Abstract
This corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of news reports on air pollution published from 2008 through 2015 by China Daily, China’s largest official English-language newspaper, reveals a significant attitudinal shift around the end of 2011 as regards public awareness of increasing air pollution levels in China and related public criticism. It also constructs a clear image of the increasing determination and resolve of the Chinese central government over the course of this 8-year period to take action to effectively reduce air pollution. This study highlights the submissive role played by the official Chinese press in their reporting on air pollution under the strict censorship system of the Communist Party of China (CPC), as well as the socio-political role that international sporting events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games played in raising both public and governmental awareness of environmental issues.
Introduction
The extent of air pollution in China first became a hot-button topic of China’s public discourse and media agenda when four American cyclists attending the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing wore face masks to protect themselves from what they perceived to be high levels of air pollution. This action, which was taken as an insult by an advanced Western country to its developing host country, received severe criticism from Chinese netizens and the Chinese media. Soon thereafter, the cyclists were pressured to apologize for their ‘decision’ (China Daily Agencies, 2008).
On the evening of 22 October 2011, the issue of air pollution once again attracted the attention of the public in dramatic fashion when Pan Shiyi, co-founder and CEO of the large real estate development company, SOHO China, forwarded data on the day’s air quality and PM2.5 indexes − 439 and 408, respectively – to the attention of the US Embassy in Beijing. Mr Pan also posted a comment to Weibo, a popular Chinese microblog, expressing his concern about the poor air quality in the Mandarin language as ‘Maya! You Duhai!’ (‘Oh my God! It’s poisonous!’). Pan’s communiqués stood in sharp contrast to a same-day announcement by the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau that the air quality on that day was ‘slightly polluted’ (Ma, 2015).
A few days later, a crisis of public trust in official measurements of Beijing’s air quality quickly spread throughout China when people learned that hourly reports of air quality taken by the air-quality monitor atop the US Embassy in Beijing indicated concentrations of PM2.5 pollutants high enough to damage people’s respiratory systems. Three months later, in January 2012, after intense discussion about air pollution on Chinese social media networks, and following the public outcry in reaction to a dense smog that occurred later that winter, the Beijing Environmental Monitoring Center began posting daily PM2.5 index readings on its website. This new practice of regularly posting data on PM2.5 levels was soon adopted by other cities in China.
By analyzing the texts of news reports and editorials published by China Daily from 2011 through 2013, Chen (2014) noted that a significant attitudinal shift occurred over this 3-year period – with the consent of the Chinese central government – with respect to the realities of air pollution in China. This shift was brought about largely through increasing public pressure on governmental agencies. Media representations of the issue, which initially sought to deny the validity of negative pollution data emanating from Western air quality monitoring facilities such as the US Embassy in Beijing, began noticeably to project a more objective and less nationalistic stance and to accept that the surge of negative data about high air pollution levels in China was indeed credible.
Under the pressure, the Chinese central government signaled through official media reports that the topic of air pollution was open as a subject for public discussion, at least to an extent given existing censorship criteria. In response to this policy change, and because the government had now voiced its willingness and determination to address this problem, various and often conflicting points of view began to appear in public discourse (Tong, 2014). These public discussions, as well as a number of new strategic directives issued by the government, served to encourage city and regional governments in China to implement their own measures to control air pollution. This new focus was in sharp contrast to their previous emphasis which focused on gross domestic product (GDP) growth – a vital index for local-level Chinese officials seeking to be promoted in their positions (Chen, 2017).
However, while the official Chinese media was now permitted to more or less openly address the subject of air pollution, one rule had to be obeyed: News reports are not allowed in any way to directly threaten the legitimacy of the government. The Chinese central government’s strategy of ‘conditional public opinion guidance’ (Tai, 2014) was directed at China’s international news outlets and in particular at news reports made available to foreign media outlets such as CNN. A survey conducted on China’s domestic news reporting to CNN from May 1988 through December 1992 indicated that the official Chinese English-language press wanted to communicate to the world that, after the 1989 pro-democracy movement, the state-controlled news media are steadily becoming more positive, both politically and socially, and that despite the sanctions imposed on China’s economy by a coalition of Western nations in response to perceived human rights abuses, the country is both stable and strong (Yu, 1997).
Similarly, the basic guideline for media reporting on air pollution in China was to construct and support a positive image of the Chinese central government as a responsible actor in this regard (Liu and Li, 2017; Xu, 2012). To achieve this goal, it was also assumed that certain facts which might possibly damage China’s international image would be omitted from news reports. In other words, the editorial decision to publish or not to publish a given story must be based on a commonly held set of value-based criteria which support the overall national interest. In their studies on the rationale of ideologies, Foucault (1982) and Van Dijk (1998) deduced that, when it comes to ideology, what is not represented publicly tends to be of equal or greater importance than what is represented. This tendency often results in one-sided perspectives relative to the mental representations, convictions, opinions, attitudes and evaluations which are shared by members of a specific social group.
Researchers have observed that news in all its forms is seldom a value-free reflection of the facts (Fowler, 1991; Van Dijk, 1988). In addition, due to the inevitable process of ‘discursive simplification’ (Fairclough, 2005: 55), it is practically impossible from a discourse-theoretical perspective for any news discourse to be fully independent or impartial (Jäger and Maier, 2009). With these two hypotheses in mind, it is possible to adopt the perspectives of critical discourse analysis (CDA), including comparison and contrast, to unveil the powers and machinations which lie behind this process of societal and institutional negotiation and control.
This study will compare official Chinese news reports on air pollution over the span of two time periods: 4 years before and 4 years after 22 October 2011, the date on which Shiyi Pan posted his complaint about China’s air pollution on Weibo, as reported by China Daily, the leading official English-language press of China. Not only by focusing on how language was used at various levels of discourse but also by investigating China Daily’s behind-the-scene agendas and strategies in their reporting on air pollution, this research aims to answer the following three questions: (1) How was smog, a frequent form of air pollution in China, constructed in public discourse both before and after Pan Shiyi posted his comment on Weibo? (2) In what ways did the official Chinese press serve to discursively construct the image and intent of the Chinese central government and the Chinese people as the two main social actors relative to the growing concern about air pollution? (3) From the perspective of China Daily, what role did events surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games, in conjunction with other contemporary socio-political factors, play in raising public awareness of the issue of air pollution in China? In the ‘Discussion’ section, I will also examine how various societal and institutional powers in China exerted influence and direction in crafting national and international perception of the realities of air pollution in China from 2008 through 2015.
Materials and methods
Data for this study were collected by manually searching the online archives of China Daily for relevant news reports. 1 I used two basic expressions as search criteria: ‘air pollution’ and ‘China’, and the time frame for these searches was 1 January 2008 through 31 December 2015. The next step was to read through each article carefully to assess whether it promotes a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation centering on the issue of air pollution in China (Gamson, 1992). According to the theory of news framing, these four characteristics are of vital importance in the coherent construction of an issue whereby some aspects of a perceived reality are selected and made salient in a news text (Entman, 1993). However, because all four characteristics are not always present in a given news text, I chose to select articles containing at least two of them. In order to benefit from another point of view, I invited an American scholar who specializes in content analysis of media to join me in this selection process. Together, we were able to compile a total of 188 relevant news reports. To determine the optimal time frame for this study, I also conducted a preliminary search of the China Daily website for reports published prior to January 2008. No relevant texts could be located for the entire year of 2007, strongly indicating that this issue did not become part of China Daily’s news agenda until 2008, the year that China first hosted the Olympics in Beijing.
Next, I grouped the 188 news texts into two datasets, Dataset 1 (‘before’) and Dataset 2 (‘after’) relative to 22 October 2011 – the date on which Pan Shiyi posted his remarks on air pollution to Weibo. Each dataset therefore covers a roughly 4-year period. The source material in Dataset 1, published from 1 January 2008 through 22 October 2011, consisted of 23 news texts (2468 word types, 11,994 word tokens). In Dataset 2, the source material consisted of 165 news texts (8183 word types, 104,526 word tokens) published from 23 October 2011 through 31 December 2015.
To investigate and compare the two datasets, I employed a corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) approach. In order to analyze how China Daily discursively constructed news reports on air pollution during the two 4-year periods, I processed the datasets using the AntConc software program, a freeware corpus analysis toolkit used for concordancing and text analysis (Anthony, 2011). As an analytical methodology, I employed CDA in order to reveal ideological bias behind media discourse as it relates to the production, maintenance and change of social and power relations in society (Fairclough, 1995; Fowler, 1991; Van Dijk, 1998). Although a corpus of linguistic data does not in itself provide any new information, the application of corpus-linguistic analytical tools can provide ‘a new perspective on the familiar’ (Hunston, 2002). Moreover, the balanced application of quantitative corpus-linguistic methods together with CDA enables linguistic analysts to make richer observations than are normally possible using basic qualitative or quantitative methods of text analysis (Baker, 2010; Baker et al., 2008; Bevitori, 2010, 2015; Fløttum et al., 2014; Kim, 2014; Partington, 2004, 2015).
In order to identify contrast and compare the two corpora, and to enhance the study’s validity given that the size of one dataset was significantly larger than the other, I used the AntConc keywords function. According to Baker (2006: 125), it is possible to identify keywords that occur more frequently in one corpus as compared to a second corpus by using statistical tests which take into account the keyword frequency and total word count of both corpora. Following the AntConc keyword analysis, I selected words directly related to the issue of air pollution in China and examined them by comparing word frequencies relative to the size of their respective corpus and by studying collocates to ascertain how these words were used. Love and Baker (2015) found that a combined analysis of keywords and words predetermined by the researcher to be relevant produces a more thorough and valid result.
To answer the first research question, as described in the ‘Introduction’ section, the next step was to identify words that refer to types or degrees of air pollution. The nouns ‘smog’ and ‘haze’ were predetermined by the author to indicate pollution types. To answer the second and third research questions, I used the words ‘people’, ‘government’ and ‘Games’ to search for texts about social and political influences related to air pollution in China during the ‘before’ and ‘after’ periods. Then, to evaluate more precisely what changes had taken place over time in China Daily’s construction of air pollution, I examined collocates and contexts of these three words. Finally, in order to confirm this study’s approach to qualitative analysis of the two corpora, I invited three experienced scholars in the fields of discourse studies and media studies – one American and two of Chinese nationality – to join me in examining and discussing the context-based data. I conducted an online Skype interview with each scholar and drew my final conclusions only when all four of us had reached a consensus.
Findings
Table 1 shows the 40 strongest keywords in Dataset 1 and Dataset 2 as obtained by comparing the relative word frequencies to total word tokens (per million words) in each corpus. Each keyword is ranked in terms of its keyness score.
Keywords derived from comparing the two datasets and relative frequencies. 2
In Table 1, I note that the keywords common to both datasets were the basic search terms ‘air’, ‘pollution’ and ‘China’. The salient terms in the keywords list of Dataset 1 were ‘Olympic’, ‘IOC’ (International Olympic Committee), ‘Games’ and ‘Expo’, all of which related to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and Shanghai Expo 2010 which took place during this time period. While place name references to ‘Taiwan’, ‘Dongguan’, ‘Guangzhou’, ‘Guangdong’ and ‘Hong Kong’ (a combination of ‘Hong’ and ‘Kong’), all of which are located in the southern China, were among the keywords in Dataset 1, references to two northern Chinese cities, ‘Shijiazhuang’ and ‘Beijing’, were present in the Dataset 2 keyword list. This may be explained by the considerable influence on Chinese society of these two major international events as well as to a general lack of awareness in northern China during the Dataset 1 period of the air pollution problem.
Terms commonly used to refer to air pollution such as ‘smog’ (also ‘smoggy’), ‘PM’ (particulate matter, as used in pollution measurements such as ‘PM2.5’ and ‘PM10’) and ‘haze’ ranked 1st, 2nd and 26th among the keywords of Dataset 2. Another noticeable difference was the high frequency of personal pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘my’ and ‘their’, as well as the common Chinese surname ‘Wang’, which could be indicative of an increasing public awareness of air pollution. Words related to personal health such as ‘lung’, ‘lungs’, ‘patients’, ‘hospital’, ‘respiratory’, ‘masks’ and ‘purifiers’ also stood out in Dataset 2 period may indicate that the public had come to realize the harmfulness of air pollution and had begun to take action to protect themselves. To further investigate how China Daily discursively constructed its reporting on air pollution in China, I also used the AntConc program to examine immediate collocates of ‘smog’ and ‘haze’.
Air pollution: ‘Smog’ and ‘haze’
While the word ‘smog’ appeared 417 times (3989 times per million words) in Dataset 2, it appeared only five times (417 times per million words) in Dataset 1. Of note in this regard is that the positioning of a qualifier immediately before its subject is frequently used to define unique properties such as time, place and quality (Biber et al., 1998). After carefully identifying the qualifiers used to modify the word ‘smog’, I grouped them into six categories based on the features shown in Table 2 in order to identify the visibility, severity and color of the smog, how long the smog persisted, when and where the smog occurred and to predict future smog events.
Collocates of ‘smog’.
Numbers enclosed in parentheses indicate a word’s total frequency of use.
The data in Table 2 show that in Dataset 1, only one word token – ‘photochemical’ (83 times per million words) – was used to modify ‘smog’. In Dataset 2, however, there are 32 types of collocates and 151 word tokens (1445 times per million words). ‘Photochemical’, a term that denotes smog’s effect on visibility but which does not imply whether it is harmful, is also the only collocate that is present in both datasets.
In Dataset 2, 118 word tokens (1129 times per million words, 15 word types altogether) are used to describe the severity and pernicious nature of smog – for example, ‘worst’, ‘choking’, ‘filthy’, ‘murky’, ‘acrid’ and ‘notorious’. These qualifiers also convey attitudinal values and indicate China Daily’s negative editorial stance relative to smog (Martin, 2000; White, 2006). Also of note in Dataset 2 is that the modifiers ‘lingering’, ‘continuous’, ‘constant’, ‘weeklong’, ‘persistent’ and ‘frequent’ are used to describe the smog’s frequency and duration and to evaluate its seriousness relative to other smog events. To indicate when the smog occurred, the words ‘spring’, ‘winter’, ‘recent’, ‘November’ and ‘October’ were used. In one instance, ‘Beijing’ was used as a qualifier to indicate where the smog occurred. In Dataset 2, ‘yellow’ and ‘gray’ were used to indicate the color of smog. The qualifiers ‘potential’ and ‘possible’, which were used to point out the threat of future smog events, are evidence that the smog problem had indeed attracted the attention of China’s English-language press and sparked widespread concern.
The way in which ‘haze’ is defined in news texts frequently leads to confusion. For this reason, it was necessary to more clearly distinguish between the closely related words ‘smog’, ‘haze’ and ‘fog’. According to Collins Cobuild English Dictionary (Collins, 2000), these terms are defined as follows: (1) ‘Smog’ is a mixture of fog and smoke which commonly occurs in densely populated, industrial cities, (2) ‘Haze’ is light mist of water droplets or dust particles in the air which reduces visibility to some extent and (3) ‘Fog’ is an accumulation of tiny water droplets in the air that forms thick clouds which considerably reduce visibility considerably. In these news reports, it was apparent that ‘smog’ is typically represented as a type of air pollution that can harm one’s health, ‘haze’ as a type of air pollution that may or may not present a health hazard and ‘fog’ as a type of air pollution that is not hazardous to one’s health. Whether or not ‘haze’ actually is hazardous to one’s health depends on whether it consists solely of water droplets (not harmful) or a mixture of water droplets combined with microscopic dust particles or other airborne pollutants (harmful). The question therefore arose of how most accurately to interpret the intended meaning of ‘haze’ as used in Dataset 1 and Dataset 2.
I searched for the word ‘haze’ in both corpora and then carefully studied the context of its use in order to assess whether it referred to a harmless suspension of airborne water droplets (the same as ‘fog’) or to a potentially harmful mixture of water droplets and airborne pollutants. In Dataset 1, there were 43 instances (3585 times per million words) of the word ‘haze’. In 12 instances, this term denoted fog (27.9%) and in 31 instances it denoted a mixture of water droplets and airborne pollutants (72.1%). In Dataset 2, ‘haze’ appeared 302 times (2889 times per million words) and all instances (100%), it was used to denote a mixture of water droplets and dust or other airborne pollutants.
In the process of compiling Dataset 1, I noted that ‘haze’ first appeared in the official Chinese English-language press as a form of air pollution in October of 2008, about 2 months after the Beijing Olympic Games. This utterance is as follows: Extract 1: PM10 and black carbon particles are the main cause of haze, Liu said. (9 October 2008)
I proceeded to carefully read each utterance containing the word ‘haze’ and noticed that after 9 October 2008, all instances of ‘haze’ referred to a type of air pollution, whereas prior to this date, all instances were used as an equivalent to ‘fog’. These usages appear to indicate a possible shift in China Daily’s representation of haze as a harmless, fog-like representation to one that includes dust and potentially harmful airborne pollutants. This inconsistent and contradictory use by China Daily of the term ‘haze’ may also indicate an attitudinal shift in its editorial stance regarding the position of the Chinese central government on the subject of air pollution. It may furthermore indicate that immediately following the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, both the official English-language press and the general public had become more aware of the existence and severity of air pollution in China.
Major actors: ‘Government’ and ‘people’
The major actors in news discourse on the subject of air pollution in China are the government, which includes the Chinese central government, local governments and the Chinese people. As the nation’s administrative organization, the central government is generally considered to be responsible for addressing environmental problems such as air pollution. The people, on the contrary, are typically viewed as the passive victims of air pollution. However, it is the people who are responsible for monitoring government policies and actions and for carrying out orders and implementing programs set forth by the government. Below, I examine immediate collocates of ‘government’ and ‘people’ in order to better understand how China Daily’s news reporting represented these main social actors on this issue.
Table 3 lists the total number (i.e. frequency of use) of immediate collocates of the word ‘government’ in the two 4-year periods of news reports. I divided these collocates into three categories: (1) Chinese central government; (2) local government such as ‘the Guangdong government’, ‘the Shanghai government’, ‘the county government’ and ‘the provincial government’; and (3) others, such as ‘the UK government’. Then, I carefully examined the contexts of all instances of ‘government’ in order to determine whether this word was used to refer to the Chinese central government or to local government.
Raw frequencies, relative frequencies (per million words) and percentages of references to ‘government’ in Dataset 1 and Dataset 2.
In Table 3, Dataset 2, references to the Chinese central government (63.9%) appeared more frequently than references to local government (33.5%). In Dataset 1, however, the percentage of references to local governments (69.7%) was much higher than to the central government (30.3%). I can perhaps interpret this data to mean that during the Dataset 2 period, the Chinese central government became more active in fighting air pollution in response to steadily worsening conditions and growing pressure from the public.
Because it is to be expected that the Chinese central government will continue to play a vital and ongoing role in reducing air pollution levels in China, I sought to assess what actions the government has undertaken thus far, what actions it has proposed to take in the near future and what actions the people have recommended be taken (see Table 4). After carefully reading each utterance containing the word ‘government’, I selected one of them to represent – to the extent possible – each type of action in the two datasets.
Discursive construction of Chinese central government actions on air pollution.
Of particular interest is the remarkable difference in percentages between the two datasets as shown in Table 4. In Dataset 2, although the percentages of the three categories (actions taken, actions proposed and actions recommended) were roughly the same, suggestions for future government action in reducing air pollution stood out in Dataset 1 at 70%. I also infer from Table 4 that the Chinese central government undertook an increasingly greater number of initiatives designed to control air pollution during the Dataset 2 period. For example, the government imposed a ‘no-car day’ and informed the public in advance as to when this new regulation would go into effect. In addition, the central government acted to better inform the public on a regular basis of air quality measurements and the presence of dangerous PM2.5 and PM10 pollutants and signaled its intentions to enforce laws related to environmental protection. I would also note that the public recommendation in Dataset 2 to reduce the number of government vehicles was more practical that the relatively vague suggestion in Dataset 1 to make ‘real improvements’ in reducing air pollution levels.
From the above analysis, I can construe that during the Dataset 2 period, China Daily sought to present a positive image of the Chinese central government in assuming responsibility for meeting its goals to curb air pollution. The percentages for actions taken and for actions proposed totaled 30% in Dataset 1% and 66% in Dataset 2. Also, the descriptions of government response to the problem of air pollution – past, future and recommended – were more specific in Dataset 2.
I now come to the other main actor on this issue: the Chinese people. Using the AntConc program, I found that the word ‘people’ appeared 20 times (1668 times per million words) in Dataset 1 and 262 times (2507 times per million words) in Dataset 2. By examining the co-text (left 5 and right 5) of these instances, I discovered many collocates which addressed the life and health of people (see Table 5). The relevant collocates in Dataset 1 appeared a total of six times (500 times per million words) and in Dataset 2 a total of 56 times (536 times per million words).
Collocates of ‘people’.
In Table 5, Dataset 2 contains 11 specific collocates, while Dataset 1 contains three general expressions: ‘the health of people’, ‘healthy people’ and ‘people’s health’. In Dataset 2, a group of collocates such as ‘people’s health’, ‘people’s daily lives’, ‘people’s lives’ and ‘people’s livelihood’ are general expressions, while the remainder are hyponyms of the word ‘health’ in a broad sense. More specific expressions included references to the human respiratory system such as ‘respiratory diseases’, ‘lungs’ and ‘bloodstream’, which may indicate that China Daily began to take notice of the range of potential health hazards which can result from breathing polluted air and that during the Dataset 2 period, the Chinese media and general public had in general come to better understand the potential health implications of high air pollution levels.
Socio-political factors: ‘Games’
It may not be a coincidence that China Daily began using the word ‘haze’ in a clearly negative sense approximately 2 months after the close of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. In its hosting of major international sporting events, China has thus far practiced the ‘Whole Nation System’ – a centralized approach in which the State Physical Culture Administration of China pays salaries to outstanding coaches who train talented athletes to participate in the Olympics and other international sports competitions with the aim of winning medals to further China’s glory (Lu and Qin, 2009). The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games was a clear public expression of the ‘Whole Nation System’. The Chinese central government brought human and material resources from around the country to Beijing because it viewed this major international event as an important venue for showcasing China’s rapid progress in globalization. Foreign athletes, journalists, officials and visitors were also invited to Beijing with the goal of connecting the Chinese people to an increasingly interconnected world (Wingwah, 2010). The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games was undoubtedly one of the most important public events to be held in China during the Dataset 1 period. Two years later, China hosted yet another major sporting event – the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games.
To better understand the role that these two international sporting events played in raising public awareness of the issue of air pollution in China, I used AntConc to search for instances of the word ‘Games’. I then carefully studied each utterance containing this word in the two corpora to ascertain to which ‘Games’ it referred, with the goals of providing a basis for comparing the ‘before’ and ‘after’ sample periods and more deeply exploring the socio-political effect these two important sporting events may have had on discussions about air pollution in China. The results of these searches revealed that the word ‘Games’ appeared 44 times (3669 times per million words) in Dataset 1: 33 instances (75%) referred to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and 11 instances (25%) referred to the 2010 Guangzhou Asia Games. ‘Games’ appeared 19 times (182 times per million words) in Dataset 2: 14 instances (73.7%) referred to the 2008 Beijing Olympics Games, 3 (15.8%) to the 2010 Guangzhou Asia Games and 2 (10.5%) to the Beijing Olympic Winter Games that are scheduled to take place in 2022.
The following four extracts, which I selected from news texts in the two datasets, show how China Daily commented on the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2010 Guangzhou Asia Games. They also are indicative of the considerable influence these events had in raising public awareness of the problem of air pollution in China: Extract 2: Seven years ago, China’s successful bid to host the Olympics and its commitment to a green Games only accelerated the move. (Dataset 1, 7 August 2008) Extract 3: Beijing enjoyed beautiful days during the Games, and the model was copied by other cities hosting big international events such as the Shanghai Expo and the Guangzhou Asian Games. (Dataset 2, 2 November 2011) Extract 4: Public concerns about air quality before next year’s Asian Games have grown stronger after this southern city reported days of heavy haze and dust last week. The local government has pledged to ensure at least 96 percent of days with better air quality next year when the 16th Asian Games are held. (Dataset 2, 2 November 2011) Extract 5: However, Beijing’s joint bid with Zhangjiakou, Hebei province, for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games has offered a chance to reduce the pollution through cooperative efforts. (Dataset 2, 31 October 2014)
It is evident that China Daily placed a high value on its reporting on the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games when it used the socially positive modifier ‘green’ in the phrase ‘a green Games’ (see Extract 2). The same positive evaluation is seen in its use in Extract 3 of the word ‘beautiful’ in the phrase ‘beautiful days’ (Martin, 2000; Martin and White, 2005). According to the text in Extract 3, initiatives employed during the 2008 Olympic Games to prevent high air pollution levels such as temporarily closing some factories, temporarily halting the construction of roads and buildings and limiting the use of private transportation were to be emulated for the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games and the 2010 Shanghai Expo. Extracts 4 and 5 highlight the government’s determination to regulate and control air pollution and serve to project a positive image of China’s central government as being both responsible and powerful. This is particularly true for instances related to the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games and the scheduled 2022 Winter Olympics.
China’s central government now views its hosting of major international events as so vital to promoting and maintaining a positive image of the country that it will take every necessary measure to ensure that high air pollution levels do not threaten the success of these events. In today’s China, the subject of air pollution involves much more than just the environment.
Discussion
The findings of this study reveal that China Daily underwent an attitudinal shift in its editorial policies regarding news reports on air quality in China following Pan’s negative post on Weibo on 22 October 2011. The shift in meaning of the word ‘haze’ from ‘fog’ to ‘a mixture of water droplets and airborne pollutants’ on the very day after the 2008 Beijing Olympics – as well as the important effect that international sporting events such as the Olympic Games and the Asia Games have had on the Central government’s policies to regulate and reduce air pollution – implies that air pollution is now perceived in China to be more than merely an environmental issue. Furthermore, despite the fact that air quality in China had clearly deteriorated during the Dataset 1 period (2008–2011), China Daily did manage during the Dataset 2 period (2011–2015) to successfully construct a more positive public image of the Chinese central government as a responsible and decisive actor with regard to air pollution.
Relevant facts that were not represented in the two datasets are also worth examining. By running AntConc searches for the term ‘PM’ in Dataset 2, and by studying the co-text of its instances in the sample texts, I could find no mention of published scientific reports on the relationship between PM2.5, PM10, lung cancer and mortality rates. This, despite the fact that China Daily openly admitted the health risks of air pollution and in particular the possible harm that PM10 airborne pollutants can do to people’s respiratory systems. Epidemiologic studies of air pollution published in China also showed that short-term effects of exposure to certain types of air pollution were sufficient grounds for an increase in health-impact assessments and mortality rates (Chen et al., 2012; Liu et al., 2017). However, information about the potential hazards of air pollution to people’s health was skillfully omitted from news stories. This aligns with the observation that China Daily consistently represented air pollution as merely a type of weather phenomenon that is not harmful to one’s health (Liu and Li, 2017).
The data analyzed as part of this study included news reports for the year 2015, the same year the phenomenal television documentary, Under the Dome – produced by the controversial former CCTV (China’s largest state-run television station) investigative journalist, Jing Chai – was released for public viewing. Chai’s documentary first appeared on 28 February 2015, on the official website of People’s Daily (www.people.com), a major state-run news outlet. Soon thereafter, it was forwarded to a large number of other official and non-official websites where it quickly sparked extensive public debate on the causes and effects of smog on people’s health. A few weeks later, the controversial documentary was removed from the People’s Daily website as well as from other popular Chinese websites. AntConc searches for the keywords ‘Dome’ and ‘Chai’ in news texts published in 2015 produced few results, indicating that China Daily largely neglected the considerable impact the documentary had on public perception of the country’s air pollution problem.
Produced at her own expense, Chai’s 103-minute documentary also presented Chinese audiences with a rather complex set of statistics and indices (including PM2.5 and PM10) together with visual representations of pollution data, on-the-scene photos of various sources of air pollution as well as an accounting of measures being taken by foreign countries to effectively reduce air pollution (Cui, 2017). Chai’s TED-style documentary soon divided the Chinese public into roughly three groups: (1) environmentalists who fully supported Chai’s presentation, (2) ‘nationalists’ who scolded her for the documentary’s potential effect of hindering the further rapid development of the Chinese economy and (3) those who were, because of Chai’s personal story and reputation, suspicious of the statistics she presented and who questioned the causal link between smog and human health (He, 2016).
At the time of its release, Under the Dome and the widespread attention it garnered in the public sphere brought considerable pressure upon the central government and also put China’s high-polluting industries in the spotlight. This may explain why Chai’s controversial documentary was quickly removed from most websites. Despite the increased awareness of the dangers of air pollution that this documentary brought into public view, the official Chinese media, Chinese society and the Chinese central government all remained in many ways unmoved by such concerns over the ensuing years. Yang (2016) observed that this phenomenon can be explained by the unequal power relationship between the Chinese state and its citizens. However, while it is understandable that the first priority of the Chinese state is rightly social and economic stability, it is also true that environmental issues are of fundamental concern (Hilton, 2017).
The purpose of news reporting is to provide accurate information to the public about current and ongoing stories of interest in society. However, my analysis revealed that although some public discussion was allowed, the majority of news reports in the two corpora appeared to be either highly controlled or subtly diplomatic in an effort to assume non-controversial positions on hot-button issues such as air pollution. Eberhardt (2015) has stated that since 2007, China has become the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2). However, both governmental and non-governmental elites in China have chosen to discuss and debate sensitive topics like air pollution and climate change in somewhat playful manner, and there has been little mention of the potential long-term effects of climate change or a serious questioning of existing policies.
Generally speaking, the official Chinese media have tended to report on air pollution using self-legitimizing themes regarding strategies and solutions, albeit at times with a mild dose of self-questioning and self-criticism (Duan and Takahashi, 2017). In their more recent ‘positive propaganda’ approach, however, the official media are providing more convincing and sophisticated messages that continue to meet the strict requirements of state censors while also catering to the public’s growing interest in facts about real-world problems (Stockmann and Gallagher, 2011).
As China’s leading English-language news outlet, China Daily provides a unique window on China to the West. Its ongoing mission is to convey a positive image of the country and to support the authority of the Chinese central government. Indeed, it can be concluded from this study that China Daily has been remarkably consistent in fulfilling this mission by highlighting and emphasizing specific aspects of a perceived reality (Entman, 1993) and by choosing to not include some of the more controversial facts about air pollution in their news reports. By disseminating these subjective perceptions on a ‘repeated, regular [and] scheduled basis’ (Tolson, 1996: 18), journalists frame news with a central organizing idea which provides meaning to an unfolding series of events (Gamson and Modigliani, 1987).
In summary, during the 8-year period of this study, the institutional power of the official Chinese press, together with the authority of the Chinese central government as guided by the Communist Party of China (CPC), effectively determined how news reporting on the subject of air pollution was to be constructed and framed in public discourse. While the content of these news reports appeared to the average Chinese observer to be quite normal, they were in fact being discursively constructed as part of an effective system of censorship.
Conclusion
This corpus-assisted CDA of how air pollution was reported in the official Chinese English-language press was designed to increase the reader’s awareness of how an official, state-run newspaper – in this case, China Daily – employed discoursal strategies to construct news reports that support the objectives and policies of the Chinese central government. It also examines the ways in which China Daily’s selective use of discoursal devices (i.e. the use of evaluative words and general/specific words) and news framing (i.e. the purposeful selection and omission of some facts) contributed to a more or less unified approach in its reporting on air pollution in China from 2008 through 2015. Despite the deteriorating environmental conditions over the years following the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the public image of China’s central government as it relates to the issue of air pollution was discursively constructed as that of a powerful and responsible actor.
This study also seeks to explain the influence of major socio-political events on public awareness of environmental issues, which became apparent following China’s hosting of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games. With its focus on socio-political considerations, this study does not adequately address the broad range of compelling economic events related to China’s rapid development and globalization which occurred during this period. To some extent, this can be viewed as a limitation of the study’s defined scope.
A more comprehensive approach to this topic would expand the discussion by carefully interweaving both socio-economic and economic aspects to explain China’s increasingly positive and hopeful approach to addressing and solving the problems of air pollution. Future researchers may consider collecting relevant data for a longer period of time and employing a discourse-historical approach to analyze the resulting corpus (Wodak and et al, 2009). Also, a diachronic linguistic analysis of such an expanded corpus would likely reveal more precisely how public discourse on air pollution in China has evolved over time. Finally, a more sophisticated process of keyword filtering, in conjunction with the manual (as opposed to machine-assisted) reading and assessment of each individual text, could be employed in future projects to establish clearer data selection criteria (Scott, 2017).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Prof. Zengjun Peng for his assistance in data collection and data analysis, Doc. Junwei Wang and Pro. Yixiang Ge for their assistance in data analysis, Prof. Haitao Liu for his insightful instructions in article structure and the reviewer for his or her critical comments on the earlier version of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.