the traditional “translation quality assessment” in that the former refers to “the process of gathering information about the quality of students’ emerging competence”, while the latter involves the evaluation of the product –​whether students produce good translation (Kiraly, 2000, pp. 140–​141). The assessment procedures for gathering information about students’ constructivist learning process are: 1) demonstrably based on extensive observation of students’ performance; 2) representative of the conditions and standards under which graduates can expect to work professionally; and 3) equitable and collaborative, with students taking an empowered role in the assessment process. (Kiraly, 2000, p. 141)

Methodology Action research Action research is a practice-​based research methodology, “the study of a social situation with a view to improving the quality of action within it” (Elliott, 1991, p. 69). A well-​planned and executed action research can shed light on the relationship between teachers’ actions and the result of student learning. Action research comprises phases of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting (Carr and Kemmis, 1986). It is an iterative, cyclical process of action and reflection. I play the dual roles

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of teacher and researcher, investigating my teaching with a goal of resolving my ethical dilemma of teaching censorship as part of news translation norms in the restrictive environment

The teacher–​researcher, students and the course I am a bicultural and interdisciplinary teacher. I was born and raised in China with a BA degree in English language and culture from a Chinese university. I lived in the UK for over five years for my MA and PhD education in communication studies. I started my career as an English teacher and then transformed to a teacher of EMI (English as the medium of instruction) courses in journalism and communication. In 2015, I began teaching International News Trans-​editing. I have had jobs of translation and interpretation. In 2002, I was a news translation apprentice for my American colleague, Arnold Zeiltin, who worked for the AP for over three decades. We helped launch a five-​minute English news program on Radio Guangdong, where I worked as part-​time news translation editor for three years. Since 2015, I have been part-​time associate editor for a bi-​monthly journalism trade journal, supervising students in translating articles on global media trends. My course, International News Trans-​editing, is offered to master’s degree students at the School of Interpreting and Translation Studies, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. The university has a memorandum of understanding with the United Nations for cooperation in training language professionals for competitive examinations. It is a member of The International Federation of Translators (FIT). The school, established in 2005, was among the first in China to offer a professional master’s degree of translation and interpretation studies (MTI). It attracts applicants nationwide. The International News Trans-​editing course used to be compulsory for media translation students with annual enrolment of 10–​20. However, a record 54 students enrolled in September, 2020, when the school allowed compulsory courses for the translation program to be elective for other students. Therefore, besides 10 media translation students, the course has 17 interpretation students and 8 MA students in Translation Studies. I divided the students into two groups, each meeting once weekly for 80 minutes in the first semester of their postgraduate study. The 18-​week course covers relevant theory and common techniques in news trans-​editing; different approaches in print, radio, television and online news translation; strategies in specialized news translation; peer evaluation and translation quality control.

Data collection The action research generated three sets of data: teacher/​researcher’s classroom observations, students’ reflective writings, and a class survey. I took notes when student groups made presentations or worked in groups. I wrote reflections on my teaching. Students’ reflections were compulsory. Each student submitted five pieces

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of reflective writing (on their presentations, news translation experiences, peer evaluations and final projects). Three were written in Chinese and the final project reflection was written in English. I chose students’ reflections for analysis if they related to my action research topic of news translation norms, especially ideology and self-​censorship. The students who were quoted were kept anonymous with their initials such as LC,WA. All ethical issues have been cleared with the university. The class survey was conducted by six students as their group presentation task. The students designed the questionnaire, conducted the survey, analysed data and wrote the survey report. I kept my role to a minimum. I gave general guidelines on their questionnaire design and offered feedback on their draft, suggesting they seek participants’ consent to use their data as required by research ethics.

Planning and implementing the classroom teaching of news translation norms Planning the action research To help students understand my approach, I introduced the recent paradigm shifts in translation pedagogy. I explained Kiraly’s social constructivist approach to translation education, highlighting features of constructivist pedagogy: student-​centred, collaborative, project-​ based, and process-​ oriented teaching methods. I showed them Bloom’s Taxonomy, the pyramid-​shaped skills ranging from bottom to top: to remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, and to create. My action research centred on the challenge of teaching news translation norms. “A constructivist approach emphasizes maintaining a maximum degree of authentic, real world complexity in learning situations” (Kiraly, 2000, p. 104). I introduced multiple perspectives on news translation norms: researchers, news translation interns and practitioners. For collaborative learning, I introduced group presentation and peer evaluation of news translation as part of assessed tasks. For lack of real projects, students completed simulated news translation tasks following professional standards and norms.To track students’ learning processes, I asked them to write reflections on their group work, peer evaluation and their personal experience of translating news. To scaffold learning, I carefully arranged the sequence of tasks to assure completing one task served as preparation for the following task. To familiarize students with reflective writing style, I provided handouts and sample writings of high, medium and poor quality. The final assessment design followed the social-​constructive approach. Students had to accomplish a project involving six tasks: (1) Choose a beat as the specialized news and explain why; (2) Map the field：write a literature review on the theory and practice of _​_​_​news translation; (3) Gain access to the field: write an evaluation based on participant observation of a new media outlet’s practice in _​_​_​ news translation; (4) Practice in the field: finish one trans-​edited _​_​_​news piece modelling after the chosen outlet; (5) Conduct peer evaluation: invite a classmate to help proofread the translation and write what has been learned from the peer

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evaluation; (6) Reflect on the project experience with description, feelings and self-​evaluation.

Implementing the action research To create rapport, I introduced my academic and career experiences. For professional requirements, I showed them four recent news translator recruitment ads. To link their learning to the real world, I had them collect at least five job postings for news translators, analyse the job requirements, and use them as a checklist for a personal action plan. Introducing news translation norms started from news translation theories. Students searched journal databases for the most popular theories on news translation and their application in practices. One group presented findings orally in class and gave me written reflections.To help students understand news translation norms, I interviewed international news editors and shared my findings with them. Students with internship experience in news translation were invited to be guest speakers. In addition, students were guided to observe the news translation norms. For lack of authentic news translation projects, we had to find some media outlets for observation and simulation exercise. The harsh reality of the death of international news in local newspapers forced us to find a national newspaper whose core content is still international news. I asked them to discover –​through literature reviews –​which newspaper was studied most frequently by news translation researchers. Reference News was the most researched source and also the only national newspaper exclusively devoted to translated news, so we decided to observe its news translation norms for the biggest news at that time —​China’s National Day celebration. Two groups presented their findings on Reference News’ professional norms, illustrated with examples and theories to explain its news translation practices. One group showed Reference News coverage and layout to the class. To contextualize the case study and give students a general picture of how international newspapers covered China’s military parade, I showed them samples of seven newspapers’ coverage, especially their use of photos, captions and headlines. Students worked in pairs to conduct comparative studies of one story’s source text from CNN and its translated version in Reference News. The work aimed to discover news translation strategies applied in the chosen piece. It was not difficult for students to collect evidence of commonly used strategies –​such as deletion, addition, change of headlines, change of structures and summary. I challenged them to delve into why. We had a heated discussion on possible explanations in relation to relevant news translation theories, reaching the consensus that ideology is the decisive factor in Reference News translation practices. Following group presentations and in-​class discussions with my input, students were asked to choose and translate a recent English news story modelling after Reference News. They were required to write reflections on their translation and proofreading experiences. Classes were combined with teacher’s brief lectures, students’ group presentations and workshops on learning tasks. Students formed

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into groups of four and had one or two weeks to prepare presentations with time pressure mimicking real-​world deadlines. Most presentation topics required students to examine both theory and practice. After students accumulated authentic experience in proofreading, they wrote their reflections on the experiences, hopefully gaining insight into how news translation quality could improve through proofreading. I arranged one group to present a literature review of translation quality and proofreading. The group interviewed fellow students and collected common problems from the simulated news translation exercise and proofreading experiences. For final assessment, students had one month to accomplish their specialized news translation project. To reduce students’ anxiety, I offered face-​to-​ face tutorial of ten minutes per student.

Findings I was unsure if my action research had a positive outcome until I got the survey results at the end of the semester. Among 54 students, 52 took part and gave consent to use the data for teaching and research purposes. When asked why they chose the course, 53.83% said to earn credit; 26.92% had some experience with news translation and wanted to learn more; and 15.38% wanted to work in the relevant field. After the course, 76.92% said they became more interested in the course, while 5.77 % were less interested. The rest (17.31%) remained interested in the course. Surprisingly, 61.54% said they would like to work in news translation compared with only 15.38% who said that before taking the course. The students’ survey concluded that the numbers convincingly showed the attractiveness of the course, which had a positive impact on students’ professional career plans and will contribute to the news translation industry (Cai et al, 2020). I developed findings centring on students’ empowerment through situated learning, collaborative learning, seeking viability and scaffolding.

Empowerment through situated learning with multiple realities and multiple perspectives Using coverage of China’s 2019 National Day celebration as a case study of news translation gave students the situated learning opportunity for a range of perspectives on one event.Through observing source texts and target texts of the news coverage, students were keenly aware of the drastic changes made in the translated news in Reference News, as demonstrated by examples from a group presentation. They labelled the changes as reframing of the headlines. Example 1 ST: China: Lessons for Zim, developing countries TT: 中国奇迹鼓舞发展中国家 BT: China’s miracles inspired the developing countries.

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Example 2 ST: China’s achievement grounded in reform and openness TT: 中国奇迹根植于改革开放 BT: China’s miracles are grounded in reform and openness Example 3 ST: China at 70: Review, reflections TT: 中国70年非凡成就“无可辩驳” BT: China’s 70 years of remarkable achievements “indisputable”. When I asked students for possible explanations for such translation norms, one replied,“The trans-​edited versions highlighted or exaggerated China’s achievements. They would make readers feel good and feel proud of China”. Another wondered whether regular readers of Reference News would be misled by such positive news. The situated learning proved to be conducive to students’ constructivist learning process, which has the dual nature of “construing and constructing” in Candy’s words (1989, p. 108). The case study enabled students to gain a new perspective on the necessity for trans-​editing rather than faithful translation. Student W wrote when she originally read the isolated sentences and paragraphs, she did not feel the strong need for trans-​editing. However, when she read the complete original foreign media reports, she realized there were great differences in the styles of Chinese and Western media. “Chinese media usually use more positive language and perspective” (WA, reflection 1 in Chinese, 2019). She also wrote of the cognitive changes she experienced. I am more aware of the bias in the western media. I came to understand the significance of “Narrative Theory” and “Rewriting Theory” as well as the contradictions and difficulties of news trans-​editing, that is, how to find a balance in practice between maintaining discursive power and remaining neutral. (WA, reflection 1 in Chinese, 2019) WA was not alone in her sharpened awareness of different journalistic styles. LY aired similar views. Almost every foreign media outlet reported China’s National Day celebration and the Hong Kong riots in the same news, showing the strong contrast and relatively negative stance. Reference News, on the other hand, intentionally tried to focus on China’s National Day parade instead of reporting minor and negative events. (LY, reflection 1 in Chinese, 2019)

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After observing the differences, LY said, “most foreign media still hold a hostile attitude towards China, always trying to discredit China”. She seemed to find justification for Reference News’ norms of filtering out sensitive content. Students WA and LY’s reflections revealed the benefits of situated learning in the real world, making them more sensitive to the journalistic differences in national and cultural contexts. They first interpreted the phenomenon and then constructed their own understanding of news translation practice. Some students quickly learned to adapt to the Reference News norms, as shown in the ­example below. Example 4 ST: The Washington Post (Oct. 2, 2019) •  Amid Hong Kong crackdown, Trump congratulates China on anniversary •  Clashes at Hong Kong protests stand in contrast to celebrations in Beijing • China rolls out new weapons to mark 70th anniversary TT: 建国70周年：阅兵仪式展示中国力量的崛起 BT: Founding of the state 70th anniversary: military parade shows Chinese rise in power. The Washington Post used juxtaposition in headlines, sharply contrasting China’s National Day celebrations with Hong Kong’s protests. In the simulated translation homework, LL reframed the headline into a positive one. Seen from students’ reflections, they had no problem selecting the positive information and reframed the news. But they were puzzled about leaving out sensitive information, because they were not sure what counted as sensitive, leading to peer debates.

Empowerment through genuine collaborative learning The collaborative learning in the action research took the format of group presentation and peer evaluation (proofreading and editing). My observation led to discovering the most effective learning took place among groups really engaged in collaborative learning. They not only gave coherent, informative presentation but also fully enjoyed the process. Groups that apparently divided the labour without working together gave poor presentations with fragmented, incoherent or overlapping content. Those engaged in collaborative learning described their experience positively. Although we have a clear division of labour, when we encounter difficulties and problems, everyone seriously considers various options and solves the problems together … Everyone has a further understanding of the relevant theories, norms and strategies of news translation. (LY, reflection 1 in Chinese, 2019)

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That quote seemed to match the essential components of co-​operative learning devised by David and Roger Johnson (1991): (1) positive interdependence, (2) face-​to-​face interaction, (3) individual accountability and personal responsibility, (4) interpersonal and small-​g roup skills, and 5) group processing –​or reflection on what the group has accomplished and still needs to learn (cited in Kiraly, 2000, p. 37). Genuine collaborative learning provided students the opportunities to assume responsibility for their own learning as well as sharpen interpersonal skills. Another form of cooperative learning is peer evaluation, which enabled students to proofread each other’s translations and debate what should be deleted and the extent of rewriting for ideological concerns. Example 5 ST: So far, China has profited little from its friendliness. … The two Communist states may be in for a period of double disappointment. TT: 两大社会主义国家正处在一段磨合期，向美好未来共进。 BT: The two socialist countries are in a period of transition towards a better future together. Student ZA, as a proofreader, suggested the above paragraph should be deleted because it was not the primary focus of the news. Student ZY, as the news translator, argued that it was necessary to retain the information, as the news story started with a Chinese restaurant in Cuba, but the focus was on friendly relations between China and Cuba. She deleted the first sentence and rewrote the final sentence from a pessimistic to a more optimistic tone “to show that China, as a well-​developed socialist country, will lend a helping hand to other socialist countries in the world and help them develop better” (Reflection 2 in Chinese, 2019). The extent of rewriting was a common headache for students. One asked,“If the source text I choose is so negative, I have to delete a lot, then there is not much left. What should I do?” I said in the real world, journalists may avoid such a dilemma by choosing more than one news source. Later students found viable solutions themselves. ZY wrote, “If I chose a piece in which China is portrayed as 100% evil, the trans-​edition would be more like a big rewrite”. To save herself the trouble, she chose a news piece that “contained certain negative narration, but could still be transformed into a positive image”. She described her decision-​making process. The article I chose uses a very sarcastic tone to describe the international collaboration between China and Cuba, and my duty, as a trans-​editor, is to carve out a new register and reverse the image. … I could change the narrative and convince my audience that this is just a minor setback between two socialist countries, and China plays a role of an elder brother … I believe the news our people read should be more about the positive image of China actively taking part in international affairs … and being a friendly force in this complex era. (ZY, reflection 2 in English, 2019)

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ZY justified her trans-​ editing decisions from her understanding of readers’ interests. But she later admitted that it was a painful experience, and she almost regretted choosing the course (Reflection 4 in Chinese, 2019).

Empowerment through seeking viability The learning process is not smooth, linear or finite but zig-​zag and iterative. Students’ joys of acquiring new knowledge are often accompanied by puzzlement. This learning trajectory is demonstrated in students’ reflections. Although there’s many norms and strategies in dealing with high-​sensitive pieces, at first, I thought that once I grasped the ultimate purpose of trans-​editing the news –​to create a narrative that is in compliance with our ideology and national interests –​it was not that difficult to follow. But I was wrong. (ZY, reflection 2 in English, 2019) Student LC wrote what she gained from presenting news translation theories in class: I have learned a lot. Originally, I only knew that after news-​editing (process), the content experienced some deletion and addition. Now I understand the theoretical support behind the phenomenon. All the changes have gradually become scientific and reasonable in my eyes. (LC, reflection 1 in Chinese, 2019) She seemed to find the explanatory power of theories in understanding changes involved in the news trans-​editing process. But she immediately raised five thought-​ provoking questions: Will protecting or spreading ideology lead to news distortion? Are all news translators controlled by the ideology of their patrons, their own economic income, and the collective pressure? Will false news inevitably run rampant? Is truth inferior to ideology? Is the purpose and information of the same news spreading in two countries equal? (LC, reflection 1 in Chinese, 2019) Interestingly, LC did not seem frustrated. She tried to find answers through hard thinking and by interacting with her peers. She attributed the problem to insufficient reading of relevant literature and lack of news translation practice. I have tried to give my own answers and discuss with my classmates, but I find that I can’t get a reasonable interpretation. The reason may be due to limited

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literature reading and news translation practice … I believe that in the future study, I will gradually find a scientific answer. (LC, reflection 1 in Chinese, 2019) LC concluded optimistically. The constructive learning apparently increased her confidence in finding a solution. Her reflection revealed her sense of ownership in learning. “Viability also suggests that learning is a dynamic, rather than a finite process. We don’t acquire knowledge and skills once and for all” (Kiraly, 2000, p. 47). LC’s trajectory of understanding followed by puzzlement is not unique. Another student’s reflection echoed hers: In the process of literature review, we find that narrative theory is the most frequently used, followed by rewriting theory. After understanding the two theories, our group became quite puzzled: Should there be boundary regarding the extent of the news trans-​editing? Can it be rewritten at one’s will as long as it is consistent with the patron’s position and ideology? (CX, reflection 1 in Chinese, 2019) CX gradually refined her understanding and found a viable solution in her second reflection piece based on her news translation experience modelling after Reference News: The Re-​narrative Theory and Rewriting Theory suggest that we can re-​ narrative and rewrite in order to suit ideology and satisfy the readers’ expectations. However, are there boundaries between translation and rewrite? Does the final text depend entirely on the trans-​editor’s own will? I think the answer is no. News trans-​editing should have boundaries or constraints. (CX, reflection 2 in English, 2019) Her trans-​edited news on Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s policy address was praised by a peer proofreader as being politically correct with justified deletion of redundant and biased details. She celebrated this as her biggest gain from the course, concluding, “Of course, as a mere reader, I would like to know more facts of the news; but as trans-​editor, I think it is necessary to make choices cautiously”. Her internal conflict of perspectives as both reader and trans-​editor seemed to be resolved when she translated specialized news in her final project. In her favourite beat of showbiz news, she was very proud of her bold trans-​editing and reader-​ oriented style. Free from ideological concerns, she was more concerned about developing other skills: to keep a balance between trans-​editing and individual authoring; to explore and enhance her own trans-​editing style; and to reinforce storytelling and language skills (CX, reflection 3 in Chinese, 2019). “Translation is always a give-​and-​take process, something is always lost and also gained” (Kiraly, 2000, p. 68). Some students embraced their renewed understanding of the losses and gains.

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Should we abide by the norm of fidelity to tell the true story, or betray fidelity and only choose the positive side to report? It seems that there is always such conflict in news translation … [W]‌e need … to make a trade-​off. (LC, reflection 2 in English, 2019)

Empowerment through scaffolding My course design moved from the more restrained newspaper news to radio, television and social media news translation. Students experienced the decreasing concern of ideology in moving from political news to other specialized news. I provided guidance early in the course and gradually gave students more autonomy. At the start, some students did not accept my facilitator role. After the first simulated news translation exercise, one student wrote, “I think it would be better if our professor can pick a piece of news and have a more specific illustration about how to trans-​edit in class” (LL, reflection 2 in English, 2019). Other students showed approval of experiential learning, “reading someone else’s work and feeling you have mastered the work is quite different than doing it by yourself ” (ZY, reflection 2 in English, 2019). Students generally appreciated the scaffolding nature of the final project. “Due to my careful observation at the earlier stage, the practice was not as difficult as I imagined before (FK, reflection 5 in English, 2019). Student ZY learned a hard lesson because she did the first two tasks in reverse order due to technical reasons and later found that problematic. [The order of doing each work really matters … [T]‌he level of tasks is carefully set, one higher than another. (Student Z2, reflection 5 in English, 2019) If given the choice, would students avoid the sensitive ideology issue? Only 5 of 54 chose political news as their beat. One wrote that her motivation is for her career: I … want to become a qualified interpreter in the future … [B]‌oth translators and interpreters are expected to always hold the correct political position while promoting exchanges between China and other countries in order not to cause unnecessary conflicts and troubles. (FK, reflection 5 in English, 2019) Another student broke the norms by choosing feminism as her beat, a topic that she was passionate about. Despite her confidence in her ability to do a decent job, she experienced a small setback. I knew in the first place, that feminism related subject is under-​discussed and undervalued. Due to speech censorship and long entrenched patriarchy

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tradition, Chinese people, to this day, still haven’t been exposed to enough contents related to gender equality. And I should’ve thought that many narrations that are common knowledge in the western media were not well understood by Chinese readers, and that some additional explanations are needed. (ZY, reflection 5 in English, 2019) She felt frustrated because her enlightened role did not work out well. “The purpose of trans-​editing feminism news is to spread the knowledge and educate people, but if the readers feel confused by the article, the outcome will not be ideal”. She blamed herself for focusing too much on the strategies in the translation technicalities while overlooking “the most important part behind the trans-​edition itself, which is to bring new perspectives to a new audience with the least possible cognition barrier” (ZY, reflection 5 in English, 2019). The experience led to soul-​ searching reflection. “If I don’t like the situation and want to bring changes, the right thing to do is to do the research with an open mind, learn the rules, rather than to stand by and frown” (ZY, reflection 5 in English, 2019).

Reflections and implications The social-​ constructivist approach proved very rewarding for gaining insight into students’ learning processes. The action research enabled me to experience students’ frustrations and sense of achievement. Looking back, I was right not screening students and having an open-​door policy. I had quite a few converts. One wrote, I want to thank this subject for giving me the opportunity to learn what is international news trans-​editing … [N]‌ow I have built great passion for this field and tend to try more and practice more. I hope that in the future I can keep practice in news trans-​editing and take good advantage of my knowledge and skills learned from the subject. (FK, reflection 5 in English, 2019) Another type of convert emerged of students changing their attitude towards censorship. I had little idea that my teaching about ideology in news translation norms would upset some students. Student ZY’s reflection on her experience in my course made my heart sink when I read her first two paragraphs: To start with, I chose the international news trans-​editing course due to my real interest in journalism, but I am strongly against anything about news censorship. As a deep user of the Internet, I really hate censorship because my account was once blocked for forwarding news about the #Metoo campaign. I think the censorship system should be abolished, but what I see is that the Internet has been restrained year after year.

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In the beginning of this course, I was a bit regretful, because the teacher first taught us that ideology was overwhelmingly important. Then the teacher assigned us to trans-​edit news modelling after Reference News, which again highlighted the importance of ideology. And in the process of trans-​editing news, I also felt the pain. (ZY, reflection 6 in Chinese, 2019) Her reflection then became more upbeat: After a semester, I went through my notes and really felt that I have learned something, not just rigid knowledge from books. The teacher attaches great importance to the integration with the current practices of news trans-​editing in the workplace. Through the teacher’s research and updates from front-​line practitioners, we can outline the full picture of this profession, including the not-​so-​optimistic industry prospects and challenging principles at work. It’s very rough, but authentic. I think this is the first course that offered direct help to my future career choice. I have never been able to know so clearly about the everyday professional practices of an industry in other courses. ZY was critical of her previous attitude, saying her opposition to censorship was too emotional and unproductive. “To claim that you despise something and thus do not bother to think deeper is really bad. … If I want to make any possible changes, the former approach will not help”. I was relieved that students’ newly gained understanding of censorship had empowered them: I have not found the so-​called ultimate answer, but after learning more, I can “understand” the causes of the status quo. … The course is coming to an end, but thinking and questioning are just beginning. I still remember what the teacher said to me, “The stronger professional ability you have, the more choices you have”, which I agree. (ZY, reflection 6 in Chinese, 2019) ZY said she wrote the reflection to encourage herself, which in turn inspired me to write this chapter, recording how students and individuals like me live and learn in a restrictive environment. Following Kiraly, “Effective teaching and constructive learning result in empowerment” (2000, p. 19). My action research generated evidence to support Kiraly’s view. “Given a suitable real or realistic environment in which students are motivated to learn through experience in the company of similarly situated students and with the help of facilitating teachers, significant learning can indeed be seen to take place” (2015, p. 26). Another lesson from my action research is the role of reflection, which can be a powerful tool to teach critical thinking and help teachers gain better insight into the translation process, especially how translator competence emerges.

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Not all the news translation assignments were authentic (some were simulated). Yet the problems students encountered and the coping strategies they adopted were very similar to what happens in newsrooms. The biggest challenges in simulated news translation modelling after Reference News are the categorization of sensitive information and the extent of rewriting. One perennial debate in China’s newsrooms is what counts as sensitive information and should be self-​censored. Heated discussions between reporters and editors and even among editors are common. Assertive reporters challenge the norms and extend the boundaries. Cautious editors tend to be heavy-​handed in gatekeeping. Liberal-​minded editors give more leeway and autonomy to reporters and often take risks themselves in breaking taboos. Veteran Chinese journalists have developed intuition on what is sensitive information. Some even have developed a list, which may change with the circumstances. To reduce students’ anxiety and puzzlement, I will introduce in the future more real-​world perspectives on dealing with sensitive issues. Many students recognized the possible logical problems caused by rewriting and deletion. Some would repair such logical jumps by using more cohesive devices, while others would add more relevant evidence. They reached the consensus that adding information is more demanding in news translation than deleting information. I will integrate authentic translation tasks into future teaching, which may spark another around of learning adventure in the realm of “complexity thinking”, in Kiraly’s term, which he sees as “the next step beyond social constructivism” (2015). He lamented that despite progress, “the quintessential characteristic of a pedagogical ‘community of (theory and) practice’ is still lacking: domain-​wide reflection on, and discussion of, basic understandings about the nature of learning and effective teaching” (Kiraly, 2015, p. 12). I hope to continue action research with new students to develop a better understanding and application of the social-​ constructivist approach.

References Allen-​Ebrahimian, B. (2014). Found in translation: Netizens cry foul when a new Chinese media outlet selectively translates an Economist cover article. https://​foreignpolicy.com/​2014/​09/​03/​ found-​in-​translation/​ Cai, K., Chen, X., Liang, Y., Wu, X., Yin, F., & Yang, S. (2020, January). A survey report on international news transediting course. Paper presented in class at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. Candy, P. (1989). Constructivism and the study of self-​direction in adult learning. Studies in the Education of Adults, 21(2), 95–​116. Carr, W., & Kemmis, S. (1986). Becoming critical. Lewes: Falmer Press. Deuze, M. (2000). Redirecting education: Considering theory and changes in contemporary journalism. Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies, 21(1), 137–​152. Du, H. (2010). The changing strategies of media control in China’s reform era (unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Leeds, Leeds, UK. Elliott, J. (1991). Action research for educational change. Buckingham: Open University Press.

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Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. (1991). Cooperative learning lesson structures. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company. Kiraly, D. (2000). A social constructivist approach to translator education. Manchester: St Jerome. Kiraly, D. (2015). Occasioning translator competence: Moving beyond social constructivism towards a postmodern alternative to instructionism. Translation and Interpreting Studies, 10(1), 8–​32. Li, X. (2018). Teaching beliefs and learning beliefs in translator and interpreter education: an exploratory case study. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 12(2), 132–​151. Mayflower. 五月花 (2014). Mayflower account: I understand the paper’s silence (五月花号：我理解澎湃的沉默). https://​web.shobserver.com/​news/​detail?id=1652 Merkle, D. (2018). Translation and censorship. In: The Routledge handbook of translation and politics. www.routledgehandbooks.com/​doi/​10.4324/​9781315621289-​16 Müller, B. (2004). Censorship & cultural regulation in the modern age. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Paavola, S., Lipponen, L., & Hakkarainen, K. (2004). Models of innovative knowledge communities, and three metaphors of learning. Review of Educational Research, 74(4), 557–​576. Piotrowska, M. & Tyupa, S. (2014).Translation pedagogy –​a new sub-​discipline of translation studies. inTRAlinea Special Issue: Challenges in Translation Pedagogy. www.intralinea. org/​specials/​article/​2112 Polumbaum, J. (2010). Looking back, looking forward:The ecumenical imperative in Chinese mass communication scholarship. International Journal of Communication, 4(2010), 567–​572. Toury, G. (1995). Descriptive translation studies and beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wong, M. (2017). Censorship and translation in Mainland China from: The Routledge handbook of Chinese translation. Routledge. www.routledgehandbooks.com/​doi/​10.4324/​ 9781315675725.ch13 Zhang, S. (2006). Editors’ handbook to television international news (电视国际新闻编辑手册). Beijing: China Broadcasting Publishing House (中国广播电视出版社).

9 DEVELOPING TRANSLATION COMPETENCE A curricular study of teaching of news translation Zirui Xiong

Introduction The salient characteristics of the twenty-​first-​century translation world, such as technologization, globalization and collaboration, have inevitably pushed translators to upgrade their skill sets in order to survive in a fast-​changing and competitive market. Therefore, a wide array of translation competence models is advocated by scholars and academic associations (Neubert, 2000; PACTE, 2003; Kelly, 2005; EMT, 2009; Hu, 2018a). They are proposed with different aims, i.e. for theoretical objectives, market standardization and for pedagogical purposes. Pedagogically, these models can be of tremendous help for translator trainers to draw up teaching objectives and assess trainees’ competence development; also, for translator trainees, to identify the skills and knowledge they need to acquire as a framework of reference (Wu et al., 2019). News translation has attracted academic attention in the past decade as the role of translation in the information flow in this age of globalization is significantly ever-​g rowing (Bassnett, 2005). Previous studies in news translation, mostly focusing on how to cope with journalistic discourse (e.g. Choi, 2013; Conway, 2005; Károly, 2012; Liu, 2017), usually ignored the role of news translation as a specialized course in translator training. It is encouraging to find that pedagogical innovations (Kiraly, 2000; Li, 2006; Hu, 2019) are devised to facilitate effective classroom environments for news translation training and aims to develop students’ multidimensional translation competences. However, the translation competence models discussed in the previous literature, which are mostly generic, lack a comprehensive benchmark that delineates specific competence required to be a news translation professional. To address this research gap, the study compares two news translation modules in terms of their curriculum design and aims to discover the overlapping requirements

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for a qualified news translator.Three major aspects (i.e. learning objectives, teaching and learning activities, and evaluation) will be the focus of discussion. Also, the study intends to investigate the influencing factors contributing to the differences in the curricular design. It is believed that a clear picture of the specifications in the news translation and a good knowledge of considerations involved in the curriculum design will have significant pedagogical implications.

Background Translation competence Since the 1970s, Translation Competence (TC) has begun to be analysed in Translation Studies and became prominent in the 1990s. Translation scholars (e.g. Wilss, 1976; Neubert, 2000; PACTE, 2003; Kelly, 2005; Hu, 2018a) have proposed an array of concepts and models of TC. To date, concepts of translational competence can be roughly divided into two categories, namely, the bilingual competence concept and the multicomponent idea of competence. The supporters of the bilingual competence concept (e.g. Wilss, 1976; Harris & Sherwood, 1978; Toury, 1984) believe that TC is a part of language competence. However, with more interest in the field of TC, some scholars and institutions (e.g. Neubert, 2000; PACTE, 2003; Kelly, 2005;TAC, 2017; Hu, 2018a) began to explore the multi-​ dimensional components that constitute TC and highlighted other competences besides those of a linguistic nature. Neubert (2000) proposed concept of TC as a hierarchical configuration of distinguishable component competences, which includes language competence, text competence, subject competence, cultural competence and transfer competence, among which transfer competence dominates other sub-​competences. In the recent and ongoing research, the PACTE group at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain has developed the first holistic model of TC, which was first presented in 1998, and is constantly refined. The revised model comprises five sub-​ competences, including bilingual sub-​ competence, extra-​ linguistic sub-​competence, knowledge of translation sub-​competence, instrumental sub-​competence, and strategic sub-​competence (which is an essential competence that affects all the others) and activates a series of psycho-​physiological components (PACTE, 2003). From a didactic perspective, Kelly (2005) propounds an integrated model of TC for curriculum design, including communicative and textual competence, cultural and intercultural competence, subject area competence, professional and instrumental competence, attitudinal or psycho-​ physiological competence, interpersonal communication competence and strategic competence. It seems that the majority proposals have similar elements for TC and, nonetheless, they differ in their approach, terminology used and the distribution and importance given to these components. Apart from discussion of TC from the academic community, the market starts to set its standards for would-​be translators as exchanges and communication at

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global levels become increasingly frequent. In the European context, the EMT1 (2009) proposed a detailed and hierarchical model of TC, in which five areas of competences were defined, including language and culture, translation, technology, personal and interpersonal, and service provision. Likewise, the Translators Association of China (TAC) released a standard list of competences for interpreters and translators in September 2017, aiming to provide benchmarks for the language service industry and references for translator training programmes. They include translation competence, interpreting competence, transferrable skills between the source language and the target language, information mining and synthesizing competence, cross-​cultural competence, technology competence and subject area competence. Hu (2018a), after examining both accreditation tests and national standards for translators, finds some overlapping elements in the market standards, which are summarized as linguistic competence, translation competence, knowledge of translation theory, extra-​linguistic knowledge and professionalism. The above proposed models for TC have been designed with various aims in mind; in some cases, for theoretical objectives to discover the function of the competences required to be identified as a translator; others with a view to performance in the job market or be used in curriculum design (Hurtado Albir, 2007). From a pedagogical viewpoint, if all the standards illustrated above are to be incorporated into the institution’s curricula, they would be significantly useful to create authentic and fair working conditions, which will enable students to confront the real settings of the professional world (Kiraly, 2000, p.150). The models can be great help for translator trainers in setting teaching objectives and assess trainees’ competence development, also for translator trainees to identify the skills and knowledge they need to acquire as a framework of reference (Wu et al., 2019).

Teaching news translation To date, a considerable amount of research has been centred on news translation as the significant role of translation plays in the information flow in this age of globalization (Bassnett, 2005), such as theory and principles in translating the news (Liu, 2017), features of journalistic discourse (Károly, 2012; Choi, 2013), ideological positioning of news translation (Pan, 2015) and so on. Despite a burgeoning interest in linguistic and cultural aspects of news translation, researchers have paid little heed to the role of news translation as a specialized course in translator training. Specialization is a standard objective of translator training programmes (Kiraly, 1995). Among many specialized courses, news translation is favoured by students and has been offered by many universities. A number of scholars (e.g. Kiraly, 2000; Li, 2006; Hu, 2019) have innovated strategies to teaching news translation, such as setting up translation workshops, working with local translation service providers, applying social media applications to translation classrooms, and build corpora of news terms, promote peer learning, write reflective journals and so forth. Those teaching methods are designed to create an interactive learning environment that

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is learner-​centred while cultivating students’ all-​round translation competences. However, the profile of a qualified news translator is not clear and specific competences that are required in news translation are not delineated.Therefore, it is urgent to devise a competence model that is “news-​exclusive”. Moreover, the process of news translation is composed of a complex range of constraints and problems, such as time pressure, resource deployment, the role of news agencies, linguistic barriers and the role of English (Holland, 2013).The complexity of news translation hence poses challenges to translator trainers in the academic circle with little journalistic experience. Li (2006) observed a gap between the teaching content and the market norm as complete translation is only or mostly taught in the course of mass media translation among six translation programmes in Hong Kong whereas selective trans-​adaptation is the dominant transmission method in handling international news. It seems that translation trainers are left behind and in need of a reference framework that can be drawn upon in the process of teaching news translation. The news industry is fast-​changing and an updated all-​inclusive package of requirements for a qualified news translator is called for.

Curriculum design A curriculum refers to a prescribed and defined course of studies, which students must fulfil in order to obtain a certain level of educational diploma or certificate. In its broadest sense, a curriculum may refer to all courses offered at a school. In education, Kelly (2009) described a curriculum as “the totality of student experiences that occur in the educational process” (p. 13). The term often refers specifically to a planned sequence of instruction, or to a view of the student’s experience in terms of the educator’s or a school’s instructional goals. Nunan (2001) advocates that curriculum contains not only all the aspects of syllabus, but also takes teaching methods, teaching assessment and the like into account. A curriculum is designed and influenced by many factors. Nation and Macalister (2010) proposed seven factors in the designing of a curriculum, namely, (1) environment analysis, (2) needs analysis, (3) principles, (4) goals, (5) content and sequencing, (6) format and presentation, (7) monitoring and assessment, and evaluation. Among them, (4), (5), (6) and (7) are components embedded in a course. Considering factors (5) and (6) are correlated, they are to be discussed together. Therefore, a curricular comparison will be carried out in three areas, namely learning objectives, teaching and learning activities and assessment in the next sections.

Methodology Research questions The following research questions guided the study reported here: 1. What is the profile of a qualified news translator? What are the specific translation competences required?

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2. How do translator trainers design curriculum to develop those specific competences? What are the considerations? 3. What are the implications for teaching of translation in general and news translation in particular?

Research design This study is a qualitative research (Hesse-​Biber and Leavy, 2011), in which data regarding descriptions of teaching of news translation were collected and interviews were conducted. The present study is a case study, which is used to investigate specific phenomena by studying a number of cases (Silverman, 2013). In order to observe more pedagogical practices in news translation training and provide a comparative perspective, two modules of news translation are chosen. A typical case sampling is aimed to “explain what a typical case looks like” (Chen, 2000, pp. 106–​ 107). Thus two cases selected for the study are representative and the detailed description is given below. The first university is in Beijing and the second one is from Hong Kong. Beijing is the capital and also the political, economic and cultural centre of China, while Hong Kong is a world economic centre and the intersection of Chinese and Western cultures. The two cases are chosen for geographical and economic reasons. Both of them are located in metropolises with rich educational resources, as the level of economic development has a significant impact on the allocation of educational resources and curriculum setting in China. A university’s environment has a profound influence on the decision-​making of the curriculum design, teaching methods and assessment schemes (Tessmer, 1990; Kelly, 2005; Nation & Macalister, 2010). The second consideration is the diversity in societal condition. Beijing is a monolingual society, with Mandarin as its official language, while Hong Kong is a bilingual society where the local government promotes the official use of Mandarin and English as well as the Cantonese as its spoken language. It is suggested by Dubin and Olshtain (1986) that societal culture affects teachers’ curriculum design, especially the choice of news translation skills. The distinctiveness of their teaching of news translation is another reason for selecting. They are training courses offered in a specialized field (i.e. news) for undergraduate students as most translation programmes offer them at postgraduate level. The detailed information of the two cases are illustrated below.

Research subjects To ensure anonymity and consistency, the university in Beijing is noted as University A and the university from Hong Kong is referred to as University B. University A is a key university in Beijing with its prominence in the field of economics and finance. The news translation course offered by University A (briefed as Course A) is a compulsory course offered for second-​year undergraduate translation majors, in

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which journalistic discourses in economics and finance are focused. It runs for two terms; each term is composed of 18 teaching weeks and each lecture lasts for 1.5 hours.The translation trainer (referred to as Trainer A) holds a PhD in in Translation Studies from a renowned UK university. Trainer A has academic interests in journalism and some editing experience and is the convenor for this course. University B is a comprehensive university in Hong Kong with a long history of humanities and it is home to Hong Kong’s first translation department. The news translation course (referred to as Course B) of University B is an elective one, in which discourses in the mass media, such as newspaper, magazines, websites and advertisements are included. Course B is open to translation majors and those who minor in translation regardless of their year of enrolment. It is a specialized course lasting for 13 teaching weeks for one term. The weekly session consists of one lecture (2 hours) and a tutorial (1 hour). The lecturer for this course (referred to as Trainer B) got his Doctorate Degree of Education in Language Teaching from a prestigious UK university. In spite of his long years of teaching experience, Trainer B has no hands-​on experience in the journalistic industry. He is also the solo instructor in this course. The profiles of University A and University B as well as Course A and Course B are shown in Table 9.1 and Table 9.2.

Data collection and analysis The profile of the two courses are collected from the university’s official website, and related unpublished documents including syllabus, teaching materials, student assignments, and presentation requirements are provided by two translation trainers

TABLE 9.1  Profile of University A and University B

Location Language Prominence

University A

University B

Beijing Monolingual (Mandarin) Finance and economics

Hong Kong Bilingual (Mandarin/​Cantonese, English) Comprehensive; Liberal arts tradition

TABLE 9.2  Profile of Course A and Course B

Nature Focus Duration Form

Course A

Course B

Specialized Compulsory News texts in economic and financial field Two terms (18 weeks) Lecture (1.5hrs/​wk)

Specialized Optional Texts from the mass media in general One term (13 weeks) Lecture (2 hrs/​wk) and tutorial (1 hr/​wk)

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and were approved for the use of this study. In-​depth interviews are conducted one-​on-​one in Chinese with the Trainer A, and in English with the Trainer B. The interviews are semi-​structured, where a list of questions prepared in advance by the interviewer and interviewees are asked to answer accordingly, which is conducive to data collation and analysis and the comparison of results (Qu & Dumay, 2011). The topics of the interview comprise the interviewees’ background, training practices and beliefs about translation competence and curriculum design. The interviews were audio-​recorded and transcribed. In the analysis, the courses will be depicted from the perspective of the course’ learning objectives, module content, assessment schemes and factors affecting the design of the curriculum will be analysed.

Results and comparison Comparison in learning objectives Biggs and Tang (2011) define an intended learning outcome as a statement that describes what a student is expected to learn after the teaching process.Three levels of an intended learning outcome are elaborated: (1) the institutional level, as a statement of what the graduates of the university are supposed to be able to do; (2) the degree programme level, as a statement of what graduates from particular degree programmes should be able to do; and (3) the course (module) level, as a statement of what students should be able to do at the completion of a given course. And the learning objectives vary depending on the level, directionality and area of specialization (Hurtado Albir, 2007). The focus of discussion of this study will lie on the third level, the intended learning outcome at the course (module) level (see Table 9.3). Writing clear learning outcomes is the first essential step to communication between teacher or institution and student, between trainer and trainee (Kelly, TABLE 9.3  Learning objectives of Course A and Course B

Course A

Course B

1) to consolidate students’ transferrable skills between the language pair of Chinese and English 2) to develop students’ in and outgoing translation competencies 3) to enhance students’ knowledge and understanding of journalistic discourse, especially in the field of finance and economics 4) to be familiar with the trans-​editors’ working environment 5) to heighten students’ project management and organizational skills

1) to acquire the basic skills for analysing and translating texts for the media 2) be able to reflect on the ideological issue concerning mass media translation, and the relation between language and ideology 3) to develop critical thinking and interpersonal communication skills through group work, presentations and class discussion

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2005). It can be observed that both Trainer A and Trainer B have concrete teaching goals, and they both attach importance to training students’ translation competence, including practical translation competence, translation theory knowledge, extra-​linguistic knowledge and professionalism (Hu, 2018a). From a comparative perspective, Trainer A places much emphasis on news translation in the financial and economic fields, while texts to be translated from Course B are more diverse, focusing not only newspaper news and broadcast news, but also the materials from the Internet, advertisements and magazines. Another obvious difference is that Trainer A incorporates the familiarity of the translation workflow of the journalism industry into the learning goals, which reflects, as she describes in the interview, career-​oriented and market-​oriented training goals. By comparison,Trainer B focuses on developing critical thinking ability, either when confronting translation problems encountered or dealing with ideological issues in the news coverage.

Comparison in teaching and learning activities Course A: Teaching and learning activities In the first term, Trainer A imparts meta-​theory and conceptual issues, including the essentials of English news, such as the classification and linguistic and non-​ linguistic features of English news (e.g. characteristics of the title and lead). In the following weeks, trans-​editing norms and methods are explained. At the end of the first term, students are asked to give a group presentation, in which acquired translation theories are to be applied to analyse real-​life translation phenomena. Students can also refer to translation theories that are not covered during the class. The second term revolves around authentic translation practices.Trainer A selects timely and authentic news with a focus on the following topics: the stock markets, mergers & acquisitions, financial markets, business and management, economic growth, and the global market. These news articles to be translated from English to Chinese are mainly from international outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Dow Jones and BBC Business sections. Moreover, Trainer A works collaboratively with a senior trans-​editor from a state-​run news agency whose role is to quality-​assure the translations of the students. The trans-​editor is responsible for providing revisions of students’ translation work based on his hands-​on experience. Based on the feedback, Trainer A will assess students accordingly and impart the translation quality regarding intelligibility, fluency and effect of news in terms of readership, register and news conventions. Furthermore, students are asked to trans-​edit English news reports for this news agency where the trans-​ editor works during the “Two Sessions2”. This is when China introduces the latest government work and national development, and when news agencies around the world spotlight China and report intensively on China’s political and economic changes. Students can practise their trans-​editing skills by re-​contextualizing the media coverage (Hu, 2019).

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Students from Course A also attend the course Macro Economics and Micro Economics, so Trainer A assigns students exercises on “thinking outside the box”, where subject-​related questions are posed. Questions (e.g. why do you think inflation occurs) to be answered are relevant with the content of the news reports, which students need to address after each translation practice. Besides that, students are required to write a reflective journal based on their own piece of translation and the revision suggestions provided by the trans-​editor and the trainer. Writing notes and guidelines are provided and the journal need to (1) review the whole translation process, the challenges encountered and their corresponding coping tactics; (2) illustrate the difference between their translation and the editor’s feedback, and plans for further improvement and progress; (3) summarize the technical terms and subject area knowledge in the news reports.

Course B: Teaching and learning activities In the first weeks, lectures on mass media communication, the linguistic features and functions of media discourse and the basic issues and strategies translating media are given. Among which, functionalist approach (i.e. skopostheorie), how ideology influences media translation (e.g. framing) and the linguistic features of English and Chinese news reports are elaborated. The skills for translating news headlines, leads and different kinds of news reports are also contained. Moreover, general principles and practices of broadcast news and the basic skills for translating broadcast news are illustrated and given equal importance. The major translation project in Course B is the group presentation. Students are required to give a group presentation with four to five members based on their translation of selected texts. The text or texts can be about 550–​600 English words, or 650–​700 Chinese characters from any websites for the publication on a mass medium (i.e. newspaper, magazine or the Internet). Students can specify a certain readership for their translated text considering the assumed ideological stance of the commissioning institution (e.g. news agency). Alternatively, they may also choose to translate for radio broadcast or trans-​edit for a magazine. The word limit for the target text should be 300–​350 English words, or 400–​450 Chinese characters. The students must ensure that there is no existing translation for the selected text and the chosen text should not be too easy or too challenging. The presentation should last around 20–​25 minutes. Students are asked to present to the class the evaluative results of the translated texts in three steps: (1) introduce the background of the text, and the skopos of the translation assignment; (2) describe the problems encountered, e.g. linguistic, cultural, contextual and technical, and the solutions thereof with the translation skills and language skills in relation to the skopos; (3) respond to any comments from the audience. Students in the audience are encouraged to raise questions in the Q&A session and online learning platform. In total, there are two home assignments. The first assignment is to translate a news report from English to Chinese and a newspaper commentary from Chinese

Developing translation competence  177 TABLE 9.4 Teaching and learning activities of Course A and Course B

Course A Teaching and learning activities

Course B

•​ Theoretical content • Theoretical content •​ Group presentation • Group presentation •​ Practical translation: university-​ • Home assignments business teaching partnerships •​ “Thinking outside the box” •​ Reflective journal

to English. The target readers of each have been designated. The second assignment is a translation of a feature article from English to Chinese and trans-​edit an online Chinese news report into 200 English words for a 2-​minute broadcast. The target readership has been assigned by Trainer B. The comparison of teaching and learning activities of Course A and Course B is presented in Table 9.4 and in-​depth analysis is illustrated below. Theoretical components. It is noticeable that both Trainer A and Trainer B choose to embed the theoretical components into the curriculum as they recognize the role of translation theory in translation practice. According to Gile (1995), trainee translators can be the beneficiary of translation theories as they are able to make progress faster and further, to choose appropriate strategies and tactics when confronted with new situations, and to be more focused on the chosen efficient and professional strategies and tactics working under market factors such as client demands, financial needs, or misconception of their work by third parties (p. 5). Comparatively, Trainer A lays emphasis on meta-​theory and thinks highly of reflective learning. Writing reflective journals has been advocated by many scholars (Li, 1998; Lee, 2014; Shih, 2014) as it assists students in forming their translation concept as well as internalize the acquired theories. Therefore, students from Course A are more likely to develop their translator’s self-​concept (Kiraly, 1995). Trainer B focuses on Skopostheorie, a micro-​translation theory that is related to practical techniques and methods (Gile, 1995), which can meet the students’ needs of acquiring useful and practical translation methods. It is acknowledged by both Trainer A and B that trans-​adaptation stands as the dominant translation method in dealing with international news (Li, 2006), so targeted readership has been assigned for each translation task, thus enhancing students’ trans-​editing ability. In addition, one of the manifestations of knowledge of translation theory is the ability to apply translation theory knowledge into practice that has been acknowledged by both trainers. For example, students of Course A must use the translation theories they have learned to explain translation phenomena in real life, which requires them to understand and digest relevant translation theories and recognize the relationship between translation theory and translation practice (Li, 1999). Students of Course B, by comparison, can deepen their understanding of translation theory by completing written translation assignments. In the process

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of finishing each translation task, in which target readers have been determined, students need to analyse the skopos of the translation task, choose the appropriate translation strategies, and then decide whether to adopt trans-​adaption techniques based on the specific circumstance. Authentic training. Authentic training should be embedded in the translation programme to enhance students’ translation competence (Nord, 2005; Hurtado Albir, 2015). It is made up of at least two parts, namely authentic training materials and authentic training methods (Li, 2005). News stories can present real-​life translation problems and known for its novelty, proximity and timeliness. They are easy to access and circulate on a daily basis. Trainer A selects financial news directly from the acknowledged international news outlets such as Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and BBC Business to ensure its authenticity. Moreover, it has become increasingly common in university systems for programmes to credit work experience (Kelly, 2005). The partnership between the University A and the news organization (i.e. the collaboration between Trainer A and the senior trans-​editor) makes the translation training more authentic. The authenticity lays in the real existence of the news agency and a clear targeted readership. Furthermore, the senior editor has many years of trans-​adaptation experience, so the feedback is more market-​oriented with the actual translation effect considered. In contrast, Trainer B emphasizes more the originality of the translated text. With no ready-​made translation of the source text, students must think critically and translate independently and prepare themselves for unexpected translation problems. Professionalism. The professionalism of translators forms an important part of translation competence, including familiarity with the workflow of translation tasks, time management competence, project management competence, teamwork skills, cost and invoice awareness, professional ethics, interpersonal and communication skills (Hu, 2018a). Trainer A prioritizes the development of time management ability and project management capacity. As in this market-​driven contemporary society, competition among the media organizations to have the exclusive coverage of a news story is getting intense and the advances in communications makes the expectation of speed even higher (Holland, 2013). For example, during the “Two Sessions”, translation tasks must be completed before the deadline, which puts students under great time pressure.Though feeling stressed, students are more likely to gain first-​hand experience as a trans-​editor in this intense environment (Hu, 2019). By comparison,Trainer B aims to enhance students’ teamwork and interpersonal skills as they need to translate and present their work as a group. Considering the fact that translation is increasingly a team activity (Kelly, 2005) and translation projects in the industry are usually accomplished by teamwork, this kind of classroom activity helps students recognize the complexity and dynamics of translation activities (Xu, 2015), thus enhancing the professionalism of student translators. Extra-​linguistic knowledge. Extra-​linguistic knowledge includes a command of cross-​ cultural communication skills, subject area knowledge, cross-​ disciplinary knowledge, information research knowledge and knowledge of common sense.

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Students of Course A are likely to sharpen their extra-​linguistic competence when finishing the exercise of “thinking outside the box”. In order to answer those domain questions and understand an economic or financial phenomenon, they would refer to the textbooks Macro Economics and Micro Economics, online resources or turn to industry professionals for help. By doing so, their information mining competence and subject area knowledge will be enhanced. Comparatively, there is no exercise or assignment reserved specifically for building up domain knowledge in Course B. As Kelly (2005) indicates, the curricular content is affected by the duration of the course.The diversified translation training in the Course A is contributed to its long teaching hours as it runs for one academic year. However, Trainer B can only select essentials to elaborate for the limit of time frame (13 teaching weeks in total). To sum up, translation competence such as knowledge of translation theory, practical translation competence and professionalism are given importance in both Course A and Course B. In both courses, theoretical components are illustrated and there are learning activities to apply those translation theories into practice; authenticity of the training is ensured as real-​life texts are used to be translate under authentic situation; and interpersonal and project management competences are enhanced due to teamwork experience. In terms of language training, neither Trainer A nor Trainer B design relevant activities, which coincides with Mackenzie’s (1998) belief. He proposes that “for translators, language is a tool rather than a research object and translators should learn how to use this tool proficiently, which means that translation teaching should focus on the communicative use of language, not the language itself ” (p. 15).The largest difference between Course A and Course B is the attention given to the extra-​linguistic competence. Trainer A aims to develop students’ subject area knowledge while Trainer B does not manage to do so due to short duration of the course.

Comparison in assessment Table 9.5 outlines the assessment scheme of Course A and Course B. For Course A, homework and a term test account for 40% respectively in the final grade while

TABLE 9.5  Assessment scheme of Course A and Course B

Course A

Course B

Assessment

Weight

Group presentation Homework (translation tasks) Thinking outside box + Reflective journal Term test Course participation (attendance & engagement) Group presentation Home assignments Term test

10% 40% 10% 40% 10% 25% 25% 40%

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group presentation, the “think outside box” exercise and reflective journals account for the remaining 20%. In Course B, a term test takes up the biggest percentage of the final score (40%). Group presentation and home assignments occupy 25% respectively for the final score while 10% is given for class participation. The evaluation methods can be divided into three categories (Galán-​Mañas & Hurtado Albir, 2015). In terms of the timing, both students are evaluated during and at the end of the semester. For evaluative purposes, both courses use mainly formative assessment, supplemented by summative assessment. Formative evaluation can collect valuable feedback during the term, quickly grasp the learning dynamics and learning needs of students, so as to reasonably adjust the teaching content and activities.While summative assessment evaluates students’ learning results over time, it is especially used for marking course scores. In terms of the evaluator, Trainer A and Trainer B are both the main assessors. However, the senior trans-​editor is also an important evaluator in Course A. With years of hands-​on experience in news trans-​adaptation, he can provide students with market-​oriented revision suggestions (Hu, 2018b). Second, the reflective journal in Course A can also be identified as a form of self-​assessment, that is to say, students themselves as evaluators, analyse and summarize their own translation works. They can hone their translation evaluation competence and enable their translation trainers grasp their learning process and adjust the teaching accordingly (Hurtado Albir, 2015). Students of Course B also need to critically assess themselves as they should choose a text to translate that is neither too demanding nor easy. Moreover, Course B also encourages peer assessment. Students who are not responsible for the presentation of this week need to download the source text and translated text beforehand, complete parallel reading, and challenge the presentation group after the presentation. These challenges, for example, may include why this particular translation strategy is chosen, why these sentences are restructured and why this exact word is translated this way. Students’ involvement in challenge sessions is counted as class participation scores. It is found that peer evaluation makes students’ learning more productive, improving students’ independent learning and sense of responsibility (Galán-​Mañas & Hurtado Albir, 2015), thus enhancing their competence to evaluate a translation work, which is considered as part of translation competence.

Discussion and implications An integrated competence model for a qualified news translator After examining the curriculum of two news translation courses, it is obvious that there is a number of overlapping requirements throughout the training. Therefore, although formulating a model of translation competence which suits all the news translation talents is difficult, it is still essential to list several common requirements from an integrated viewpoint (see Table 9.6).

Developing translation competence  181 TABLE 9.6  An integrated competence model for a qualified news translator

• Knowing features of journalistic genre and style (including the title, lead, lexis, clause structure, textual organization and etc.) • Knowing the differences of English and Chinese news, newspaper news and broadcast news Translation • Knowing how to translate news from E to C and C to E competence • Knowing how to trans-​edit news from E to C and C to E • Knowing how to proceed with self-​assessment • Knowing how to engage peer assessment • Knowing ideological issues in the news translation Knowledge of • Knowing how to apply relevant translation theories to news translation translation tasks (e.g. skopostheorie, framing) theory • Knowing how to develop a translator’s “self-​concept” with help of relevant theories Extra-​linguistic • Knowing subject area knowledge (e.g. economics, finance, law, knowledge medicine and etc.) • Knowing cross-​disciplinary and cross-​cultural knowledge • Knowing information mining techniques Professionalism • Knowing the workflow of trans-​editors and dynamics of news industry • Knowing how to facilitate effective communication and work in a translation team • Knowing how to cope with the time pressure Linguistic competence

Source: Adapted from Hu (2018a, p.74).

Possible explanations for differences in curriculum design It is not surprising that there are many differences between Course A and Course B in terms of curriculum design and different aspects of translation competence are focused on.When translation trainers define the intended learning aims, both at the level of overall objectives and specific learning outcomes, many different sources are considered and a few of the most important are listed: • • • • • • •

social needs (often linked to the local or regional economy) professional standards industry’s needs and views institutional policy (or corporate policy in the private sector) institutional constraints (national regulations or legislation; available training resources, etc.) disciplinary considerations (existing research and literature; common practice on other similar courses in your country or others) student/​trainee profiles (Kelly, 2005, p. 22)

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The three contributing factors that determine the formulation of the curriculum in this case study are elaborated below.

Sociocultural background One of the distinguishing factors is the sociocultural background in which courses are offered. To be specific, these two universities that offer news translation course are located in Beijing and Hong Kong, respectively. The two cities are different in many ways (e.g. regulations, language policy and ideology of the society). Hong Kong is an international financial hub, a special administrative region of China as well as a capitalist society with colonial history. The diverse identity of Hong Kong makes it important for translation trainees in Hong Kong to think critically about ideological issues in the international news. This may explain why Trainer B places considerable emphasis on designation of a targeted readership as trainees are expected to assess ideological stance of the commissioning institution before they translate.

Institutional context The institutional context is the second consideration in the formulation of the curriculum and this includes institutional background, positioning, policy and resources. In this case study, University A is renowned for its prominence in the field of economics and finances and the school’s policy dictates maintenance of competitiveness in these studies and this affects the design of Course A in many ways. For one thing, the intended learning objectives of Course A clearly outlines its specialized area that is, journalistic discourse in the field of finance and economics. For another, the “Thinking outside the box” exercise is devised to deepen students’ understanding of the subject area knowledge in the economic and financial areas. By comparison, University B is less focused and Course B, consequently, is less subject-​ oriented. Furthermore, University A has connections with the industry as collaborative programs have been set up for professionals (i.e. veteran trans-​editors) to be included in the course design and assessment. It is acknowledged that their feedback is market-​oriented and can better prepare students for the journalism industry.

Trainers’ perspectives Trainers’ individual condition (e.g. personal belief, academic and professional background and decision-​making power) also affects the design of a curriculum. Specialization implies reducing breadth of content in favour of depth in one particular field (Kelly, 2005), so it is the trainer’s self-​concept and belief that determines which content should be put at the fore-​front or set aside. For example, both trainers in the case study incorporate trans-​adaptation as one of the teaching units, as they recognize its predominance in methods for translating international news.

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Moreover, Trainer A places emphasis on reflective learning while Trainer B believes in cooperative learning and accordingly, reflective journals are required after each translation task in Course A and team translation and group presentation are specified requirements in Course B. It is also worth mentioning that both trainers in the case study are solo lecturers, which means that they may have considerable say in the overall course design and curriculum design (Kelly, 2005). Translation trainers can decide the intended learning objectives, teaching content, sequences and assessment exclusively by themselves. For example, Trainer B said in the interview that he may consider incorporating the writing of reflective journals in the next term’s assignment after the interviewer’s recommendation.

Conclusion The present chapter sets out to compare the teaching of news translation from a curricular perspective, in which three major aspects (i.e. learning objectives, teaching and learning activities, and evaluation) are compared. Building on the existing translation competence model, this study aims to provide the readers with an integrated competence model specifically for news translation. Some translation competences are highlighted to be a qualified news translator (e.g. knowing features of journalistic genre and style, the differences of English and Chinese news, newspaper news and broadcast news; knowing how to translate and trans-​edit news from E to C and C to E, how to proceed with self-​assessment and peer assessment; knowing subject area knowledge, cross-​disciplinary and cross-​cultural knowledge and information mining techniques; knowing the workflow of trans-​editors and dynamics of news industry, etc.). The mapping of an all-​inclusive profile of eligible news translators is conducive to curriculum development as the model can serve as the reference framework for translation trainers (e.g. devising intended learning objectives and related learning activities) and translation services (e.g. setting benchmarks for recruitment of news translators) alike. Furthermore, the differences in curriculum planning can be attributed to the differences in sociocultural background, institutional context and the trainer’s own perspectives. If translation trainers take the initiative to consider these elements and carefully design the course, translation trainees will benefit tremendously. It is hoped that the results and discussion reported in this study can provide an initial demonstration of professional standards of a news translator and important considerations in the curriculum design. To conclude, the methodology of this research can be transferred to study translation of other fields. This study has investigated the translation competences specifically in the news subarea and one case is with strong economic and financial background. Similar research can be conducted in some other domain or on cases with prominence in other fields of subject. This will further enrich translator training in general.

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Notes 1 The EMT, namely The European Master’s in Translation.This project was born in a period of important changes for the translator’s profession. The main goal of the EMT project is to raise the quality standards of translation programmes around Europe. 2 “Two Sessions” is the abbreviated term for the two national conventions held by the National People’s Congress and the Political Consultative Committees of China.

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INDEX

70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China 1, 4–​5, 85, 91–​95, 97, 103–​104, 109, 111–​113, 116, 119–​121, 124, 159 academia and industry 130 action research 148–​149, 153–​157, 159, 164–​166 administrative decentralization 12, 21 advocacy 25, 27, 38–​39 advocator 26 AFP 57 agency 10, 13, 15, 18, 20, 44, 47–​48, 58, 60, 91–​92, 95, 104, 120, 131, 137, 142–​143, 150–​151, 175–​176, 178 agents 18, 21, 46–​47, 67, 71, 83 “alternative modernities” 100 Anglo-​American media 5, 66, 70–​75, 77–​78, 80–​81 anti-​corruption 12 AP 57, 59, 83, 89, 154 Appraisal Theory (AT) 3, 5, 10, 12–​14, 19, 21, 23–​27, 29–​31, 33–​35, 37–​39, 42–​44, 46–​47, 50, 52, 54–​59, 61, 65, 67, 69–​71, 75, 80, 85, 87–​89, 96–​97, 99, 102–​103, 105, 107, 120, 122, 124, 131, 134–​136, 138, 140, 142, 146, 149, 154, 156–​159, 161–​163, 165–​166, 169, 171–​172, 174–​175, 178, 180–​182, 184 authentic training 178 authoritarian states 9 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 1, 23–​24, 26–​29, 34, 38, 41, 94, 102

Biggs and Tang 174 Bo’s dismissal 9, 14–​16, 18, ​20 Bo Xilai 4, 9, 14–​16, 19–​21; Bo Xilai Scandal 14–​15 business news translation 138, 142, 146 cadre management system 12 cadres 9, 12–​14, 18–​21 Catholic missionaries 86 CDA 2–​3, 65, 69 celebrations 93–​95, 104, 112–​113, 124, 159 censorship 3, 5–​6, 9–​10, 22, 94, 97, 148–​150, 154–​155, 163–​165, 167 Central Government 12–​16, 18–​22 central trust 13 “changhong dahei”17 China 1, 3–​7, 9–​10, 12–​15, 21–​27, 31, 35, 38–​46, 48, 51–​56, 59–​61, 70–​76, 79–​80, 83–​105, 107, 109, 111–​115, 117, 119–​125, 136, 145, 148–​151, 154, 156–​160, 163, 166–​167, 170, 172, 175, 182, 184–​185 China Daily 73–​74, 76, 79–​80, 91–​93, 103–​105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121–​123, 125 “China Opportunity” 97, 101 China Radio International 48 “China threat” 88, 94, 96–​97, 100–​102 China’s external communication 122 Chinese Communist Party 4, 14 Chinese media 3, 11, 46, 54, 61, 70, 72–​81, 91, 97, 158, 166 Chongqing 9, 14–​20 Chongqing Daily 14–​15, 17

188 Index

Chongqing Morning Post 15–​16 Chongqing Times 15, 18 clean government 18, 20 cluster 30–​34 cognitive bias 84 collaborative learning 145–​146, 155, 157, 159–​160 colonization 86 combating corruption 18, 20 Compositional 30, 32 condemnation 4, 21 conflict frames 96 content analysis 22, 24, 27, 41, 45, 101 corporate identity 31–​32, 34 COVID-​19 39, 88, 95 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 2 curriculum design 5, 168–​172, 174, 181, 183–​185 data visualization 5, 104–​105, 112, 115, 120–​121, 123–​124 Deng Xiaoping 24, 39, 44 denouncement 4, 21 “destination image” 35, 40 development and cooperation 99 divergence of interests between central and local governments 12 economic and public diplomacy 25 economic approach 10–​11 elites 17, 22, 25, 85, 95–​96, 99 empowerment 29, 37, 146, 148, 151, 157, 161, 163, 165, 185 EMT 168, 184–​185 engagement 1, 38, 69–​70, 75, 99, 179 environment protection 12 ethonocentric 87 evaluation 67–​69, 75–​77, 78, 80, 82, 88, 133, 144, 146, 153–​156, 159–​160, 169, 171, 180, 183–​184 extra-​linguistic knowledge 170, 178 “Fascinating China” 88 foreign policy 6, 84, 88, 100–​102 formal diplomacy 25 framing 2, 4–​6, 22, 31, 33, 67, 82–​84, 86–​88, 100–​101, 124, 147, 176, 181, 185 free speech 11, 96 genre 30, 66, 68, 105, 121, 181, 183–​184 Gile, D. 177, 184 guiding ideology 11, 27 hashtag 98 hierarchical trust 13

historiography 85 home page 24, 30–​34 Hong Kong 5, 61, 71, 75–​76, 79, 87, 93–​99, 101–​102, 158–​159, 162, 171–​173, 182, 185 human interest frames 95 Hurtado Albir, A. 170, 174, 178, 180, 184 ideology 2, 5–​6, 11, 27, 41, 46, 79, 82, 94, 100–​101, 148–​149, 155–​156, 161–​165, 174, 176, 182 indirect control 9–​10 individual differences 123, 130–​131, 137, 143–​144 infographics 5, 103–​109, 111–​113, 115–​117, 119–​125 “Innovative China” 88 integrated competence model 180–​181, 183 interactive meaning 30, 34 internal reference (neibu cankao) 13 international news 101, 121, 132, 147–​150, 154, 156, 164, 166–​167, 171, 177–​178, 182 international news translation 147–​150 journalistic translation norms 137, 144 Kelly, D. 129, 146, 168–​169, 171–​172, 174, 178–​179, 181–​184 Kelly, A. 171, 184 Kiraly, D. 129–​130, 146, 148, 151–​153, 155, 160, 162, 165–​168, 170, 177, 185 language training 179 leadership frame 94–​95, 97 legal approach 11 legitimate ruling 11, 21 licensing system 10 linguistic salience 121 linguistics semiotic modes 32 local distrust 13 local government image 9 local news organizations 9, 13–​15, 18, 20 local protectionism 13 macro-​level design 24, 29 Maritime Silk Road (MSR) 23–​24, 26–​27, 38, 40 “Mass Line” 11 mass media 60, 84, 102, 171, 173–​174, 176 media discourse 2, 6, 65, 67–​69, 72, 78–​79, 82–​83, 176

Index  189

media translation 67, 69, 83, 154, 171, 174, 176 meso-​level analysis 30–​31 metaphor 4–​5, 65–​83, 103–​104, 109–​112, 115–​119, 121–​124 metaphorical images 70–​72, 74, 77–​80 metonymy 119, 123 micro-​level analysis 29, 34–​35, 37–​38, 47 misconduct 19, 21 modes 5, 31–​32, 34, 81, 111, 115, 121, 123 monetary incentives 11 mouthpieces 11 multi-​modal discourse 24, 30, 34 multiculturalism 88 multimodal metaphors 104, 109–​111, 116, 119, 121 multimodality 4–​5, 30, 103–​104, 121, 123 Nation and Macalister 171 “national image” 26, 38, 84, 102 National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) 45, 60 nationalist sentiments 100 Neubert, A. 168–​169, 185 news discourse 1–​6, 43, 45, 63, 65–​77, 79–​81, 83–​84, 91, 100, 103, 121, 184 news framing 2, 4–​6, 82, 86, 88, 101 news media conglomeration 10 news media control 9–​10, 13, 20 news translation 4–​5, 68, 83, 101, 127, 129–​132, 138–​139, 142–​144, 146–​151, 154–​157, 159, 161–​164, 166, 168–​173, 175, 180–​185 news translation strategies 129–​132, 156 Ningbo 23–​24, 27, 30, 32–​33, 35–​38, 41, 48 Ningbo Zhoushan Port (NZP) 24, 30–​34, 40 non-​Party newspapers 14–​15 novice and expert translators 129–​131, 143 Nye, J.S. 25, 39–​41

political speech 66, 68–​69, 75, 81 political speeches 4, 67, 82–​83 porcelain 86 port cities 23, 40 port studies 23 portrayals of China 85, 87, 89 positioning 3, 41, 47, 65, 67, 69, 75, 77–​78, 80–​81, 83, 170, 182, 185 potential resources 39 power relations 15, 20 pragmatic nationalism 88 press control 10 professionalism 4, 6, 34, 57, 140, 170, 175, 178–​179 promotion mechanism 12 propaganda 3, 10–​11, 14–​15, 20, 41, 89 propaganda authorities 15 public anger 13 public diplomacy (PD) 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 35, 38, 39, 40, 90, 92 public diplomacy represented domestically 4, 23–24, 25–27, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 37, 38–40 qualitative research 172, 184–​185 quotation 67, 69–​70, 72, 74–​77, 80–​81, 95, 146; quotes 57, 67–​69, 72, 74–​78, 133, 135

orientalism 27, 86, 99, 101–​102 ownership 10, 46, 91, 162

re-​centralization 12 recontextualization 65–​70, 72, 76–​78, 80–​82 Reference News 156–​157, 162, 165 reflection 33, 153, 155, 158–​166 reflective journals 170, 177, 180, 183 reform 9, 12, 16, 22, 24, 39, 41, 85, 87, 99, 151, 158, 166 regime support 13, 21 regulatory powers 12 rejuvenation 26, 28, 87–​88 reported speech 67, 74, 76–​77 reporting verbs 67, 69–​70, 72, 75–​76, 78, 80 representational meaning 30 Reuters News Agency 48

PACTE 168–​169, 185 Party newspaper 14 “Party principle” 11 Party State 3, 10–​11, 14, 20–​21 People’s Daily 91, 101 “place identity” 35 political approach 10, 20 political discourse 38, 41, 65–​69, 81–​83 political metaphor 4, 65–​77, 79–​81, 83 political scandals 9, 21

safeguarding of state legitimacy 14 salience and saliency 120 SARS 6, 88–​89, 101–​102 scaffolding 151, 157, 163 self-​censorship 151–​152 semiotic resources 104, 111, 115, 119–​120 “Singing Red, Striking Black” 17–​18 sinophilia 85 sinophobia 85 situated learning 146, 157–​159

190 Index

social and cultural representations 35 social constructivist approach 2, 146, 148–​149, 151–​152, 155, 167, 185 social media 3–​6, 54, 58, 84, 88, 91–​92, 96, 98, 100, 102, 132, 149–​150, 163, 170 social stability 12, 37–​38 soft power 24–​25, 28, 35, 38–​39, 41 specialization 174, 182 specialized news translation 139, 154, 157 split 20, 71–​74, 76, 80 sponsorship 10 stakeholders 1, 13, 25, 38–​40, 93, 95 stance 3, 69–​70, 75–​77, 79, 83–​84, 87–​88, 158, 176, 182 state legitimacy 4, 9, 11–​17, 19, 21 stereotypical 86, 88, 93 “strong nation” 27–​29, 34, 36–​38 “strong party” 27–​28, 34, 37 “strong port” 31, 34 student translator 142 supercluster 31–​34 thematic analysis 24, 27 themes 4–​5, 15, 19–​20, 27–​29, 35–​37, 45, 83, 86, 93–​96, 98, 111 Thoughts of Governance 24 Three Gorges Metropolis Daily 14–​15 Tianjin Daily 43 “top-​level design” 26–​27, 29 trans-​editor 5, 143, 175 trans-​print 20, 93, 95 transforming China 87, 99 translation competence 5, 145, 168–​171, 173–​175, 177–​181, 183–​186

translation habits 138 translation norms 137, 144, 148–​149, 151, 153–​159, 161, 163–​165, 167 translation pedagogy 1, 4–​5, 127, 129–​130, 146, 151, 155, 167 translation quality 5, 133, 137, 139, 142–​143, 146, 153–​154, 157, 175, 184 translation routines 132, 143 translator training 5, 143, 146, 168, 170, 183–​184 Translators Association of China (TAC) 170 Trump, Donald 95 types of infographics 104–​108, 112, 122–​124 viability 38, 151, 157, 161–​162 visual images 31–​32, 45, 105 visual salience 121 “water element” 36–​38 “white gold” 86 Wisers.com 14 World Press Photo Contest (WPP) 43–​44, 46, 48, 54, 58, 60 World Press Photo Foundation (WPP) 48 wrongdoings 11–​13 Xi Jinping 24, 26–​27, 40–​41, 65, 71–​75, 88, 102 Xi Thought 24, 26–​30, 35, 37–​39 Xinhua News Agency 10, 13, 15, 18, 20, 44, 48, 60, 91