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My research project investigates the discourse of human rights in mainland China’s
news media: The People’s Daily (Chinese language) and China Daily (English
language). I focus on how the discourse is represented in the Chinese context, how it
has changed over a period of 40 years -- from December 1978 (i.e., since the policy of
Reform and Opening-up) to the present day -- and how the discourse differs between
the two languages in the two publications.
I am building a specialized corpus of Chinese human rights reporting from the news
media, and analyzing the occurrences of words of interest, including human rights,
Chinese human rights and human rights in China, using corpus linguistic tools. The
data will be examined critically, looking at the lexical choice, topic focus, stance,
ordering of information, and representation of voices in the news accounts. For example,
the English-language stories always mention X, while the Chinese-language versions
never mention Y. In addition, interviews with both Chinese and non-Chinese people
who live in China of different ages, genders, educational backgrounds and nationalities
will be included, aiming to explore their perceptions of and attitudes towards human
rights in China and to the discourse of Chinese human rights in the media. The
sociocultural issues that accompany translation is also explored.