ABSTRACT

A CRITICAL-DRAMATISTIC STUDY OF RHETORIC: ANALYZING IDEOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF CHINA IN THE REPORTING OF THE KUNMING ATTACK

by Hua Zhu

This thesis argues for a new methodology, namely, critical-dramatistic analysis, for studying the rhetorical construction of reality in news reports and the politics and ideological forces that motivate and legitimatize such discursive representation of reality. Mainly synthesized from pentadic analysis and social-oriented critical discourse analysis, this methodology proposes a hybrid analytical framework that explains textual features of news reports in terms of the historical and sociocultural exigencies. To verify the applicability of this methodology, I employ a critical-dramatistic analysis to critique the ideological representations of China in three news reports on the Kunming Attack. My analysis of the reporting of the Kunming Attack also provides fresh data to understand the interpretive frames of different discourse communities. Implications upon discourse analysis of reality construction in news reports and upon cross-cultural communication are suggested, followed by a discussion about the limitations of the current study and the possible directions for future studies.

A CRITICAL-DRAMATISTIC STUDY OF RHETORIC: ANALYZING IDEOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF CHINA IN THE REPORTING OF THE KUNMING ATTACK

A Thesis

Submitted to the

Faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Department of English

by

Hua Zhu

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2015

Chair: ______LuMing Mao

Reader: ______Michele Simmons

Reader: ______Madelyn Detloff

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ...... iv

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: Toward a Critical-Dramatistic Analysis of News Reports ...... 4 Introduction ...... 4 Rhetoric of Discourses ...... 4 Discourses as Selective and Institutionalized Representations of Reality ...... 5 Politics and Ideologies of Discourses ...... 7 Discourses as Interpretations of Motives ...... 9 Research Questions and Objectives ...... 10 Developing a New Methodology ...... 10 Fundamental Perspectives of Critical-Dramatistic Analysis ...... 11 The Trajectory of Critical-Dramatistic Analysis ...... 12 Procedures of Analysis ...... 15 Summary ...... 16

Chapter 2: Critical Studies of Media Discourses as a Genre ...... 17 Two Areas of Study in Media Discourse Studies ...... 17 Production and Circulation of News Reports ...... 17 News Reports as a Genre ...... 18 A Rudimentary Review of Critical Perspective ...... 20 Textual Characteristics of Media Discourses ...... 20 Production of Media Discourses in Contexts of Various Kinds ...... 22 Sociocultural and Ideological Perspective ...... 22 Sociocognitive Perspective ...... 24 Intertextual Perspective ...... 25 Summary ...... 26

Chapter 3: Ideological Meaning-Makings in News Reports on the Kunming Attack ...... 27 Introduction ...... 27 Data Collection ...... 27 Data Selection ...... 28 A Critical-Dramatistic Analysis of Three News Reports ...... 28 Act-Agent Ratio ...... 29 Scene-Act Ratio in Xinhua News ...... 33 Scene-Act Ratio in the Post and the BBC ...... 36 Purpose-Act Ratio in Xinhua ...... 38 Scene-Purpose Ratio in the Post and the BBC ...... 38

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Agency ...... 39 Dominant Terms in the Three News Reports ...... 39 Political and Ideological Underpinnings ...... 41 Xinhua: Ideology of Nationalism ...... 41 The Post and the BBC: Ideology of Freedom, Equality and Democracy ...... 44 Summary ...... 45

Chapter 4: Conclusion ...... 46

Works Cited ...... 49

Appendix ...... 51

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Acknowledgements

My gratitude first and foremost goes to my thesis committee, LuMing Mao, Michele Simmons and Madelyn Detloff. Without their rigorous supervision, it would have been impossible for me to finish this project. Ever since our first meeting back to 2012 at Sun Yat-sen University, Professor Mao has been encouraging and guiding me to explore the field of rhetoric and composition, and more importantly, to open up myself to many possibilities in life. As the director of my thesis, he introduces me to academia in the United States and expands my perspective to see out of a cultural context that is familiar to me. Starting from our summer independent study, Professor Mao has offered his many insights on this research, stimulated and complicated my ideas, and walked me through the process of writing this thesis. His intellectual works in particular and his way of living in general always motivate me to grow into a better teacher, writer, scholar and person.

I am also deeply indebted to Michele Simmons. With Michele’s methodology class and the many great conversations we have had during her office hour, I can gradually hear many dialogues in our field, and inquire into, though stumbling a little bit, many scholarly areas that were used to be unknown to me. It was from my seminar paper for Michele that I began considering a new methodology for studying reality representation in news reports, a pilot study which I base this thesis project upon.

I owe much to Madelyn Detloff, with whom I had my first graduate seminar at Miami. Madelyn’s understanding and patience relieved my anxieties of studying in a new institute. Her enthusiasm for writing keeps me excited about both this project and my study here, and inspires me to continue making efforts to move forward.

I am so fortunate to become part of the community of the English Department. Whenever I feel uncertain or apprehensive, my friends and colleagues are here cheering me up and calming me down till I can hear my own voice. Laura Tabor, especially, always accompanies me even when I went to those dark places. The many breakfasts, evening tea, and hours of reading and writing together with Laura made me laugh and kept me sane.

Most of all, I am grateful to have my parents standing by my side. With them, I have the strength to navigate through the graduate school and a new life in another country. Their support, trust and confidence continually remind me where I come from, and lead me to new journeys.

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Introduction

On March 1st, 2014, a group of knife-wielding attackers rampaged through the Kunming Railway Station, hacking citizens at random. At least twenty-eight ordinary citizens were stabbed to death and more than a hundred were injured. The attackers were either shot dead at the scene or were captured by the police. The Chinese government later identified these attackers as coming from the region Xinjiang, where two ethnic/cultural groups—Han and Uighur—constitute the majority of its population. Partly because this event brought up a series of social topoi of contemporary China—most prominently, the ethnicity issue and the role of the Chinese government—major international and national media immediately covered this violence in the Kunming City, the capital of Yunnan Province in the Southwest China. More news reports, editorials and feature stories were produced in the following days. News outlets echo or contest with one another to comment on the leadership of the Chinese government, and the affinity and division between the Han people, the largest ethnic group in mainland China, and the other ethnic minorities. Perhaps not unexpectedly, a dissonance between the Chinese mainstream media and its western counterparts arises from the reporting of the Kunming Attack, projecting distinctive images of mainland China. Xinhua News Agency, for instance, displays the unity of the Chinese people and the efficiency of the government in restoring social order. The Washington Post extensively cites information from Xinhua, but tells a story that China is being troubled by another social breakdown due to the hierarchical structure between ethnic groups and the Communist Party’s disciplinary governing. In fact, the perceived disagreement occurring from the reporting of the Kunming Attack is not an isolated case. News coverage concerning the region Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan tends to repeat such discordance and to perpetuate the China/West binary. That is, in their reporting of an emergency, the Chinese mainstream media prefer to emphasize China as a unified nation that is making effort to sustain and defend for social stability. When covering a same social event, media based in the United States and Britain oftentimes narrate a routine failure of the Chinese totalitarian Party-government, solidifying a presumed communism versus democracy dichotomy. Troubled by this situation where different discourse communities either stick to their own cultural narratives or slander their interlocutors for concepts that the other culture does not possess, I started this project to inquire into the rhetorical representations of realities regarding mainland China and the ideological motivations behind such discursive constructions. The reporting of the Kunming Attack also serves as an example to illustrate the interconnectedness between rhetoric, knowledge-making, and the historical and sociocultural arenas in which discourses are produced and circulated. In particular, I narrow down my analysis concerning the contextual factors which enable but also condition the existence of discourses to the politics and ideologies of the two discourse communities involved, namely, the Chinese mainstream media, and American and British leading media corporations. By examining the discursive patterns of news reports, mainly their choices of lexicons, sub-topics, and intertextual references, I trace the way group-specific ideological values legitimatize particular representations of contemporary

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China—a process that are approved, endorsed and prompted by institutional powers. Interested in the construction of realities in news reports and its legitimation process, I delve into critical studies of media discourses, looking for analytical apparatus to examine the construal of politics and ideologies in textual details. Rooted in functional linguistics, existing critical discourse analyses of media discourses give attention to the manifestation of politics and ideologies in linguistic units. Nonetheless, a more global view is needed to examine the rhetorical strategies functioning across the entire text. The means by which ideological forces determine the selection and arrangement of sub-topics, for instance, remains under-explored. To bridge this perceived gap in current critical studies of media discourses, in Chapter One, Toward a Critical-Dramatistic Analysis of Rhetoric in News Reports, I synthesize Kenneth Burke’s dramatism and Michel Foucault’s discursive formation theories with critical discourse analysis theories of James Paul Gee and Norman Fairclough to create a new methodology, which I tentatively name as critical-dramatistic analysis. The Burkean framework supplements critical discourse analysis with a much-needed macro perspective in that as a productive heuristic, dramatism, and pentad and ratio in particular, allows me to examine the reasoning pattern running across the entire text from multiple dimensions, and to further explain the organization of a text in terms of its producer’s ideological motives. Additionally, Burke and Foucault both hold an epistemic vision of rhetoric which is on par with CDA’s fundamental view on language because all three recognize the inherent capacity of language in shaping human experiences. That is, the world we believe we know, and our understanding of ourselves and others are framed and defined by the language we use, and thus are rhetorical and contestable in that they are situational symbolic representations. Chapter 2 is devoted to a literature review of existing critical studies of media discourses as public discourses. Focusing on studies from Teun A. van Dijk, Allan Bell, Roger Fowler and Norman Fairclough, I explore the textual characteristics of media discourses as a genre and trace the contextual conditions that characterize the production and circulation of media discourses. Chapter 3, Ideological Meaning-Makings in News Reports on the Kunming Attack, presents a critical-dramatistic analysis of three news reports. I posit the narratives told by Xinhua News Agency, The Washington Post, and the British Broadcasting Corporation within their respective sociocultural and institutional matrix, where the news items under study are produced and delivered for the advantage of the privileged. I aim to reveal and question their views concerning a chain of political issues in contemporary China, and the ideologies of these discourse communities, from which their politics originate and evolve. In Chapter 4, I acknowledge the limitations of my current project, pointing to unexplored sites for future studies. I suggest that methodologies of comparative rhetoric would be incorporated in a follow-up research to further rewrite the boundaries between different discourse communities and to spur them out of their own frames. While my project cannot even begin to fully describe the way different forces of ideology contend for a privileged position to formulate and speak for their versions of realities, I hope my interpretation of the reporting of the Kunming Attack will carve a space for us to interrogate our own conditions of existence, serve as a beginning for different communities to reevaluate their commonly-held assumptions, and thus

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encourage us to dialogue with other competing ideologies for reimaging our identities and to seek ways to move out of our own limitations.

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Chapter 1 Toward a Critical-Dramatistic Analysis of News Reports

Introduction In this chapter, I refer to the rhetorical theories of Kenneth Burke and Michel Foucault, and socially-oriented critical discourse analysis theories to specify the primary assumptions of my project. Adhering to the epistemic vision of rhetoric, I delimit my scope of rhetoric as knowledge-making and as a social act. I also clarify concepts that stand infrastructural to my project, mainly, my definition of “discourse,” “politics” and “ideology.” Based on these theoretical lenses, I propose a new methodology and continue to tease out its fundamental perspectives and its trajectory, including the specific procedures for conducting this proposed methodology.

Rhetoric of Discourses To start with, I see news reports on the Kunming Attack as moments of employing rhetoric in specific sociocultural and historical circumstances to invent knowledge. Accordingly, images of China that emerge out of different news reports are particular versions of reality created by these practices of rhetoric. Taking this view as the primary assumption of this project, I ally myself with an epistemic characterization of rhetoric that might be traced back to the ancient Sophists. This tradition holds the stance that knowledge does not exist as a priori as if it were waiting to be discovered, but is negotiated within a contingent situation (Bizzell and Herzberg 5). Reality and knowledge, hence, rest on the context in which they are created, and are literally embodied with information that is sensitive to time and place. The Sophistic definition of knowledge also indicates that while certain knowledge is accepted to be true by one social group, it might be rejected as such in another. However, with respect to realities concerning mainland China, different discourse communities might neglect or ignore the situatedness of knowledge and reality when they communicate. Each community desires to claim and naturalize its version of knowledge as the absolute truth. While my research principally views rhetoric as knowledge-making, I do not take a “philosophical view” (Covino and Jolliffe 7) towards rhetoric, which is more interested in finding an effective means of knowing than examining particular discourses. Instead, my research is exactly about specific “discourses” or “texts.” I do not adopt the distinction that “text” is the “outward manifestation of a communication event” while “discourse” is language-in-context (Garrett and Bell 3), but use these two terms interchangeably in this study. I suggest texts and discourses are not static entities composed from formal linguistic units, but are rhetorical in the sense that they are contextual and social. My thinking on the interrelation between discourse and context mirrors James Paul Gee’s notions of “discourse” and “Discourse”. To Gee, discourses are language used on specific occasions, and Discourses with a capital “D” are “forms of life” (7). The “non-language” elements of Discourses are interlocked with discourses in terms of language-in-use to enact identities and activities (7, 33). Norman Fairclough also expresses a similar idea about discourses. Defining discourses as “forms of

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social practice” (Discourse and Social Change 63; Language and Power 23), Fairclough emphasizes the interplay between discourses and social structures, which he coins as a “dialectical” relationship. That is, a discourse is constrained by social structures, and particularly by power relations, while it in turn contributes to constituting those social structures (Discourse and Social Change 64). Like Gee who believes discourses is an action in Discourse, Fairclough also maintains that people “act upon the world and each other” via discourses (Discourse and Social Change 63). Akin to the views of Gee and Fairclough, I also see discourses to be language-in-use that cannot be segregated from its context. Particularities of that context, such as community-specific values, behavioural norms and interpretative conventions, map out but also set down the parameters for rhetorical practices in discourses. Conversely, discourses are not solely final products that are passively tailored by the context, but also react to and transform a variety of contextual factors, especially when the institutions assent and exploit such discursive practices.

Discourses as Selective and Institutionalized Representations of Reality Fairclough’s “multifunctional view” towards discourses (Media Discourse 17) further specifies discourses are simultaneously operating in three aspects to create reality. Informed by Language as Social Semiotic in which Halliday argues that language is implementing the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions, Fairclough suggests any media discourse is representing the text-producer’s experience in the world (5, 17,103), setting up “social and personal identities” for all the participants, such as reporters and audiences of a media output (126), and forming relations between the involved participants (126). In this project, I mainly attend to the “representation” dimension of a discourse, namely, the rhetorical depictions of contemporary China, but am less interested in the “relation” or the “identity” aspects. Terming news reports on the Kunming Attack as “representation,” I am also wanting to highlight the images of mainland China that are not faithful “presentations” of what actually happened, but have been processed and structured within multi-faceted contexts. To be more specific, news reports are an incomplete reflection of reality in the sense that they are selective and institutionalized. Partial representation of reality could hardly be avoided, nor there is need to do so, because language by nature is selective, as Kenneth Burke informs us with his notion of “terministic screens” (Language 45-47). Burke points out that in order to ever fulfill its function of reflecting the world, terminologies cannot exhaustively present a full view of the reality, but select, or rather “deflect” certain facet to represent (Language 45). Our understanding towards reality in fact features certain, but downplays some other “channel” or “field” of the world (ibid.). Burke further exemplifies our observations of reality, as “implications” of terminology (Language 46), are in fact “different photographs” of the same object but have been filtered through different “colors” (Language 45). By this, he suggests our discursive understandings of reality are always being percolated through the personal lived experience and socioculturally-specific beliefs. Due to the ever functioning terministic screens, news reports on the attack are selective descriptions of human actions, directing our attention to certain aspect of

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the contemporary China, as the text-producer wishes to foreground, enhancing but meanwhile also reducing our knowledge of mainland China. Derived from Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics, the “Social Semiotic view” of language (Machin and Mayr 17-19) also maintains the selectivity of discourses. This view supplements the notion terministic screens with a social perspective: it emphasizes particular expressions are finally chosen because of “social pressures” that are present in every interaction, and the chosen wordings in turn re-shape the communicative situation (Machin and Mayr 16). To be more accurate, as one of the fundamental perspective of critical discourse analysis studies, The Social Semiotic view sees linguistic choices as forms of social domination: maneuvered by the institutional powers, they are favored over the other possible candidates of linguistic units to reproduce asymmetrical power relations, advocating the thinking patterns of the groups in authority, and obscuring their privileged status (Machin and Mayr 24). This stance of the Social Semiotic view of language, that discourses are partial representations because of their constant play with power relations, can be traced back to Michel Foucault, who argues discourse is a field where power and knowledge intersects. In line with Burke, who thinks discourses are always deflective and reductive because of the selectivity of terminologies, Foucault explains the rhetoricity of discourses in relation to the controlling institutions. He contends that it is the institutions that give power to discourses, allowing them to formulate knowledge and to put a hierarchy of orders in place (“Language” 216). I thus understand that both the world of objects to be known, in this case, the human experience reported in the news reports, and the mode of knowing, namely, the linguistic and rhetorical patterns arranged in the news discourses, are initiated by a “will to knowledge” (“Language” 218): being anxious to sustain and reinforce their dominant position, the institutions desire to claim their knowledge of the truth. Thinking along this line, news reports are produced within a system of rules and principles conditioned by the institutions, and are set in motion to ascribe significance to reality. Among a multitude of rules that delimit the formation of knowledge, the principle of “prohibition,” the role of “ritual,” and the function of “author” are especially relevant to my study. Governed by the principle of prohibition, which is a form of “principle of exclusion,” news reports on the attack only include topics that are authorized to be legitimate but leave out the ones that are categorized to be the social and cultural taboos. The rule of prohibition guarantees the privileged voices in news reports with the right to speak for their viewpoints concerning the common goods of the society. Rituals of discourses, then, denote the “qualifications” that the discourse-producers and readers are expected to have (“Language” 225). Discourses must rest on rituals as they lay down the terrain of communication: for example, the meaning of words that exert effects on interlocutors is “imposed” or “supposed” by rituals (ibid.). Besides, the “historical possibility” (Clinic xv) of words, which I view as a form of rituals, also significantly influences the meaning-making in discourse. Whenever a word is used to address a here-and-now situation, what it means and how it means in the past are immediately recalled and become intervening in the current knowledge-making process. Representations of reality that are realized through words, therefore, are not much controlled by the “author,” but are more

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regulated by the histories loaded in the words, and other rituals and prohibitions surrounding the words. According to Foucault, the “author” of a discourse is better to be understood as “the unifying principle of a particular group of writings or statements” than the “individual” who actually wrote the discourse (“Language” 221). Foucault does not deny the creativity of individual authors, but place them within a map interwoven from social norms and structures. By introducing “author” in Foucauldian sense, I emphasize that news reports on the Kunming Attack are produced by discourse communities—cohorts of people who follow sets of conventions of thinking and behaving. To be more specific, the journalists, the editors and the news agencies, regardless of their idiosyncratic values and beliefs, are part of a discourse community. To further complicate the notion “discourse community,” I want to point out though members of a discourse community identify with one another in the sense that they are generally acting together (Burke, Rhetoric 21), they also differ from one another. In other words, individuals within a community are “consubstantial” (Burke, Rhetoric 21). As Kenneth Burke articulates, they are “joined” as a “substantially one” while still remain “separate” as distinct “locus of motives” (ibid.): they interact as participants of a larger group whereas the properties of each human agent as such are retained. Individuals continuously look for division from groups that they have more conflicts with—the same process that they seek consubstantial identification with a community that are less “at odds” with themselves (Burke, Rhetoric 22). I thus suggest it is because members of a discourse community are joined but are also apart that the institutional power strives to take advantage of discourses to promote the “social cohesion” of the community (Burke, Rhetoric x). News reports on the attack, hence, are resources for the institutions to eliminate the potential division existing in the community. A mutual understanding about the status quo of the Chinese society is expected to be achieved through the reporting of the Kunming Attack.

Politics and Ideologies of Discourses To take a step forward, institutional powers in fact exploit the news reports on the Kunming Attack to validate and reinforce the assented “politics” and to guarantee that the discourse community is an ideologically homogeneous one. “Politics,” defined by Gee, is one of the seven areas that discourses continuously (re)build to construct a coherent version of reality (10). Gee notes that when language is used to “fit in” a here-and-now situation, it carries out “seven building tasks,” including “significance,” “activities,” “identities,” “relationships,” “politics,” “connections,” and “sign systems and knowledge” (11-12). Whenever a discourse is operating, it actively makes things significant by giving them meaning or value. Meanwhile, it enacts activities to clarify the goings-on in the current situation. It also allows us to take on a certain identity and to simultaneously give identities to others. It as well signals or seeks to establish a type of relationship that we intend to sustain with others, advocates an opinion on “the nature of the distribution of social goods” and connects or disconnects things for our purposes. Moreover, it chooses and privileges one language system such as English, or one variety of a language, academic writing, for instance, or one non-language sign systems like images and graphs, over the other language and sign system to express knowledge of realities.

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Though language is simultaneously construing the reality in these seven areas, in actual communication, a discourse does not give equal attention to every block. When it comes to news reports at hand, they are more concerned with the building block “politics.” To Gee, “politics” is a perspective on “social goods,” that is, where power, status, value or worth comes from (Gee 1) and which is the “good,” “normal,” “appropriate” and “valuable” (11). Since people’s understanding of politics can be incongruent, discourses are produced to convey, argue over and contest perspectives on the nature and the distribution of social goods (Gee 2). Fairclough agrees with Gee that “politics” are arguments over social relations, that is, are by nature contestable because they are responses to disagreement and conflict over public affairs at stake (Political Discourse Analysis 34). Fairclough’s view, however, appears to be more centered on activism as he articulates the core purpose of politics is to “enhance a decision-making process” and to cause certain social actions in the real world (Political Discourse Analysis 22). He values the argumentative nature of politics and envisions that through collaborative deliberation, a more reasonable decision about social issues of common interest could be reached (Political Discourse Analysis 34). To further complicate the notion of “politics,” I posit politics as perspectives regarding social goods within a system of ideologies, which are essentially “networks of interpretation” (Crowley and Hawhee 25). Constituted from community-specific commonplaces, these interpretative frameworks are generally agreed by members of a sociocultural group. Just as institutional powers are intervening in the politics-making process in discourses to proliferate social relations of inequality, they are also the forces that approve, drive and naturalize the production and circulation of the ideologies of a community. Nonetheless, though being structured by institutional powers, politics and ideologies do not “often imply distortion, ‘false consciousness,’ manipulation of the truth in pursuit of particular interests” (Fairclough, Media Discourse 46). Different from Fairclough, I do not suggest politics as a form of ideology tends to be false or manipulative, but take it to be the essence of our existence, with which we could see our positions in relation to others. In other words, politics and ideologies are the necessary criteria for us to reflect upon the past, the foundation for anticipating the future, and the principles that guide us to taking actions in the present. They are essential to both the entire discourse and the individual members within it because they can be used to identify the cohort, to define the relationships between the members, and to assess what are the good and the acceptable in that community (Crowley and Hawhee 25). Also, unlike Fairclough who distinguishes the ideological aspect of a discourse from the persuasive one (Media Discourse 45), I see ideologies have “persuasive potential,” hence, are rhetorical (Crowley and Hawhee 25). That is, although ideologies as the common grounds of a discourse community tend to be taken for granted, they can be contested and even rejected as long as such a challenge is approved and supported by the dominant power force. Rhetoric, with its epistemic and heuristic nature, then, becomes the key apparatus to question ideologies, the commonplaces that constitute such networks of interpretations, and the politics that originate from them. To wrap up, I begin this section by mapping out my scope of “rhetoric,” highlighting its capacity of creating knowledge. I then set down the parameters of “discourse,” seeing it as

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language-in-use whose internal structures are conditioned by historical and sociocultural exigencies. Besides, I see news reports on the Kunming Attack to be selective and institutionalized representations of realities. In particular, different representations of contemporary China in news reports differ from one another because each of them is structured by community-specific politics and are derived from different networks of ideologies. Further, being disciplined by institutional powers, news reports under study seek to promote social unity as a means to validate current hierarchy of a community.

Discourses as Interpretations of Motives Heretofore, I have characterized the reporting of the Kunming Attack as an attempt by the institutions to selectively construct and shape reality, an effort that is driven by their desire to remain in power, and a rhetorical move that is eventually realized by endorsing and naturalizing particular political and ideological stances that they prefer. But there is more. Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, his notions of “symbolic action,” “motive” and “substance” in particular, help me more comprehensively conceptualize the way contextual and institutional exigencies exercise themselves in producing news reports. In his rhetorical theory of dramatism, Kenneth Burke foremost sees using language to be an “action” of human beings, not a mechanical “motion” of things or “biologic organisms” (Language 45, 53). That is, using language is a constructive act to the world, in contrast to a passive reaction to the external conditions. Language-users are always attributing “motives” to human actions when they are depicting those acts (Burke, Grammar x). Using language to represent reality, thus, becomes an action of interpreting motives—how and why human communicate in the way they do. Texts as language-in-use, therefore, are “statements of motives”: the rhetor talks about “what people are doing and why they are doing it” (Bizzell and Herzberg 1296). From this perspective, the constructed realities in news reports differ from one another because their interpretations of the motivational force of the actions vary. To be more specific, news reports represent reality in different ways because of their divergent understandings of the “substance” (Grammar 21-23, 46-52) of human actions: which motive is the intrinsic substance that drive the actions and which is the extrinsic one. An intrinsic substance is the motive “within” the human acts (Burke, Grammar 46). As the “cause of itself” (Burke, Grammar 50), the intrinsic substance is the internal force that motivates the actions involved in the Kunming Attack. The expression of the “extrinsic” motives, however, might be suppressed by outside conditions such as the social and political structures (Burke, Grammar 49). Pertinent to the different representations of reality in news reports is the rhetoric of substance. That is, whereas one substance is regarded as the “internal,” that very substance might be taken as the “extrinsic” in another text (Burke, Grammar 23). Such disagreement on which motive is “within” or “without” the human action results in divergent observations about the situation and human relations leads to different suggestions about available means to cope with the situation, and further yields to predictions on how the situation may become (ibid). Heterogeneous sizing-up of motives and substance of human actions, then, is part of the reason why human experiences are given disparate definitions in different news reports.

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Thinking back to the notion terministic screen, the selectivity of language also indicates difference in interpreting the motives of human actions. One imperative of my study, hence, is to compare the selection of language details in different news reports to trace which motives are identified as the internal force and which are marginalized as the extrinsic. Scrutinizing motives as assigned by the text-producers then contributes to uncovering the politics and ideologies lurking beneath the seemingly innocent linguistic terms.

Research Questions and Objectives Based on the above assumptions because of which my research is ever made possible, my study starts with examining the linguistic details and rhetorical strategies of news reports but endeavors to reveal the terministic screens that shape the representations. Aiming for social change in the form of effective communication between different discourse communities, my research inquires into the following questions: How do the discursive patterns chosen and arranged in a news report give rise to constructed representations of China? How are the politics of the discourse community intertwined in the discursive trends? How are the ideologies of the institutional power, which produce the politics that dominate a discourse community, manifested and maintained via news reports at hand? Further, how do the news reports produced by different news agencies, while inflected with their own historical and sociocultural contexts, debate with their counterparts on the structured representations of China to identify with and to sustain the community that gives birth to the news reports?

Developing a New Methodology To answer the above research questions, I develop a new methodology, namely, a “critical-dramatistic analysis,” from a pentadic analysis and a critical discourse analysis. In Opening Spaces, Patricia Sullivan and James Porter place methodology “inside rhetoric” (13). They argue that methodology cannot merely be a system of “observational procedures,” “data-collection strategies” or “specific data analysis techniques” (11). They further frame methodology to be a heuristic invention of knowledge which essentially is local and contingent. With respect to the relation between theory, methodology and research, their view implies that these three components are not clearly separated (64) but are “informed and informing” (26) one and other: theory does not dictate the rest two and methodology cannot be applied rigorously as if it was a set of rules or guidelines. As the actual research proceeds and the particulars in a given situation emerge, the research questions might be adjusted accordingly, and so are the methods employed. Seeing methodology as a knowledge-making rather an instrument, they appeal to the researcher to consider the situatedness of the research in a given historical and sociocultural moment and space (28), and to develop a methodology that could directly address these local factors. Sullivan and Porter also advocate that a rhetorical and heuristic methodology must be critical in at least two aspects. First, researchers must contextualize their positioning, including the prior experience brought into the research, their “motivations” of conducting the research and their implicit or explicit evaluations of the issue at stake (16). Researchers are also expected to acknowledge their “bases, instructions, doubts and mistakes” in the research (69). Also, a

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research practice ought to have a practical purpose and to work toward positive social improvements (xvi). Furthermore, a methodology should be aware that research is political because of the exerted power relations in the study, especially the larger institutional frameworks such as the “disciplinary paradigm” (39). Following Sullivan and Porter’s framing of methodology as an act of rhetoric, the critical-dramatistic analysis proposed in my research recognizes the situatedness of the research practice, reflects on the positioning of the researcher, gives attention to the politics of researching, and aims at positive social changes. Specifically, in my analysis, I will contextualize the cross-cultural (mis)communication between China, the U.S. and Britain that occurred in the news reports. This proposed methodology also aims to interrogate the relationship between the rhetoric of news reports and the multi-faceted context, to further question the implicit politics in terms of perspectives on social goods and the ideologies as networks of interpretation. The political and ideological dimension is particularly important to my research because I observe that the two seemingly binary sides in the communicative anecdote appear to be unwilling, if not blinded, to admit their own social and cultural biases and are equally culpable of fossilizing the stereotypes surrounding themselves. It is troubling for me to see the two camps accuse the other of “twisting reality” while both of them are continuously structuring a partial, if not distorted, representation of mainland China for their own interests. I hope to bring the two camps beyond their own limitations by exposing their political and ideological assumptions that are embedded in the news reports. Although this research inevitably is one interpretation that filtered by my own terministic screen, it intends to be a “participation of human event” (Sullivan and Porter 13). As Gee suggests, reflecting upon the meanings we give to other people’s words, discourse analysis could help us better cooperate with others (xii), and I must add, to better understand our own identities and performances.

Fundamental Perspectives of Critical-Dramatistic Analysis Critical-dramatistic analysis as a methodology fundamentally takes on a rhetorical perspective. In contrast to a traditional “meaning-based” linguistic analysis which is more interested in the language itself, my framework concerns with how texts mean and what they do (Bazerman and Prior 3). My methodology is also a combination of textual and contextual analysis. Though language details are an important facet to be examined, this proposed methodology focuses more on the influence of rhetorical situations upon the modes of choosing and organizing discursive patterns. Thus, my analysis is always twofold: I examine how the use of linguistic components, semantic units and rhetorical strategies realize and naturalize the interpretation of reality by the institutional power. Meanwhile, I also consider how the local political and sociocultural exigencies determine the configurations of news reports. It should also be noted my research is distinguished from a communication study. Whereas communication studies care about the reactions of audiences towards the text such as if their emotions and beliefs have been changed and in which way (MacNealy 126), the role of language in creating meaning is the centrality of my research, highlighting news reports as practices of rhetoric are resources for knowledge-making.

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Echoing Kenneth Burke’s notion of terministic screens and the Social Semiotic view of language, the critical-dramatistic analysis is concerned with the question of choosing, both the mode of selecting and its effects. My analysis of the language patterns of texts constantly asks which elements are included or foregrounded in contrast to the excluded or under-represented ones. Employing the tool “a scale of presence” proposed by Fairclough, I will differentiate components of texts depending on their “degrees of presence” and labels them as “absent,” “presupposed,” “backgrounded,” or “foregrounded” (Media Discourse 106). The current methodology also pays attention to how a news report reuses other texts, that is, the “intertextuality” of discourses. As a property of discourses, intertextuality indicates all the words and phrases used to compose a new text are endowed with meanings from the past but are strategically arranged by the writer to speak to the current situation (Bazerman 83). I suggest this relation a current text bears to the “prior, contemporary and potential future texts” (Bazerman 86) is worth particular emphasis when analyzing news reports, considering journalists have to rely on source information, such as news from other news agencies and accounts from witnesses, to account for what happened in a temporal and spatial dimension where they usually cannot be present. In my analysis, I pay special attention not only to the gist of the information cited in the news reports, but also the way the source information is referred to, including the ordering of the quoted information and the transformations they go through. The scrutiny of selectivity and intertextuality of discourses eventually contribute to a contextual analysis that asks why particular selections and cross-text references take place. The contextual dimension of critical-dramatistic analysis is particularly influenced by Gee’s D/discourse analysis in An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method and Fairclough’s social analysis of discourse in Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. Both their approaches to discourses are social–oriented in that their textual analysis are extended to account for the social functions of language: the possible social changes caused by the language, such as changes in beliefs, attitudes and actions (Fairclough, Analysing Discourse 8), the social activities and identities enacted by language-in-use (Gee 2) and the affiliation of language with cultures, social groups, and institutions (Gee 1). Drawing insights from Gee and Fairclough, my contextual analysis concentrates on the connectivity between language use and sociocultural values: how social dominance, discrimination and control are expressed, constituted and legitimized by the micro structural and semantic units of language. In all, I attempt the critical-dramatistic analysis to be a rhetorical approach to news reporting. As a hybrid framework combined from textual and contextual analysis, it involves linguistic, intertextual and critical analysis.

The Trajectory of Critical-Dramatistic Analysis This section elaborates the way I scaffold the new analytical apparatus. Pentadic analysis, the dramatistic dimension of my methodology, is first explicated, followed by an indication of how I adapt it to more directly address the reporting of the Kunming Attack. I then introduce two sets of inquiry tools offered by the social-oriented critical discourse analysis, namely, overlexicalization and suppression, and specification and genericization. I will also explain my

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using of Fairclough’s intertextual analysis. Evolved from Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, pentadic analysis investigates the text-producer’s depictions of the motives of human actions (Grammar x). Its subject of analysis is not actions, but descriptions of actions; not reality, but language (Bizzell and Herzberg 1296). Central elements of this model are Act, Agent, Agency, Purpose, and Scene. Burke explains these five terms as the generating principle of a discourse, out of which all statements of motives arise (Burke, Grammar x). They are not only the aspects which the rhetor must address in the writing, but also the very components of a discourse that the critic must examine and evaluate. The rhetorician can describe the “five-fold complexity” of the human activities (Foss 465), and make a case for his or her understanding of these human experiences by identifying and characterizing the dramatistic pentad. Critics, then, are able to unpack and anticipate the intrinsic interrelationship between language and thought as articulated by the rhetoricians by examining Act—what happened, Agent—who and what kind of person performed the act, Agency—by what means the agent achieved the act, Purpose—the intentions of the agents, and Scene—the situation or the background in which the act occurred (Burke, Grammar x). The pentad in this sense is both an invention tool for generating arguments about human motives and is an analytical technique for critiquing such discursive interpretation. Further, using the pentad as a heuristic principle involves interrogating the “ratios.” Burke sees ratios as the “internal relationships” between the pentad, the “possibilities of transformation” and “the range of combinations” of the five elements (Grammar xi). To persuade the audiences to believe certain motives are the “true” substance of the human actions described, the rhetorician can arrange the internal relationships between the five terms. Exploring ratios also allows critics to “talk about the talk-about of human actions” (Burke, Grammar 56), and thus further help them to conceptualize from multiple perspectives how the rhetorician understand human motives. Essentially, the critic is to pair two elements from the pentad into a ratio, and to employ “the principle of consistency” to analyze the “effects each term has on the other (Burke, Grammar 3). Elements in a ratio are consistent in their nature, that is, could be seen in terms of any of the other because these five elements are interdependent, also overlap with one another in some areas (Burke, Grammar 127). Burke further points out the five terms may be “reduced” to one, the one that is selected by the rhetor as the “essential,’’ ‘‘basic,’’ and ‘‘logically prior” (ibid.). Therefore, when examining ratio, the critic needs to discover this dominant term—the “common terminal ancestor” of the other four elements (ibid.). Probing questions for interrogating ratios might involve (Foss 458-62; Hart 368): What is the featuring element in the ratio? How is the second term characterized in terms of the first term? What is the privileged term of the entire text? How are the other terms derived from it? Ratios, thus, are a productive method to tease out the reasoning of the rhetoricians—how they organize discourses to justify their particular interpretations of communicative actions. In critical-dramatistic analysis, pentad and ratio help me methodically analyze the strategic arrangement of subtopics, make me more aware what information about the Kunming Attack are absent, and allow me to detect the semantic focus of a text. Using pentad and ratio, I will reveal the ways the rhetors identify and assign motives, and their justification for their

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interpretations of the motives. I will first distribute the subtopics of a discourse into the five-fold categories, outlining how the rhetor account the act, depict the agent, assign the agency, capture the scene, and decipher the purpose. I then delve into the interrelations between the five elements, detecting the featured and the marginalized terms, looking for their traits and how one is portrayed in consistence to the other. As an integrated part of the critical-dramatistic analysis, pentadic analysis reveals the intrinsic substance of human actions as identified by the text-producer and lays down a firmer ground for me to trace the political and ideological underpinnings of a news report. While pentadic analysis offers me a systematic framework for analyzing the semantic information of news reports, especially their selection and hierarchical ordering of subtopics, I also realize a traditional pentadic analysis could not sufficiently answer my research questions in two aspects. First, Act, Agent, Agency, Scene and Purpose are useful categories for analyzing how a variety of semantic information is organized throughout the entire discourse. Also, the pentad succinctly divides semantic information of a discourse in a more flexible manner because the interrelations between different pieces of semantic information are considered from a multitude dimensions when the five elements are paired into ratios. However, pentadic analysis might not be able to answer how semantic information is eventually expressed by concrete linguistic constituents. A critical discourse analysis, being deeply rooted in linguistic analysis, then, benefits a traditional pentadic analysis in that it answers how the characterization of the five elements and their internal relationships is eventually realized through linguistic structures. An analysis combined from pentadic analysis and linguistic analysis thus more thoroughly examine a discourse: it is able to account for the semantic information, which are operating at a level of the whole discourse; in the meantime, it also addresses the functioning of more micro-dimensional units such as lexicons. With its close attention to the influencing of power relations upon language, critical discourse analysis also contributes a social perspective to dramatism. When inquiring into why a motive is taken as the intrinsic one in a news report, dramatism answers from a rhetorical perspective. Burke, for instance, states that “[f]or the featuring of agent, the corresponding terminology is idealism” (Grammar 128). In this study, I do not employ Burke’s explanation about the underlying ideologies of language because I suggest the ideologies of the dominant groups, which arise from a unique historical, sociocultural and institutional landscape, might be the major reason that leads to different representations of China. In the reporting of the Kunming Attack, it is due to the different politics held by the institutional powers that different discourse communities assign different motives to human actions in news reports. Critical discourse analysis, then, offers dramatistic analysis a systematic set of terminologies and methods to tease out how the larger social disciplines interplay with the micro linguistic constituents. Specifically, “overlexicalization and suppression” (37) and “specification and genericization” (80) developed by Machin and Mayr will be employed for analyzing the “degree of presence” (Fairclough, Media Discourse 106) of agents, co-agents and counter-agents, and the institutionalized politics and ideologies underpin them. “Overlexicalization” denotes an overuse of particular words and their synonyms, indicating an excessive description of certain aspects

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and reflecting the anxiety on the part of the text-producer to “over-persuade” the readers to believe in those aspects of the representation (Machin and Mayr 37). “Suppression”, on the contrary, is the place where terms are under-used or omitted all together, an absence that contradicts our expectations (Machin and Mayr 38). “Specification and genericization” question whether agents are represented as individuals or as a generic type and why (Machin and Mayr 80). I plan to employ these two sets of critical strategies to reveal the nature of the five pentadic elements, and to determine each of their positions along the “scale of presence” (Fairclough, Media 106), that is, which is the dominant term and hence might be the intrinsic motive of the human actions described. Intertextual analysis is another critical instrument that I draw upon from critical discourse analysis theories to interrogate the politics and ideologies of the language details. In particular, the analysis of intertextuality in my study focuses on the web of “voices” (Fairclough, Media Discourse 77, 84) present or absent in the news reports. I will scrutinize how the opinions of a range of social agents are interwoven into a web of voices, upon which the text-producer imposes orders and interpretations. My probing questions include: Whose voices have been referred to by the text-producer to present and foreground which aspect of the agents? How is the information “recontextualized” (Fairclough, Media Discourse 41)? Is it directly quoted or implicitly alluded to? Has it been summarized or commented? How is the cited information ordered in the new text? How are the source texts connected to the new text? What are the motivations driving the text-producer to prefer one piece of information over another and to transform the source text in a particular way? Intertextual analysis is important in my study because news reports as a genre extensively relies on information that originates from elsewhere. In all, incorporating tools offered by critical discourse analysis studies into traditional pentadic analysis, I can simultaneously engage with the textual features of news reports and their political and ideological motivations. The dramatistic and the critical dimension of my methodology complement each other to uncover the functioning and appropriating of politics and ideologies in language details, and to reveal the sociocultural and institutional determinants standing behind the choices of lexicons, semantic information and voices.

Procedures of Analysis In this project, the critical-dramatistic analysis is applied to analyzing news reports on the Kunming Attack in the following four steps. First, I specify the dramatistic pentad of each discourse, investigating what activities are performed by whom in which situations by what means and for what intentions. To identify the five elements, I categorize the thematic threads running across the entire text: each sentence will be divided into one or more semantic chuck(s), each of which is to be summarized as one subtopic. The identified subtopics then are distributed into the five categories, namely, Act, Agent, Agency, Scene, and Purpose. For instance, when analyzing a sentence from the news report by The Washington Post: “The government-run Xinhua News Agency described the Kunming train station assault as a ‘premeditated violent terrorist attack’ and identified the group of more than 10 assailants as Uighur separatists from China’s restive Xinjiang region,” I distinguished the subtopics present in this sentence as:

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Subtopic 1—“response from the domestic state media” that falls into the category of Act of the counter-agent; Subtopic 2—“the ethnicity of the attackers” that belongs to the category of Agent; Subtopic 3—“the tension in Xinjiang” that concerns with the category of Scene. Next, I pair the five terms into ratios, along with employing the critical inquiry tools of overlexicalization and suppression, specification and genericization, and an intertextual analysis, to examine the traits of each element from the pentad. For example, in Chapter Three, I suggest Act and Agent of the news from The Washington Post are placed into an Act-Agent ratio. The Post overlexicalizes the words “authority” and genericizes attackers to be “Muslim” and “Uighurs.” The voice of the government and the government-run media are also prominently quoted in this report. Such lexical choices and intertextual quotation conjure up a censored Scene, implying that it is because of the hierarchical social structure that an Act of attacking was taken by the oppressed Agents against the tyrant Counter-agents. The attack, then, is a resistance for the Purpose of pursuing democracy and freedom. In the meantime, I also investigate which pentadic elements are the featured one and which is the dominated one of the whole discourse. I draw a conclusion in Chapter Three that Scene is the featured element in the news reports from The Washington Post and BBC, whereas Purpose is the privileged one in news report from Xinhua News Agency. The final task of my analysis aims to compare and explain the politics the discourses identify with, and to critique the ideologies that motivate the adoption of the politics. I argue that news report from The Washington Post seems to revolve around concepts such as “freedom,” “equality” and “democracy” and news from Xinhua values social stability and national unity.

Summary In this chapter, I lay down the theoretical assumptions and the methodological frameworks of my study. In Chapter Two, I will look into the ongoing conversations about media discourses as a genre of public discourses. With this review chapter, I want to identify gaps in current critical studies of media discourses to further exemplify my building of critical-dramatistic analysis. I also hope to gain a fuller understanding about the means and conditions of creating realities in news reports as a generic type, and the interaction between such discursive constructions and their underlying political and ideological sources of power.

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Chapter 2 Critical Studies of Media Discourses as a Genre

Two Areas of Study in Media Discourse Studies Focusing on works by Teun A. van Dijk, Allan Bell, Roger Fowler and Norman Fairclough, in this chapter, I want to familiarize myself with two areas whereby media discourses are studied: the textual features of media discourses as a genre of public discourse and the characteristics of the context where media discourses are produced, delivered and circulated. I intend this review of literature to answer two core questions that are largely joined in my research: How is the language of news reports structured in relation to the immediate situations? How do particular representations of mainland China, which essentially are different versions of reality, emerge from the discursive patterns? Works from these four scholars are chosen because they all take a critical view towards the production of media discourses. That is, they propose analytical frameworks that integrate a textual discourse analysis into a contextual one. As my following review illustrates, they tease out the production of media discourses to be sociocultural, ideological, sociocognitive and intertextual. By reviewing and critiquing their works, I hope to understand currently available explanations about the discoursal features of media discourses with reference to the contextual factors. More importantly, I try to locate gaps in the critical studies of media discourses and to further theorize the critical-dramatistic analysis.

Production and Circulation of News Reports In this study, I ask how contextual particularities interfere with the production and circulation of media discourses. My focus does not suggest the audiences’ participation in the meaning-making process enacted by news reports. Concentrating on the production of texts in fact suggests my focus is on the ideologies of discourse communities: while the ideologies the news reports encompass are the values of the text-producers, they might as well be the audiences’ because the news agencies and the readers are both constructs of a community and are together constrained by the governance of institutional powers, who tend to rationalize their own interpretative habits as the legitimate norms and to impose their beliefs values upon the entire community. Therefore, my examination of media-discourse-producing is not one-sided but attends to both the text-producer and the audience who are “usually undifferentiated at a more personal level” (van Dijk 74). Also, I frame my probing question as “how are the discourses produced within the multifaceted circumstances?” but not as “how are the discourses composed in consonance to the characteristics of the audience?” An ethnographical approach, such as having surveys and interviews with the readers, might yield a more solid conclusion for the latter question. Studying the reception of news, which would give a more comprehensive study of the language of news reports in relation to the situational factors, is beyond the scope of my current study. Regarding the contextual factors, I am less concerned with the professional structures and relationships of the journalism industry, though journalistic conventions certainly influence the rhetorical meaning-making enacted through the reporting of the Kunming Attack. Bell contends

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media language is “moulded” through “multiple hands” (8), pointing out that conventional journalistic practices significantly modify the language of news; van Dijk, Flower and Fairclough also pay considerate attention to the way journalism as a profession and an industry influences the language of news items. They note factors such as the journalistic routines of newsgathering (van Dijk 175), the everyday editorial procedures (Fairclough, Media 59; van Dijk 175), news values that are functioning throughout the entire production process (Fowler 13), and the tendency to entertain the readers and to dramatize the news event (Fairclough, Media 45) might transform and sometimes even determine the configuration of journalistic discourses. Nevertheless, I pay less attention to the “news values” that are conventionally practiced in journalism—the criteria for evaluating if bits of information are worth being reported (Bell Language 155; Fowler 13). Nor do I investigate the industrial-capitalist particulars such as the possible influences of sponsorship and advertisements. Compared to these journalistic or commercial values, the dominant sociocultural and community-specific perceptions towards mainland China seem to play a major role in structuring realities in news reports on the Kunming Attack. Hence, when referring to the text-producers, I prefer “news agencies” to “journalists” in that the former connotes a sense of social totality whereas the latter focuses more on journalism as a profession. Even the ideology of a given news agency is less relevant to the representations of China. Instead, the relation of media outlets to other institutions, their connectivity to the government, in particular, is more crucial to the reporting of the Kunming Attack because this social event essentially brings to the forth several topoi that are crucial to modern China, such as the relationship between different ethnic groups, social stability and national unity of China, the participation of government in public discourses, and the role of the Communist Party in contemporary China. Compared to the characteristics of journalism as a profession and industry, the wider historical, sociocultural and political environment might be more relevant to the reporting of the Kunming Attack. From this perspective, I do not treat news agencies as substantial discourse communities, but am inclined to see them as members of a larger discourse community. News reports on the attack thus give voice to the sociocultural community they are identified with and express its attitudes toward the social topoi mentioned earlier.

News Reports as a Genre The news reports is one type of public discourse because it is produced to offer an agenda of topics for public conversation, to discuss the “public order and disorder” (van Dijk 182), to inform a vast number of cultural groups of the public affairs and social issues (Fairclough 3), and to regulate people’s familiar beliefs and their daily behaviors in a society (Fowler 2). Furthermore, news reports are public discourses because they are meant to be circulated to address “a public,” which “comes into being only in relation to texts and its circulation” and thus is “by virtue of being addressed” and discursive (Warner 67). Because the addressees, as Warner observes, are “open-ended,” indefinite, and are always “yet to be realized” (74), news reports are produced and circulated to address this body of strangers who are partially non-identified with the issues reported, to draw their attention to the issues at hand, to initiate them to actively participate in the issues being reported, and to elicit interaction and dialogic conversation (90).

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Michael Warner emphasizes that the addressees of public discourses are and to some extent “imaginary” (74), though they do have “a sense of totality” (65) and “social basis” (74). By this, news reports hope to assign the fluid addressees the identity of “audience” and turn the issue of interest into a public issue. News reports hence are not the final products that are only passively conditioned by situational exigencies. They are circulated to create moments of encounters with current or potential members of the addressed community. Because of their capacity of creating encounters and assigning identities, news reports on the Kunming Attack, which are closely aligned with the dominant ideologies, are exploited as the venue for different forces of institutions to deliver their preferred ideology, to reproduce and redistribute their group-specific values, and to legitimatize that ideology is truer than other competing ideologies. They are also dispersed to ensure the institutionalized ideologies remain as the essence of the addressed community, and as the taken-for-granted evaluation criteria within that cohort of people. As illustrated in Chapter One, news reports as language-in-use do not stand independently away from the context, though they are generally categorized as a “factual genre” (Garrett and Bell 4) which takes “objectivity” to be the “professional ethos” (Fowler 1). In conformity with my primary view toward “discourse” and “text,” news reports are rhetorical because of their capacity to create knowledge and their situatedness in a historical, sociocultural and political landscape. The rhetorical nature of news reports is also shown in their selective featuring of reality to the advantage of the institutional power. Thus, in my study, the rhetoric of news reports principally concerns the doing of discourses and the means for generating knowledge in discourses. I find it necessary to again clarify my understanding of rhetoric because van Dijk and Fairclough, whose studies of media discourses are to be reviewed, also consider the “rhetoric” of media discourses. Even though both of them state that rhetoric is the persuasive dimension of language, their scope of “rhetoric,” compared to mine, is narrower. Whereas I insist news reports by nature are rhetorical, they seem to imply that rhetoric can be left out from discourses. Rhetoric in their studies is viewed more as an instrument because they both see rhetoric to be devices or techniques for polishing language. Van Dijk’s notion of rhetoric mainly denotes “rhetorical structures” (86) and “strategies” (179), involving “well-known figures of speech” such as “exaggeration, comparison, suggestive metaphors” (28). He also claims that the pervasive use of precise numbers might be the “major rhetoric aspect” of news reports (179). Fairclough also mentions the rhetoric of media discourses when he distinguishes the ideological aspect of a media discourse from the persuasive dimension (45). He suggests rhetoric to be optional in his definition of ideologies, which are the common grounds that could not be negotiated via “rhetorical devices” because these believes have already been “adopted” and “taken for granted” by the audience (45). In contrast, I see rhetoric as present in any instance of using language and it is rhetoric that makes human communication possible. For example, in news reports, rhetoric is functioning when certain lexicons for naming the social agents are chosen over other possible candidates, when semantic subtopics are organized in particular ways, and when relevant texts are cited as source information in the new text. Our discursive constructions of realities are essentially rhetorical. So are our claims about truth, our definition of our own identities, and our evaluations of people who co-exist with us.

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A Rudimentary Review of Critical Perspective In which aspects can the language of media discourses be regarded as unique? How are the discourses endowed with the identifiable traits? Focusing on these two questions, I selectively review studies by van Dijk, Bell, Fowler and Fairclough. These four scholars attend to different textual characteristics of media discourses: the lexicons and the naming of social actors in news (Fowler), the organizational structures of news stories (Bell), the semantic structures of news (van Dijk), and the selection of linguistic structures for a purpose to represent human experience, to assign identities and to enact communicative relations (Fairclough). More importantly, their studies take on a critical view in that their investigation is no longer restricted to the discourse itself, but refer to the properties of the contextual backdrop to explain the language characteristics: In his discussion about the narrative structure of news, Bell features the industrial and professional aspects of journalism, including the possible regulations from the news values and the conventional journalistic practices such as editorial procedures and production schedules. Van Dijk gives a sociocognitive account of the textual processing that takes place in the mind of individual journalists as members of social group. Fairclough and Fowler utilize Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics to conceptualize the social functions of the linguistic forms. They both highlight the structuring effects of sociocultural-specific ideologies upon linguistic constituents. From differentiated perspectives, Bell, van Dijk, Fowler and Fairclough thoroughly address their mutual interest in media discourses, viewing this type of discourse as a contextual-conditioned practice of language, via which presuppositions and values of various kinds are manifested and circulated. My following review of the four approaches to media discourses first examines their discussions about the textual features of media discourses, then proceeds to scrutinize the contextual determinants as the four scholars identify. These two sections respectively address two interdependent facets of my research: how selection and arrangement of discursive patterns generate realities and knowledge, a dimension which is more text-oriented; and why such discursive choices occur, an aspect that is more context-dependent.

Textual Characteristics of Media Discourses Bell’s model foremost views news as “stories” that contain unique structures and values. Composed from “abstract,” “attribution,” and “the story proper” (164-74), news is distinguished from personal narratives in its structure. In addition, news as stories is also unique in its “new values.” Three categories of news values are mentioned by Bell: criteria for assessing if the news events and actors are newsworthy (156-58), conventions that monitor the entire process of writing, publishing and reporting (159-60), and the style of news (160). Closely related, van Dijk’s framework also attends to the micro and macro structures of news. Syntax or “sentence forms,” semantics or “meanings,” and pragmatics or “speech acts” of each individual sentence describe the micro level (25-26). The macro level of a discourse, then, constitutes of “macrosemantics” (26) or “semantic macrostructure” (31) which denote the “topics or themes” (31). “Macrosyntax” (26) or “schemata” (49) also function at the level of an entire

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text. They determine the topics that conventionally occur in news, and the ordering of these topics. Fowler and Fairclough base their discussions of the textual characteristics of media discourses on Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics, mainly because this branch of linguistics analyzes the linguistic structures in terms of their communicative functions in actual contexts. Within systemic functional linguistics, linguistic configurations are analyzed mainly in relation to how the grammatical rules and components facilitate language-users to achieve their purposes in context. Grounded in Halliday’s theory, Fowler and Fairclough examine the way in which linguistic constituents are chosen and ordered to realize communicative functions. Fowler concentrates more on the units of vocabulary and clauses whereas Fairclough’s attention is extended to textual organization above individual clauses such as cohesion and the overall structure (57). Fairclough also differs from Fowler in that he takes a “multifunctional view.” Informed by Halliday’s idea that language implements three metafunctions—the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual metafunction, Fairclough scrutinizes how media discourses represent the world (103-24), set up identities and enact social relations (125-49). Fowler, on the other hand, is more exclusively interested in the representation dimension. In my study, I also focus on the representation of realities in discourses, though I do not think such a discursive construction is accomplished merely via linguistic constituents. The content of the selected and the referred information, and the very act of selecting and intertextually referring also significantly contribute to a particular representation of reality. Complementary to one another, the works of these four scholars offer a comprehensive study of the textual characteristics of media discourses. Nevertheless, the subtopic of news reports as one construct seems to be less explored. Perhaps, Bell’s and van Dijk’s analyses of the macro structure of media discourses are efforts to categorize what types of subtopics are conventionally included and how they are often arranged in media discourses. Bell brings back the traditional “journalist’s five ‘Ws and an H’,” suggesting this list of “who, when, where, what, how and why” might be the general rule for journalists to assign news stories a structure of “leads, headlines, source attributions, news actors, time, place, the use of numbers, and news as talk” (175). Van Dijk also tries to summarize the principles of organizing the topics of a news item. These principles, termed by van Dijk as “news schemata,” account for the semantic macrostructure of news, that is, they indicate which topics are routinely included when journalists compose a news item. He further enumerates the semantic categories that constitute the news schemata, noting that these categories are hierarchically ordered: Summary, which includes Headline and Lead; Episode, which breaks down to Main Events and Consequences; Background, which consists of Context and History; and Comments, such as Expectations and Evaluations. However, I sense the subtopics of a news report (semantic macrostructure in van Dijk’s terminology) can be examined in a more systematic way by employing dramatistic pentad as the semantic categories. The pentad can be readily used to anticipate the themes that might occur in a news report, to organize and to divide the seemingly tangled subtopics of a news item into the five categories: Act, Agent, Agency, Scene and Purpose. Furthermore, the way information is

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ordered and the underlying reasons could be interrogated from multiple perspectives via examining ratios—the diverse interrelationships between the subtopics. Additionally, I suggest the pentad can be used as an analytical apparatus for exploring the semantic structure of news reports because in the analyses of Bell and van Dijk, the five elements of the pentad are implicitly reiterated: Bell mentions the structural components of a news item involve actors, actions, setting and background (169). Likewise, van Dijk (111) also observes and predicts that when processing news items, journalists might interpret the dominant features of a news event from the aspects such as “actions” (Act in Burke’s terminology), “participants” (Agent), “circumstances” (Scene), and “instruments of actions” (Agency). Compared to categories proposed by Bell and van Dijk, Burke’s pentad is more feasible because ratio accounts for the interaction between different semantic information, allowing critics to inquire into each subtopic in relation to others. To put it in another way, the dramatistic pentad, with its simplicity, might better explain the complex interactional relationships between different subtopics, and thus help us to locate the semantic foci of a discourse and why they are featured. As Burke suggests, the pentad is the “generating principle” of any statement of motives (Grammar xi), meaning, it is an invention tool helping text-producers to select and arrange meaning to compose a full discourse. I hence propose the pentad as a heuristic can be developed into a critical-dramatistic analysis to examine the composition of the whole text, not merely the arrangement of subtopics.

Production of Media Discourses in Contexts of Various Kinds In critical studies of media discourses, linguistic analysis often leads to analyzing the contextual motivations underlying the linguistic structures. As Garrett and Bell observe, it is not a coincidence that critical discourse analysis is extensively employed as a theoretical and methodological lens to analyze media discourses (6). Because of the “explicit sociopolitical agenda” of critical discourse analysis, that is, their primary interest in issues such as inequality, discrimination, and privilege, “social activist” researchers incline to use CDA to investigate the nature of media discourses as a representative “institutional” discourse (Garrett and Bell 6). In this section, I turn to the critical agendas of the four approaches, concentrating on how they expound the formulation of discourse in dynamic contexts.

Sociocultural and Ideological Perspective All four critics, Fowler and Fairclough in particular, acknowledge that news is produced within a context that is laden with values, stereotypes and attitudes of a particular discourse community. Fowler assumes that every linguistic expression of news embodies ideological stances (4). On the basis that language itself is a “constructive mediator” (1), he argues news like any other “representational discourse” (10) constructs, rather than faithfully reflect reality. He justifies this claim by drawing upon Sapir and Whorf’s sociolinguistics which declares that linguistic differences would represent human experiences in different ways (28-32). Halliday’s argument, that the communicative functions carried by linguistic structures are determined by the social circumstances, is another theoretical lens that Flower’s study relies on (32-37). Rest on these two linguistic theories, Fowler concludes that any particular linguistic constituents present

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in the news are chosen for a reason. It is in this sense that he believes news is an ideological representation of reality (4). However, while I define “ideologies” as interpretive habits and as the very essence of a community, Fowler’s definition is more restricted to the professional values of journalism. To be more explicit, I relate ideologies more closely to the traditions and values of a culture and a society. Fowler, then, discusses more about news values—the journalistic principles for selecting which events will be reported and how they will be narrated (13-15). Besides, “institutions” to Fowler are mainly news organizations, which have their own networks of commercial and “industrial-capitalist” (2) relations and structures, such as advertising, sponsorships and conventional journalistic practices (20-22). In my analysis about the reporting of the Kunming Attack, “institutions” refer more generally to the authority of a discourse community, for instance, the state government and the more privileged class. Closely related to Fowler’s view, Fairclough also sees media discourses to be shaped within a social system. He further points out media discourses are “socially constitutive” (Media Discourse 55), that is, discourses can cause actual changes in a society. Power relations and the ideologies underlying the linguistic components of the discourse are also the focus of Fairclough. He demonstrates that the production of media discourses is mediated by power relations such as “class, gender, ethnicity,” politics and science (Media Discourse 12). Meanwhile, ideologies of the dominant groups are mapped into the media discourses, turning the discourses into an “ideological apparatus” (Media Discourse 44) that manifests, circulates, validates and reinforces the values and the privileged position of the groups in power. In comparison to Fowler, Fairclough defines “ideology” in a boarder sense as his notion is no longer restricted to journalistic values: to Fairclough, ideologies are the taken-for-granted ideas that are agreed within a sociocultural community where the discourses are produced and received (Media Discourse 45). He also implies that ideologies run the risk of being distorted and manipulative (Media Discourse 46) because they are exploited by power relations to (re)produce relations of domination. In addition, he distinguishes the ideological aspects of a discourse from the persuasive aspects (Media Discourse 45). He contends persuasion takes place when audiences are moved to adopt a certain viewpoint (ibid.). Ideologies, on the other hand, are not to be adopted or rejected, but are presupposed as the “common grounds” throughout the communicative event (ibid.). Whereas I appreciate the fact that Fairclough expands the scope of ideologies and define this term as sociocultural, not merely journalistic, commonplaces, I do not agree that they are often false or deceptive. I am leaning to see ideologies to be necessary because they navigate us through the intrinsic webs of human relationships, determine and renew our understanding towards the meaning of the world. I am also reluctant to separate the ideological and persuasive aspects of a discourse. As Crowley and Hawhee point out, ideologies could be adopted or abandoned (25). Media discourses, in this regard, are delivered to persuade the audience to sustain or alter their ideologies. With respect to the sociocultural and ideological dimension of news production, Kenneth Burke complicates this issue with his notion of terministic screens and his conception that texts are interpretations of motives. Similar to Fowler’s stance—language selectively represents and thus constructs realities, Burke also argues that language as a “symbolic action” is bound to

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“deflect” and “reduce” reality (ibid.). Fowler posits himself within the sphere of linguistics. He primarily sees language to be a set of structured “semiotic codes” (4) and examines the relation between concrete linguistic components. Burke then speaks from a rhetorical perspective: his notion of terministic screens is more concerned with the interrelationship between reality, language and human communication. By terministic screens, Burke shows terminologies, with its core property of “selectivity” (Grammar 59), frames and defines our understandings about reality and our own positions in the world. Thinking along Burke’s rhetorical perspective, news production is bounded by values of a particular society and culture in the sense that language is filtered through the beliefs of that community. Furthermore, Burke discloses another contextual factor that influences the construction of texts—the understandings about the substance of human actions, namely, the motives (Grammar x). His view is rhetorical because he asks why humans communicate and to what effects. In comparison, Fowler and Fairclough might adopt a more linguistic-oriented view because they are more interested in the effects of social structures, power relations and cultural commonplaces upon linguistic units. Complementary to Fowler and Fairclough’s studies which are grounded in critical linguistic theories, Burke’s rhetorical perspective sheds a new light on the sociocultural dimension of producing media discourse.

Sociocognitive Perspective Van Dijk proposes a “sociocognitive” approach to media discourses (2), viewing the processing of news reports as characterized by the newsmakers’ personal opinions and attitudes, their professional and journalistic values and conventions, and their sociocultural beliefs. Van Dijk foremost conceives that the actual production of news happens “in memory” of the newsmakers (111), and involves interpretation, selection, and transformation of two subjects—the news events and the source texts (96-97). In other words, van Dijk believes that the actual processing of news is “cognitive” as well as “socially-monitored” (112): when writing a news item, newsmakers invoke subjective and local values, such as their personal experiences and preference. They also rely on conventional news values, which might vary depending on the society and culture, to decide if an event and the source texts are newsworthy. Complex journalistic practices and routines, deadline constraints and the accessibility of the information of the events, for instance, also influence the production process. Meanwhile, the journalists assess if the nature of the event and the source texts are consistent with the ideologies of the entire society and culture, which van Dijk terms as “group schemata” (109), that is, the general features of a social group such as the social roles, positions, class, gender and ethnicity (108), and if the events coincide with the “norms, values, goals and interests” (109) of that community. Van Dijk thus names his analytical framework as sociocognitive in that his analysis is neither an “individual account” (99) which only depicts the subjective cognition of individual newsmakers, nor a “collective account” (99) that exclusively describes the journalistic and institutional ideologies of news media (180), the economic conditions of the media organizations (176) or the cultural and historical values and beliefs (176). As he himself evaluates, the sociocognitive discourse analysis pays attention to local cognitive factors, on the one hand, and considers their social embeddings, on the other. His approach to media discourses tries to connect the textual

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structures of a finished discourse to the macro sociological context—two dimensions which van Dijk contends are not directly related (99). It must be noted that van Dijk mentions the roles of “source texts” (96) in the production of news items, that is, how the already “coded and interpreted discourses” (96) are appropriated to write a new text. This property of new reports, namely, intertextuality, is especially important to my study. As van Dijk cautions, information expressed in the source texts have significant influences upon the news reports that are produced chronologically later because the cited texts are embedded with formulated perspectives. Fairclough also inquires into intertextuality in Media Discourse. Whereas van Dijk asks how newsmakers actually process the source texts in mind (115-9), Fairclough gives more attention to the social conditions that shape and determine the intertextual references in media discourses, with a focus on how contextual particulars are construed through linguistic units. According to Fairclough, intertextual analysis is necessary because it connects textual analysis, which scrutinizes the linguistic units, to contextual analysis, which critiques the overall political, historical and sociocultural environment. That is, intertextual analysis explains how sociocultural values and institutional powers advance themselves into textual features. In the following section, I will further discuss the intertextual dimension of news production.

Intertextual Perspective Fairclough observes that a media discourse is “in chain relationship” (Media Discourse 75) in that its current configuration is mostly a result of quoting, alluding to, and recontextualizing other discourses, and itself will be further transformed in its subsequent delivery, circulation and consumption. While this intertextual characteristic is true of all types of texts, news reports more heavily rely on information that is collected elsewhere to ever be able to inform their readers of what happened. “Intertextuality” (Fairclough, Media Discourse 37) as a property of media discourse is also noted by van Dijk and Bell. Van Dijk points out one media discourse is composed on the basis of multiple “input texts” (97). Compared to Fairclough, van Dijk’s emphasizes the actual processing of the “performulated information” (115), a process which happens in the mind of the journalists. He highlights that when journalists select, summarize and reformulate the topics, the schemata, and the stylistic and rhetorical structures of a source text, the news events depicted in the source texts go through another interpreting process (115-19). This recursive interpreting is social and cognitive as it involves understanding of the newsworthiness of the events, identification of the “dominant” aspects—which are arguable—of the events, evaluation of the consistence of the event with the sociocultural ideologies, and influences from the personal emotions and opinions. Bell also gives attention to “where the story came from” (169). His notion of “attribution,” which asks the question “who says” (190), is one of the three essential structural components that constitutes a news story (169). In his analysis of intertextuality, he gives particular attention to the credibility, authority, and reliability of the news outlets or the persons who attribute the information (190-91). Fairclough’s interest in intertextuality is different from that of van Dijk and Bell. He emphasizes more how information is “recontextualized” (41) in a news item, though he also

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considers the content of the quoted information. His analysis thus principally sees intertextual reference as a social act that is constrained by “sociocultural practices” (78) and power relations. To him, intertextuality is another location to detect the sociocultural and institutional control. Fairclough proposes the concept of “voice” as an inquiry tool to examine the intertextuality. He states that voices are the “framed” (83) “speech” (80) of “individual or collective” (77) “social agents” (171). For instance, “ordinary people, correspondents, police” (151) and “officials” (161) are “voices” that often occur in a news item. I thus understand his notion of “voice” as concerning the social roles of both individuals and groups in a larger community. Additionally, “voices” of social agents are constructed representations in that they have been sifted through the political and ideological terministic screens of the newsmakers. Therefore, within Fairclough’s analytical framework, the gist of the voices (83), the degrees of presence of different voices (81), and the interpretations imposed upon them (82) are all aspects to be examined.

Summary Consistent with their critical view, van Dijk, Bell, Fowler and Fairclough substantiate that producing media discourses is sociocultural, sociocognitive and intertextual. Informed by their stance that language of media discourses is reflective of the situational factors, I am aware that ideologies are not only embodied in the connotations of lexicons, such as the naming of the participants, but are also manifested by the very act of selecting subtopics. I am also reminded to pay close attention to the cited information and the way the source information is referred to. Focusing on these three constructs of discourses, in the following chapter, I carry out a critical-dramatistic analysis to trace the sources of power that authorize the representation of China in the news on the Kunming Attack.

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Chapter 3 Ideological Meaning-Makings in News Reports on the Kunming Attack

Introduction In this chapter, I apply the methodological apparatus I have proposed in Chapter One to the reading of three news reports on the Kunming Railway Station Attack. How do news reports from different discourse communities vary from one another in their understandings of human motives? How do the linguistic features and reasoning patterns reflect these community-specific interpretations? What politics and ideologies do the discourses embody and why? Focusing on these questions, I conduct a critical-dramatistic analysis to better make sense of the discursive patterns, on the one hand, and the political and the ideological underpinnings that motivate the discursive choices, on the other.

Data Collection I narrow down my data to only include news reports released by the Xinhua News Agency (hereafter as Xinhua), The Washington Post (hereafter as the Post), and the British Broadcasting Corporation (hereafter as the BBC). These three organizations are influential news outlets inside and outside their nations. All three have established world-wide news-gathering and distribution networks. They have large scales of publication that are written in English, reaching out both domestic and global readers. Besides, as public media, these three news organizations give particular attention to political and social affairs. Given their wide circulation and influence, these news agencies are the major forces to import and export the preferred ideologies to the societies and cultures where they are posited. One of Xinhua’s missions is “to build up China’s international communication capacity” (“Brief Introduction”). As a representative of Chinese mainstream media, it closely collaborates with the Party-government. It strives to construct a national identity for the Chinese people, to establish a unified image of China, and to assist the nation-state to negotiate with other global and local social actors. The Post has a public service tradition of gathering and distributing local, national and global news and information (“About Us”). Being one of the leading daily newspapers in the United States, it particularly focuses on political issues. Though the political stance of this newspaper—whether it is liberal or conservative—is out of the scope of my study, the Post is allied with American ideologies. Additionally, the lack of direct control from the state-government does not free the Post from being monitored by the privileged or from serving the institutions at the expense of underclass. The BBC also aims to “bring the UK to the world and the world to the UK” (“Public Purposes”). Covering issues of politics, sciences, arts and so forth, the BBC is the major contributor to the national identity of the Great Britain. Meanwhile, when reporting the Kunming Attack, these three are competing with one another to have their own voices heard. In this light, news reports from these three media outlets are used to monitor and sustain the political values and ideological beliefs of the discourse communities in which they are produced and circulated. When collecting data, I searched the official websites of the three news agencies: Xinhuanet.com, Washingtonpost.com and BBC.com with key words “Kunming Railway Station”

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and “attack.” I also limited the time range within March 1st, 2014 to April 28th, 2014. On Xinhuanet.com, 93 items of news reports, editorials, feature stories on the topic were displayed; 6 items were found on Washingtonpost.com; BBC.com showed 9 relevant items. Only news reports that are about the attack itself are collected whereas items featuring other events but briefly mentioned the Kunming Railway Station Attack were not included.

Data Selection From the overall 108 pieces of collected news items, three news reports were selected, each of which represents one news agency. These three news reports are attached in the Appendix. They are “At least 28 dead, 113 injured in Kunming railway station violence,” which was released by Xinhua on March 2nd; “Knife-wielding attackers kill 29 at Chinese train station; more than 100 injured,” one report that is published on March 1st by the Post, and “China mass stabbing: Deadly knife attack in Kunming,” which is reported by the BBC on March 1st. They are among the earliest coverage of the attack, mainly serving to inform the public of what happened. Instead of concentrating on one specific aspect of the attack such as why the attack was launched or how the citizens and the government acted, they encompass a wide range of subtopics and capture the actions of a wide spectrum of social actors. Additionally, they belong to hard news, a journalism genre that is often termed as factual. Compared to editorials or feature stories, the rhetorical moves taken in these discourses are more implicit and are more likely to escape a critical reflection. In fact, a cursory look at the three reports reveals two opposing theses about the Chinese society, which seems to form a China/West binary and suggest two contesting ideological understandings about the social and political structures of contemporary China.

A Critical-Dramatistic Analysis of Three News Reports Having described the media outlets, the genre and the basic content of the data, I now move to examine the dramatistic pentad of the three discourses. In what follows, I will first identify the Act, Agent, Scene, Purpose and Agency of the three discourses. In the meantime, I place the five elements into ratios to specify the traits of each element and to illuminate the ways they are characterized in relation to others. When I first analyzed the pentads, I intended to observe each term in turn before moving to pair them into ratios. I soon realized a close interconnectivity between the five elements, and the overlapping between them makes it unfeasible to draw a clear-cut distinction between the five factors1. Moreover, I also became aware that ratios are inherent in the pentad in that it might not be possible to articulate the properties of the five elements without positioning them into ratios. I thus adjusted my analysis and started distributing the terms into different ratios and

1 I found one term can easily extend and transform into another. As Kenneth Burke notes, “…because of the overlapping [areas between the five terms], it is possible for a thinker to make his way continuously from any one of them to any of the others. Or he may use terms in which several of the areas are merged. For any of the terms may be seen in terms of any of the others” (Grammar 53). The actions of attacking, for instance, can be an Act of the Agent attackers, but can also be seen as one part of a Scene of violence and confusion. They might as well fill in the slot of Agency, serving as a brutal instrument to realize the Purpose of the Agents.

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simultaneously tracing the nature of each term2. My pairing of the terms into ratios also evidences that certain ambiguity persists between different ratios in the sense that they are not absolutely exclusive to each other. After all, identifying ratios partly relies on the arrangement of the text-producer and partly rests on my own interpretation, which means that ratios are case-specific and thus what makes sense in one situation might not be applied to another. My analysis in this chapter therefore is partial and incomplete, considering that my understanding of the ratios is filtered through my terministic screen—they bear the ideological weight of my orientation and my worldview. My examination shows that in all the three news reports, the Agents and the Acts are represented through Act-Agent ratio, the Scene is characterized in terms of a Scene-Act ratio, and the Agency is placed into a Purpose-Agency ratio. Incongruence occurs between Xinhua, the Post and the BBC when they interpret the Purpose of the attackers: Xinhua defines the Purpose through a Purpose-Act ratio whereas the Post and the BBC use a Scene-Purpose ratio. Following the examination of the pentad, I exemplify the dominant terms of each discourse. As such, I aim to uncover how the three discourses vary in their explanation of the intrinsic motives of the attack. The politics and ideologies of each discourse are lastly compared and critiqued, shedding lights on the historical and sociocultural context in which the texts are composed and circulated.

Act-Agent Ratio All the three news reports describe Agents in terms of what they do. In other words, the news producers portray Agents by choosing to bring certain performances of the Agents into light while leaving other aspects in the background3. In Table 1 that I attach in Appendix 4, I spare the space to list the naming of the Agents because the way the social actors are addressed is one of the major differences between the news reports. Choosing different terminologies is not simply an attempt to diversify the linguistic forms. Different wordings might lead to subtle changes in the meaning, which further suggests nuances in the text-producers’ attitudes towards the social actors and indicates variations in their understanding of the internal motives of human actions. As Table 1 shows, I mark the group of individuals who attack the Kunming Railway Station as the Agent in all the three news reports. Correspondingly, I term the citizens as the counter-agent4 and the Chinese authorities, the Chinese domestic media, and the emergency assistants as the additional counter-agents. Another possible way of analyzing the news by

2 In this process, I also use analytical tools provided by critical discourse analysis theories, such as “overlexicalization” (Machin and Mayr 70), “genericization” (Machin and Mayr 70) and intertextual analysis to better understand how the text-producers choose and arrange linguistic constituents and semantic topics to characterize the pentad. 3 Specifically, the text-producers construct the Agents by including and excluding relevant co-agents or counter-agents, and by presenting them in hierarchical sequence. More importantly, the three news reports generate divergent images of the same Agents by selecting their Acts and by paring their performances with the Acts of the co-agents and the counter-agents. 4 As Burke briefly mentions, the “Agent” is the one who did the act (Grammar x), whose act might be “modified (hence partly motivated) by friends (co-agents) or enemies (counter-agents)” (Grammar xiv). That is, the Agent and the counter-agent act against one another.

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Xinhua will be terming the knife-wielding group as the counter-agent whereas taking the Chinese authorities as the Agent, with the citizens, the Chinese domestic media and the emergency assistants being the co-agents5. Nevertheless, considering all the three texts are composed because of the Kunming Attack, an Act of the attackers that directly6 prompts the actions of the other social actors, I choose to label the knife-wielding individuals as the Agent and to emphasize that it is the Act of attacking—the basic action of the Agent—that conditions the activities of the other social actors. The three news reports share four common categories, which are Attackers as the Agent, Citizens as the counter-agent, the Chinese authorities as the additional counter-agent, and Chinese domestic media as another additional counter-agent. Nevertheless, the social actors that are attributed into the four categories are endowed with distinctive temperaments. First, the attackers in Xinhua are primarily denoted as “terrorists,” whereas in the Post and the BBC, this group of social actors is mostly referred to in terms of their ethnicity and religious beliefs. Xinhua uses the word “terrorists” five times. Compared to the Post and the BBC where “terrorists” only occurs when Xinhua’s wordings are quoted, the over-use of this word in Xinhua indicates an anxiety to define the attackers as the offenders of the Chinese society, who take pleasure in killing and thus must face legal punishment and ethical condemnation. To be fair, Xinhua does indicate that the attackers of the Kunming Railway Station probably are Muslim Uighurs by reporting an attack that took place in June in Xinjiang and another attack that happened in October in Beijing. Though Xinhua verifies that these two relevant attacks are launched by religious extremists who are active in Xinjiang, it also cautiously adds that “their [the suspects of the Kunming Attack] identities have not been confirmed yet.” In contrast to Xinhua, “Muslim,” “Uighur,” and “minority” are more linguistically present in the Post and the BBC. By over-using words concerning ethnicity and religious belief, the Post and the BBC might try to genericize the attackers and to categorically assign the identity of attacker to the community of Muslim Uighurs. In doing this, the Post and the BBC might try to validate their assumption that Muslim Uighurs as the minority in the Chinese society are prone to subvert the government because of the wide-spread discrimination against them. In all, though all the three reports see attackers as the Agent, Xinhua defines attackers as violators of the laws based on what they committed, and they therefore must be condemned and punished. The Post and the BBC, on the other hand, bring in the Scene-Act ratio to rationalize the illegal and unethical behaviors of the attackers. Attackers as the agent in the Post and the BBC are described as the powerless minority who are struggling to resist a powerful state. Citizens as the counter-agent are also characterized differently in the three news reports. In Xinhua, citizens—a category that includes the local residents of the Kunming City, the victims and witnesses of the attack, and social media users—represent the voice of the Chinese people.

5 The first analysis might imply a belief the attackers as the Agent took action to resist the counter-agent, that is, the Chinese government who has imposed oppressive policies upon them. The second analysis seems to endorse an opposite stance, which might also be the viewpoint of the Chinese authorities in that this analysis suggests the attackers as the counter-agent, are the “enemy” of the Agent, namely, the Chinese government. 6 I italicize the word “directly” because one might argue it is a Scene of oppression and censorship that has initiated the attack and thus the Scene is the determinant of the Acts and the Agents.

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Xinhua’s interviews with Chen Guizhen, Yang Ziqing and Yang Haifei intend to project the victims and the witnesses as innocent and vulnerable “civilians.” Also, quoting in length their narratives about the attack and describing in detail their body language and facial expressions, Xinhua intensifies their sorrow and terror. Even the specification of their names might be one strategy to capture them as individuals and to bring them closer to the audience: the survivors are not some random people, but are one of “us,” the ordinary citizens who have jobs, families and life stories. Their loss and grief, then, is also “our” pain. Right after the interviews with the survivors, Xinhua gives a full coverage of the online discussion about the attack by citing the posts from Sina Weibo and WeChat—the two most popular social networking websites in China. By commenting “[t]he incident has fueled massive anger among the people across China, with netizens severely condemning the violent attacks on social websites,” Xinhua again describes the social media users to be representatives of the Chinese people. Xinhua also lists the user names when it quotes a particular netizens, enhancing the credibility of the cited information. By pointing out that the users are calling to “stop publishing bloody photos,” Xinhua pictures that the netizens, or rather, the Chinese people, are actively participating in domestic affairs. In addition, emergency workers as an additional counter-agent also belong to the category of the Chinese people. While the Post and the BBC exclude this social actor, Xinhua reports their Acts of treating the injured to stress that the Chinese people are composed and responsible, and are uniting to support each other. Citizens as the counter-agent in the Post and the BBC are no longer the representative of the Chinese people. It is noteworthy that whereas the Post and the BBC also specify the names of the survivors and both directly quote the interviews of Xinhua, the survivors are pictured to serve a different role in these two discourses. First, the Post comments on the experience of Yang Haifei by stating that “the station transformed in an instant into a scene of panic and confusion,” highlighting the attack as brutal. Second, the personal narratives of these two survivors are elaborated by the background information that “[t]he train attack comes on the heels of a spate of incidents that Chinese authorities have identified as acts of terrorism…” Such an ordering of information diverts the readers’ attention away from the agony of the survivors, which is foregrounded in Xinhua, but implies that the Kunming Attack signals a tension between the Muslim Uighurs and the Chinese authorities, and possibly, between the Chinese people. Here, the Post is assuming the Kunming Attack is carried out by “Muslim extremists” from the region Xinjiang, who also carried out the October Attack in Beijing. Note that when the reports were released, the identities of the attackers have not been verified, yet. Additionally, the Post reports that since the October Attack, Chinese authorities have increased “anti-terrorism security” which is “focused on ethnic minorities, particularly Muslim Uighurs in the Western region of Xinjiang.” In doing so, the Post seems to presuppose that all Muslim Uighurs are in conflicts with the Han people, and this community does not belong to the “Chinese people” whose interests are represented by the Chinese government. After introducing the October Attack, the Post further mentions the “Uighur leaders…report oppression by the official policies of China’s authoritarian government and by widespread discrimination within Chinese society.” I term “Uighur leaders,” along with

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“Muslim Uighurs” and “ethnic minorities,” as co-agents in the Post, which are also present in the BBC but are absent from Xinhua. In Xinhua, Uighur people, terrorists, and religious extremists are strictly distinguished in that Xinhua does not once refer to the attackers of the Kunming Railway Station in terms of their region, ethnicity or religion. The Post, on the other hand, lumps these social actors together as an undifferentiated whole. In fact, through including “Uighur leaders,” the Post suggests that the Chinese authorities can only represent the Han. As minorities who are being suppressed in the Chinese society, a nation which is mainly constituted of Han, Uighurs must have their own leaders. In other words, by placing the October Attack as the background information after the cited narratives of the survivors, and by pairing the speech of the Uighur leaders with the October Attack, the Post does not give much attention to how the Kunming Attack impacts the lives of citizens. Instead, it is more interested in the severity of the attack and the political and social scene where the attack happens. Allied with the Post, survivors are depicted as unfortunate victims in the BBC. The BBC places the stories of Yang Haifei and Yang Ziqing under the sub-title “Pools of blood” to foreground that attack is gruesome. The BBC continues to stress the severity of the Kunming Attack by recounting that “[i]mages seen by the BBC show men and women lying on the floor in pools of blood following the attack.” One of the major counter-agents in Xinhua—social media users, is excluded from the Post and is backgrounded in the BBC. Unlike Xinhua which details the comments from the social media users to weaves a web of voices of the Chinese people, the BBC mentions the pictures posted by the “social media users in China” are “being taken down,” suggesting that the government are imposing strict censorship to maintain social orders. Whereas Xinhua reports netizens as representative of the Chinese people act together to reduce terror, the BBC is not interested in the identity of Chinese people. Rather, it includes social media users to picture an authorative government and a strained political environment. The Post and the BBC might sympathize with the survivors because they are the victims of the tension between Han and Uighurs, who are also unfortunate in that they are living in a highly censored nation. Authorities as the additional counter-agent are pictured to be a credible law enforcement agent in Xinhua. Xinhua reports that “[p]resident Xi Jinping has urged the law enforcement to investigate and solve the case and punish the terrorists in accordance with the law,” emphasizing that the Chinese government and people battle against the attackers because the assailants are violators of the law. By showing the Chinese top leaders are determined to enforce the law, Xinhua highlights that the Chinese government can be counted on to guard against any illegal or unethical behaviors. Xinhua also posits the authorities in relation to the Chinese people by quoting responses from “the Ministry of Public Security.” “At its official Sina Weibo account,” the Ministry first emphasizes the situation is under control, stressing that the government is fully engaged with and is operating to restore social stability. Xinhua continues to report that the Ministry believes “[n]o matter what motives the murderers hold, the killing of innocence people is against kindness and justice.” With this, Xinhua shows that the Ministry is keeping with the direction pointed by the central government and is firmly enacting the laws for justice. Lastly, Xinhua cites the Ministry’s condolence to the families of the victims, showing that the authorities not only commit to tackle emergency, but also care for their people. Quoting

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statements of a governmental bureau from a social network website, a space that tends to be seen as open, Xinhua might be also suggesting that the authorities are communicating with citizens via transparent and effective channels. In all, in Xinhua, authorities are projected as effective and responsible executive agents, who are defending and protecting the interests of the Chinese. The credibility of the authorities, however, is doubted in the Post and the BBC. The Post terms the government essentially as “China’s Communist Party” who is having “an annual convening of its largely rubber-stamp legislature in Beijing.” By questioning the Chinese legislative system, the Post might try to restrict Communism to be an ideology of censorship and dictatorship, a particular image about Communism that was prevalent in Western countries during the Cold War. When reporting the resolution of President Xi to punish the attackers, the Post directly quotes Xinhua’s words, but leaves out “law enforcement” and “in accordance with the law,” which are particularly stressed in Xinhua. In addition, though the Post reports that the authorities made statements and were “en route to the scene” immediately after the attack, it attempts to prove that “a coordinated attack of this size and nature is rare in China,” instead of showing the efficiency of the government. The Post and the BBC further capture the Chinese authorities as a tyrannical by characterizing Chinese domestic media in general, and Xinhua News Agency in particular, as “state media” and “government-run media.” Through overlexicalizing the word “state,” the Post genericizes Xinhua News Agency as a media that is approved by the government and thus essentially is a propaganda machine for the Communist Party. When reporting what has actually happened, the Post exclusively refers to Xinhua News for information, and reminds its readers that “many comments about the attack on Chinese social media were censored, and the news did not appear on the front pages of many newspapers.” Here, the Post suggests that reliable information is difficult to obtain because of the political restrictions from the government. Even the information that has been released cannot be trusted, given Xinhua as a “state media” is closely overseen by the Party-government. In contrast to the authorities in Xinhua, who are efficient and supportive, the Post and the BBC account the Chinese government as dictatorial.

Scene-Act Ratio in Xinhua News Xinhua News foremost posits the Act within a Scene of (anti-)terrorism by coining the Kunming Attack as a “violent terrorist attack,” channeling one of the most often discussed motifs worldwide since September 11, 2001. In other words, Xinhua News posits the Kunming Attack, which, one might argue, is a local event, within a global environment. In this way, the Kunming Attack as a manifestation of terrorism becomes an emergent global threat. By this, the Acts of the Chinese people and the government, their measures to restore the local as well as the national security are not only necessary and crucial for China, but should also be promoted for the peace of the entire world. Further, Xinhua mentions another two attacks, one happened in June 2013 in Xinjiang and the other took place in October 2013 in Beijing. The news agency seems to introduce these two attacks as background information, placing these two attacks at the end of its report. What interesting is though these three attacks are apparently related to the region Xinjiang and are possibly launched by the same extremist religious organization, as identified by

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Xinhua in its reporting of the October attack, they are more overtly termed as terrorist attacks. That is, whereas the three attacks are similar to one another in several aspects, “terrorist” is the only common word that Xinhua applies to them: the Kunming Attack is “an organized, premediated violent terrorist attack;” the June attack is “the latest violent terrorist attack that caused most civilian deaths;” and the October attack is a “deadly crash as a violent terrorist attack.” Via overlexicalizing the word “terrorist” in contrast to suppressing other possible lexicons such as “Uighurs,” “religion,” “Muslim,” and “Xinjiang,” Xinhua posits the Scene of terrorism as the prominent context, in which the three attacks are closely related to. By constructing a Scene of (anti-)terrorism, Xinhua suggests that the actions of combating these three attacks are certainly a domestic affair in that the attackers bear an intention of dividing the nation, but meanwhile, they are also an event that requires support and participation of the international community. Because the “entire” world shares the same perspective towards terrorism, the battle of the Chinese people and the government against the terrorists, which now should be as seen actions taken by a responsible member of the international community, need to be encouraged. At least two correlated social and political environments are illustrated in the sentence “President Xi Jinping has urged the law enforcement to investigate and solve the case and punish the terrorists in accordance with the law.” First, President Xi as the top leader of China and a representative of Chinese government made statements to provide executive directions to the local government and the Chinese people. This immediate response from the government represents a Scene of efficiency: when facing a sudden attack, the government is not only determined to take responsibility, but is also capable to cope with such an emergency and is actively performing to settle the disputes. Further, a Scene of order, stability and unity is rendered. It must be noted that such a Scene of order is formulated throughout the entire report. As my analysis of the Act-Agent ratio shows, the actions of various (additional) counter-agents are brought into the narrative of Xinhua to map out a complete view of the Chinese society. In other words, Xinhua weaves an intricate network of counter-Agents: city police as representing the local executive department, emergency assistants, and ordinary users of social networking media. These actions contribute to the building of a stable social environment: doctors and emergency workers are taking care of the injuries, the local government is undertaking investigation, the city police stays on guard to take control of the situation, the train station maintains punctual departures, and social media users are continuing an open discussion online. Through describing the Acts of multiple social actors, a picture of an orderly society is sketched out. Instead of being disoriented in chaos, the government, citizens, and other mechanism of the society cooperate with one another and react in a composed manner to restore social security. Further, Xinhua makes effort to bring a sense of unity to the fore. Xinhua begins its description of the online discussion about the attack by stressing that “[t]he incident has fueled massive anger among the people across China.” Additionally, in “[t]he attack…has also awaken a strong sense of justice and strength among us…” and “[w]e strongly condemn violence, and we call on people to stop circulating bloody pictures,” the use of “us” and “we” highlights a voice of a unified community, which might be the voice of the Chinese people. As my following

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examination shows, whereas the Post and the BBC privilege a Scene of violence by giving more attention to the actions of the attackers, Xinhua emphasizes more of the Acts of the counter-agents to foreground a Scene of order, stability and unity. The phrases “the law enforcement” and “in accordance with the law” in the “President Xi Jinping…” sentence also generates a Scene of democracy. Pairing the urge for punishment immediately with the law emphasizes the supremacy of the Constitution, conveying a message that the Chinese society is ruled by law. While a stern attitude of the government towards the attackers, or to use Xinhua’s words, “murders” and “thugs,” is expressed, a resolution to resolve the conflicts by legal means is simultaneously declared. A belief that whoever commits these crimes must face the consequences is highlighted, maintaining that punishment that will be performed is irrelevant to ethnicity, religious belief, region of birth or even political stance. The democratic Scene is further reinforced by detailed accounts of the online discussions about the attack. Xinhua gives considerable space to the opinions of ordinary Chinese citizens. It summarizes a Scene of open discussion by reporting that “…netizens severely condemning the violent attacks on social websites.” This general description is followed with intertextual reference to comments from users of Weibo and WeChat. Here, Xinhua directly quotes three messages from the two social media. The first message from WeChat condemns the violence while, in the meantime, calling to stop circulating pictures of the brutal attack. Such an appeal is then elaborated by Xinhua—“…netizens are spreading the word of stopping the circulation of bloody photos on the Internet,” and by another remark from a Weibo user—“[s]top publishing bloody photos, because that’s just what the thugs want…” Directly quoting and indirectly commenting on opinions of the Chinese people, Xinhua tries to communicate with its audience that instead of having the government strictly monitoring the online and the offline society, the general public is autonomously taking measurements to prevent panics. These comments that ask for stopping distributing pictures build up a friendly and humanistic environment and contribute to the Scene of democracy. Intertextual quotations and allusions to online postings hence display an ongoing conversation about the Kunming Attack. By this, Xinhua presents a multitude of perspectives about the Kunming Attack: indignation at the violence, the determination to hold together to go through this unsettling moment, the awareness of the public to maintain a friendly social environment, and the trust in major media. In all, with the voice of netizens, a heated discussion is brought to the forefront, which supports a democratic Scene, considering such a discussion continues on an open digital space. Lastly, a Scene of disruption is structured in the news report of Xinhua. Two specific survivors—Chen Guizhen and Yang Ziqing—are named and featured in the report. Xinhua gives a full coverage to their personal experience by directly citing their speech to foreground their pain and loss. Additionally, Xinhua details what these two survivors have been doing before the attack: Chen Guizhen and her husband planned to stay one night in the waiting room, and Yang Ziqing and her husband were waiting for their departure. Xinhua captures them as ordinary citizens, implying that these survivors, or rather, victims, are innocent. What is more, Xinhua includes in the voices of another two witnesses, Yang Haifei and a Weibo user named “HuangY3xin-Dione.” With reference to their narratives, Xinhua emphasizes that they are

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terrified and vulnerable. In other words, Xinhua not only details the experience of the survivors in this attack, but also tries to present more complete stories of their lives, and to suggest that their life, which ought to be peaceful, is significantly disrupted, or even destroyed by this violent attack. Taking on the perspective of ordinary citizens, Xinhua argues the attackers and their behaviors, therefore, must be denounced because it only brings misfortune.

Scene-Act Ratio in the Post and the BBC The reporting of the Kunming Attack in the Post begins with a Scene of violence. Whereas Xinhua tends to use more general adjectives such as “violent” and “cruel,” the Post intensifies the scale and the nature of the attack. For instance, the attack is termed as a “mass stabbing.” Another example is the Post introduces the attack by commenting that “[a] coordinated attack of this size and nature is rare in China.” Moreover, when capturing the actions of the “assailants,” the Post selects verbs such as “burst into” to highlight that the attack is serious. The injured are portrayed to be “sprawl[ing] on the train station floor,” where blood splattered. Coinciding with the Post, the BBC also emphasizes the ruthlessness of the scene, given the only sub-title in the discourse is “pools of blood.” This scene of “pools of blood” again occurs when the injured are delineated to be “…lying on the floor in pools of blood following the attack,” which suggests a collapse of social orders. Along the same line, the personal narratives of the survivors are used to represent chaotic consequences. Whereas Xinhua mainly pictures the victims to be terrified and vulnerable citizens, the Post and the BBC quote the interviews from Xinhua to show the damage of the attack. The story of Yang Haifei, which directly quoted in Xinhua News, is paraphrased in the Post, with comments such as “scene of panic and confusion, with everyone running away” added. The BBC also includes Yang Haifei’s narratives but uses verbs of violent physical action to re-articulate. The sentence “…people who were slower were severely injured” in Xinhua’s reporting, for instance, is transformed into “…those too slow to flee were cut down” in the BBC. As my analysis of the Scene of disruption in Xinhua shows, when describing victims, Xinhua shares the same viewpoint with the survivors as a way to express empathy towards the victims and their families. The Post and the BBC, in comparison, might intend to include the voice of the survivors to give its readers a sense of emergency. In other words, though the Scene of disruption and the Scene of violence are both present in the three news reports, through choice of lexicons and rhetorical intertextual reference, the former becomes the central in Xinhua while the latter are being featured in the Post and the BBC. The three reports also differ in their descriptions of the Chinese government, which conjure up a Scene of Communism and censorship in the Post and the BBC, contrasting with the Scene of efficiency and democracy in Xinhua. Connecting the attack to the “most important public meeting” of “China’s Communist Party,” the Post dwells upon the time when the attack happened. The Post also interprets that the attack, an “incident” of “sensitivity,” took place at “a sensitive time,” leading the readers to imagine a political environment in which open discussions are closely monitored by a powerful government. In fact, the Post explicitly doubts the accountability of the Chinese government by introducing the “public meeting” as “an annual convening of its [the Communist Party’s] largely rubber-stamp legislature.” The appositive

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“rubber-stamp” indicates that the Chinese people could hardly participate in public affairs but the Party takes complete control of the nation. By this China is labeled as a Party-nation which deems Communist as its core ideology. The intense political atmosphere is further amplified with the major domestic media being described as “state media” or “government-run” news agencies in the Post. The BBC describes Xinhua almost in the same way by terming it to be “the state news agency.” Additionally, without much qualification, the Post provides that “…the news did not appear on the front pages of many newspapers.” Not only the off-line media are restrained, but also the online space. Whereas Xinhua demonstrates that citizens are autonomously having an open conversation about the attack, the Post contrasts the democratic Scene by reporting that “many comments about the attack on Chinese social media were censored.” Likewise, the BBC reports through the voice of “correspondents,” whose identities are not revealed, that “[s]ocial media users in China posted pictures of the attack on the internet, but…they are being taken down.” Note that in Xinhua, it is the Weibo and WeChat users who call to stop delivering and circulating gruesome pictures. In the BBC, however, the responsible citizens who act together to reduce pains and to construct a friendly social environment are invisible, but an online space with implicit barriers are presented by an anonymous correspondent. The society in which the attack happened, in other words, is fraught with propaganda released by domestic media that appear to be strictly censored by the government, and with issues that are prohibited or canceled by the government as the gate-keeper. Also, the attack is posited in a Scene of oppression in the Post and the BBC, another changing political landscape that runs contrary to the Scene of democracy in Xinhua. The Post includes the voice of Uighur leaders who “condemned the violence,” but also exposes “oppression by official policies of China’s authoritarian government and by widespread discrimination within Chinese society.” Quoting the opinions of “Uighur leaders,” first of all, seems to indicate the Uighurs are living in a society where the government merely represents the Han people, the largest ethnic group in China, and the Uighurs must have their separate, independent representative. Besides, the Post tends to refer to the attackers as “Uighur,” “ethnic minorities,” “Muslim extremists,” or “Muslim Uighurs.” The BBC also prefers to modify the attackers with “Muslim Uighur minority group.” Compared to Xinhua, the over-use of “ethnicity” and “religion” in the Post and the BBC again enlarges the tension between different ethnic and religious communities, which, according to Xinhua, are united as responsible members of a coherent nation. Further, the Scene of oppression essentially draws readers’ attention to a local context, in contrast to the Scene of (anti-)terrorism, a more global scene in Xinhua. To be more specific, the Post mainly concentrates on “China’s restive Xinjiang region,” where the conflict between Uighurs and Hans and the dissonance between Muslims and atheists are breaking out. So does the BBC which introduces Xinjiang as “…home to Muslim Uighur minority group which has a long history of discord with Chinese authorities.” A closer examination shows that the Post and the BBC probably refuse to acknowledge the attack and the counter-attack are within a context of (anti-)terrorism. The Post quotes, without specifying its own position, that Xinhua and the Chinese authorities—two social actors that have been degraded as manipulative agents—identify the attack to be a terrorist activity. Such ambiguous

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attitude is as well expressed by the BBC in “…people were wounded in what authorities said was a ‘premediated, violent terrorist attack’.” In all, the global Scene of (anti-)terrorism is replaced with a local Scene of oppression, which is characterized with conflicts between different ethnic groups, and disputes between the Party-state and the citizens.

Purpose-Act Ratio in Xinhua In Xinhua, the element Purpose mainly functions in a Purpose-Act ratio. Xinhua appeals to a seemingly universal truth that massacring civilians is absolutely against human rights, to support its belief that the attack is fundamentally “against kindness and justice,” hence, under no conditions can it be allowed. Also, because of the attackers’ ambition to divide the nation, Xinhua argues, the attack must be severely punished. The news agency believes separatism causes distrust and strife among the Chinese people, an integrated community that encompasses different ethnic and religious groups who have been living within the territory of China since ancient times. Separatism thus is an attempt to impose a distinction between different ethnic groups where it is not wanted, and worse, a dangerous intention to cause friction in the society, which will further hamper economic development and social progress. Separatist activities, therefore, betrays the interests of the Chinese people in that it distains state sovereignty and impinges upon national security, which the success of a nation relies on. Approaching the Acts by characterizing the political agenda of the attackers as vicious, Xinhua substantiates the Act of attacking by nature is a terrorism activity.

Scene-Purpose Ratio in the Post and the BBC The Post and the BBC, however, assign a different Purpose to the Act of attacking by invoking a Scene-Purpose ratio. To these two news agencies, the Purpose of the Agent essentially arises from oppressed social conditions. They give credence to Xinhua’s statement that the attack is a manifesto of separatism, but questions if a separatist activity is wrong. On the ground that the attackers have long been struggling in a society that is supervised by a dictatorial Communist Party, they try to rationalize, if not to support, the attackers’ political agenda to gain independence from China. The Post and the BBC bring in the Scene of Communism and censorship along with the Scene of oppression to endorse the separatists, who the Post genericizes as Muslim Uighurs, and to make a case for the administrative autonomy and political independence of Xinjiang. Unlike Xinhua which deems the attack destabilizes the society thus is an unjust personal goal, the Post and the BBC play with the wrongness of the attacks by advocating that the attack is an Act to preserve the religious and cultural traditions of the Muslim Uighurs, whose identity is now in peril due to the official policies of the Chinese government and the ever-present suppression from the Han. In Xinhua, the attackers are so preoccupied with their personal goals that they resort to violence. In the Post and the BBC, however, the attackers are forced to take action because the Chinese government tries to purify and monopolize their cultures. Hence, their actions to overthrow the ruling of the authorities, who have betray their will, might not be harshly blamed. After all, their resentment and hatred towards the society and civilians are resulted from the long-lasting discrimination that they have been suffered from. The

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tyrannical government and the society are partly culpable for the recent undesirable attack.

Agency My analysis of the Agency is one respect where the distinction between the five elements blurs. The Act of attacking the Railway Station might as well be termed as the Agency insofar as the attacking is a method to an end. To be more accurate, the Agent attackers resort to an Agency of violence to obtain their Purpose for independence. Observing the attacker’s action from the dimension of Agency places the attacking into a Purpose-Agency ratio. To use Burke’s words, Agency is “the means necessary to the attainment of goal” (Grammar 128). Defining Agency in relation to the Purpose is another pair of ratio that is in play in all the three reports. As my above analysis of the Purpose reveals, the three reports agree that the attackers strive towards a goal of separating Xinjiang from China, but when deciding if the resentful instrument deployed to achieve the goal should be blamed or not, the three news agencies are at variance. To Xinhua, attacking as an instrument must be denunciated foremost because it bears a purpose that will finally yield drawbacks for the society and the people, and second, because there are more constructive channels that are offered and protected by the law to express one’s petition. The attack, therefore, is false in that it satisfies harmful personal desires and gratifies lust for violence. The Post and the BBC, on the other hand, refutes Xinhua by contending that the attack indeed is an ill-chosen method, but it might not be a corridor heading to a wrong direction. Predicated on the belief that the Muslim Uighurs are oppressed, the Post and the BBC demonstrate the “rightness” of the attacking by arguing it is a media to resist, a method to regain lost civic rights and a means to protect religious and cultural traditions. By demonstrating the Scene of censorship and oppression, the Post and the BBC contest with Xinhua in their understandings of the ethical and judicial grounding of the attack, and accordingly draw a different conclusion, that the attack is an effort of the Muslim Uighurs to re-gain their silenced voice. Along this line, the Agency might not be entirely wrong if it is for much-needed rights.

Dominant Terms in the Three News Reports In the previous section, I place elements into ratios to reveal their nature. I now move on to consider which factor dominates the discourse generally. By “dominate” I mean to find the central term from the pentad, which principally determines the text-producers’ definition and description of the other four elements. Essentially, to detect the pentadic term(s) that predominate the entire text, I try to locate the intrinsic motive(s) that the rhetor assigns to the situation in study. The dominant term of a discourse as the internal force, then, is “the cause of itself insofar as the motive is not deduced from any cause outside itself” and will “demand expression” whatever the external conditions (Burke, Grammar 50). Based on the “principle of consistency”, the other elements in the pentad derive their properties from the dominant factor (Burke, Grammar 3). Hence, seeing the three news reports at hand as discourses of motives, I will compare their dominant terms to uncover how their understandings of the intrinsic and extrinsic motives vary from one another. Clarifying the dominant term and discovering the intrinsic motives will further offer a premise from which I will explore and critique the politics

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and the ideologies that are embodied in the texts. Concentrating on the state-ethnic conflict, Xinhua refers the internal motive of the Kunming Attack back to a source in Purpose whereas the Post and the BBC find the primary motivational force in Scene. Arranging the other four elements around the Purpose, Xinhua argues that the Purpose to divide Xinjiang from China is the necessary intrinsic motive for the Agent attackers to resort to violence as the Agency and to carry out the Act of attacking, which finally results in a Scene of (anti-)terrorism. To put it in another way, when answering why a group of individuals can be so resentful that they deployed a lethal method to express their interests and needs, Xinhua traces the internal motive to the Purpose. According to Xinhua, the attack happens not because of the qualities of the Agent, that the attackers are Muslim or Uighurs, since the religious, cultural and linguistic traditions of different ethnic groups are protected in the Chinese society. It also cannot be because of the Scene, where citizens are encouraged to participate in decision-making. Instead, Xinhua contends that such a despicable action of attacking innocent citizens can only arise from an ambition to tearing a region away from its motherland. Therefore, by pinning down the motivational force in the Purpose of separatism, Xinhua projects the Act of attacking as a disruption to the society, the Agents of attackers as terrorists who cause panics, the Agency as a means that must be condemned, and the Scene of (anti-)terrorism as situations that are naturally entailed. Taking the Scene as the dominant element, the Post and the BBC represent a reality of mainland China that is fundamentally distinct from the one in Xinhua. The Post and the BBC foremost represent the Scene as censored and oppressive, and accordingly characterize the Agent as the marginalized group, highlighting the division, instead of the identification, between the Chinese people. The Post and the BBC also gesture toward that Act of targeting on innocent citizens certainly cannot be approved, but these individuals would not choose to be desperados in the first place if they are embraced by an equal and democratic community. Additionally, they would not turn to an Agency of violence if they were granted with civic engagement or have legal means to express their petition. Because of the discriminatory circumstances, the Purpose of aiming a divorce from China is reasonable. Overall, the Post and the BBC insist that it is the social conditions that twist the character of the Agent, and without the suppressive Scene, they would not choose to threaten civilians’ life to achieve their goals. By locating the intrinsic motive of the Kunming Attack in two distinctively characterized terms, namely, the Purposes as assigned in Xinhua and the Scenes as represented in the Post and the BBC, the three news agencies contest with one another in their representation and evaluation of a same social event. In fact, Xinhua, the Post and the BBC not only disagree in their conceptions of a single social event—the Kunming Railway Station Attack in this case, but also demonstrate disparate understanding about the status quo of China: Xinhua represents a picture of China as an efficient, well-organized and unified nation, where ethnic-state conflict is an external condition. The Post and the BBC, then, view the strife between ethnic, religious and cultural groups as an intrinsic feature of contemporary China, a society that is troubled by one-party governance and the attending dictatorship.

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Political and Ideological Underpinnings To take a step forward, the Kunming Attack event itself might not be the primary concern of the three news agencies after all. Their differentiated conceptualizations of the intrinsic motives manifest distinctive political stances concerning separatism: Xinhua uses the event to demonstrate how separatism can damage a society. Covering the Kunming Attack is an opportunity for Xinhua, who also partly represents the Chinese government, to confront separatism and to enhance social stability and harmony. The Post and the BBC, on the other hand, exploit the Kunming Attack to expose the existing as well as the potential friction in the Chinese society, to further challenge the official narrative about the status quo of China, and, more importantly, to discredit the Party’s surveillance of the nation. Such contrasting interpretations and evaluations of separatism reflect their dissonance concerning the nature, the origin and the distribution of social goods. Specifically, the three news reports display two competing political perspectives on the pivotal topoi of the Chinese society and thus convey different senses of political possibilities in contemporary China: Is it legitimate to include different ethnic groups into the category of “the Chinese people?” Does the collective identity of Chinese impinge upon the expression of individuality? Are social stability and unity of contemporary China achieved at the expense of freedom of speech? Can the government represent the will and needs of the Chinese people, a collective identity that might be imaginary in the first place? Or is the government actually manipulating and dictating the country, given China is a one-party state? Before proceeding to a more detailed examination, it is necessary to note that my analysis of the political and ideological underpinnings of the three discourses do not mean to essentialize the differences between the three news reports. I am aware that my reading of the three news reports is inflected by my own ideological perspectives. To some extent, any attempt to compare different cultural and political traditions involves imposing structures where structures might not inherently reside. After all, differences are usually intersecting with similarities, and it might be especially so because of the current trend of globalization. In this sense, the conflicts between Chinese news agency and its western counterpart cannot be understood in black and white terms. I intend my discussion to critically reflect upon the limitations of each side, but not to perpetuate an undesirable binary between China and the West.

Xinhua: Ideology of Nationalism Xinhua invokes an interpretative network of nationalism in its characterization and evaluation of the Kunming Attack. By using “nationalism,” I am not suggesting that nationalism simply re-occurs in Xinhua as if it had a fixed essence that Xinhua could readily bring back and apply to its reporting of a current social event. Nationalism as a form of ideology, and specifically, as a political perspective in my study, incarnates into a particular configuration in a here-and-now context. During the last two centuries, nationalism has been recursively reinvented to rethink China in different historical, sociocultural, and political sites. For instance, nationalism today differs from nationalism of the anti-Japanese war. When China was fighting against the invasion of Japan, nationalism was drawn upon in parallel with anti-colonialism to alert the Chinese people that their country, culture, and society is on a survival mode. Nationalism at that

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time is also one of the forces that motivate intellects to seek for paths for modern China. Nationalism in contemporary China, then, fulfills different functions. Exemplified by Xinhua’s reporting of the Kunming Attack, the surge of nationalism in current historical phase seems to be driven by a desire of the authority to remain in power. Whereas nationalism of anti-Japanese war might advocate for change, breakthrough and revolution, nationalism today inclines to enforce and sustain an already-structured system. At this historical moment, nationalism undergirds the two much-emphasized tenets in the Xinhua report, namely, unity and stability. Though being manifested in a variety of forms, nationalism in different temporal and spatial contexts does have commonalities. That is, a common foe is usually depicted, or rather, imagined, to conjure up a communal identity “we.” Again, the assumed enemy is constantly revised as the historical, sociocultural and political landscapes change. During the anti-Japanese war, the enemy of “we Chinese people” is one country. When the Kunming Attack happens, the imagined enemy might be less specific and involve a cluster of social actors. In general, Xinhua first imagines a moment when the nation is being threatened by a vicious attacker. It then captures that in this crisis, the Chinese people—guided by the Party-government—hold together and co-operate orderly and effectively to fight for the independence of their nation and to ensure that the society is operating as a harmonious organism. Underlying this picture is a persistent construction of an identity of being Chinese: Xinhua foremost identifies the group of individuals as “terrorists” who, when making way to realize their political ambition, imperiling the nation and consequently impinging upon the interests of the citizens. This group of people hence is “our” enemy. In other words, Xinhua appeals to an identity of “we Chinese people” by presupposing an aggressive Other. To take a closer look, Xinhua bases its construction of the collective identity of Chinese on a chain of assumptions: first, only when the economic, political, and social structure of a nation remains stable can that nation thrives; and second, the prosperity of a nation is one of the necessary conditions to protect and to realize the interests of individuals. That is, individuals and the nation are co-existing: a secure and stable nation is the premise to achieve individual interests and rights, and conversely, the participation and expression of personal needs and opinions guarantee a nation to stay united as an integrated whole. Besides arguing individuals and nations are interdependent, Xinhua alludes to a communal historical memory of the Chinese people to consolidate a sense of Chineseness. It pairs the combat of the Kunming Attack together with China’s battle against colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century. What these two historical events have in common are the struggle to protect territory integrity and the effort to maintain the sovereignty of the nation. By yoking these two historical phases together, Xinhua juxtaposes the political and sociocultural conditions of two different historical moments, but recalls the trauma of the Chinese people that their cultural traditions are at the verge of perishing due to the invasions of the West and Japan. With this, Xinhua again conveys a message that the nation, which embodies Chinese cultures and identity, is in danger. Being Chinese, then, means to defend for territory integrity and to restore the independence and sovereignty of the nation. To reinforce the collective identity of Chinese, Xinhua also suppresses using “Uighurs” and “Muslim” to indicate that ethnicity or religion is not the metric for deciding Chineseness.

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Instead, it tries to enable different ethnic and religious communities to perceive themselves as members of a collective group in that they are living within the territory of P.R. China, and are enacting the same social conducts to fight against the same enemy. In other words, Xinhua blends the civic identity with the identity of being Chinese. Underlying this reasoning is a justification why a sense of belonging exists between different ethnic groups: since ancient times, the close communication between various ethnic groups has forged a strong bond between these communities. Xinhua presumes that their different cultural traditions have merged into an integral whole, where sameness and difference join in harmony. In this light, though Uighurs and Hans have their own cultural origins, they do together inherit and now are enjoying one single Chinese culture, where their own historical, cultural, and religious traditions are so tightly related that it is hardly possible to tear them apart. In this way, Xinhua nurtures coherence between the beliefs and values of different ethnic groups and thus ascribes them a communal identity. As aforementioned, the function nationalism plays when the Kunming Railway Station Attack happens are contingent in the sense that it is relative to constantly shifting historical and sociocultural dynamics. As a form of politics that originates from a larger network of ideology, nationalism is reiterated and endorsed by Xinhua to pave the way for the government to satisfy its will for power. To put it in another way, aspiring to maintain and validate its status of being in authority, Xinhua assists the government to mobilize the masses to support its current policies, rules, and systems. From this perspective, telling the general public that their nation is in peril as a means to establish a collective identity stabilizes the social and the political structures, which the government bases its privileges upon. Further, as I maintain in Chapter One, ideologies are rhetorical, meaning, when endorsed by institutional powers, one form of ideology can be redefined and restated to persuade their addressees to either accept it as a the only universal truth or to reject it as a false conception of the Self, the Other, and the world. Because ideologies have persuasive force and because institutional power always seeks to recreate prohibitions, rituals and doctrines, Xinhua calls upon and appropriates nationalism at this particular time and in this specific context to aid the Party-government to guarantee its status, namely, to remain as the sole governing party in China. When depicting the measures taken by the Chinese people to counter the Kunming Attack, Xinhua particularly highlights the Acts of the Party-government, implying that without the guidance of the Party, Chinese as a national identity might become dismantled and the nation might fail to defend its sovereignty. Here, Xinhua invokes the image of the Party as a leader who salvages China from the fate of being colonized in the first half of the twentieth century. At that historical moment, Xinhua recalls, the Party reacted timely to unite industrial workers and farmers to establish an independent nation. Likewise, in the current historical phase, the Party continues to play its role as a pioneer, a representative, and a defender for national identity. By foregrounding that the Chinese people are fighting against terrorism under the leadership of the Party, Xinhua demonstrates the Party is engaged to guarantee the nation’s autonomy and is committed to improve the well-being of the Chinese people. In other words, Xinhua reinterprets nationalism in a way to portray the Party-government as an embodiment of people’s will, attempting to internalize the values of the Party as the commonplaces that are recognized and

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followed by the Chinese society. In short, as a communication channel between the Party-government and the public, Xinhua is making effort to rationalize and enhance the privileged status of the government in asymmetrical power relations.

The Post and the BBC: Ideology of Freedom, Equality and Democracy When understanding the topoi in contemporary China, such as the relationship between the government and the Chinese people, the issue of ethnicity, and the role of the Party, the Post and the BBC speak from another network of interpretation. Attributing the intrinsic motives to a Scene of censorship and oppression, the Post and the BBC suggest that suppression of individual rights, ethnic minority rights and personal freedom is the fundamental reason why Kunming Attack happens. The two news agencies further postulate that individuality is restricted in China because the current political and social structure of China lacks democracy and equality. To substantiate their claim that the subjectivity of individuals and ethnic minorities are largely repressed, the Post and the BBC draw upon several assumptions. For one, they presume that a sole governing Party naturally yields to dictatorship and corruption. For instance, the Post identifies the Chinese government principally as ruled by a Communist Party but provides no further elaboration about what Communism exactly denotes, despite Communism being a form of ideology is sensitive to contingent time and space. Or perhaps the Post does define Communism, but hastily brings in a pre-conceived image: it indicates that today’s China still has strained political atmosphere because the “most important public meeting of” the Party is “an annual convening of this largely rubber-stamp legislature.” Nevertheless, the Post does not qualify why China’s legislature is “largely rubber-stamp” and what the meeting in reference is. In this sense, the Post erases the situational meaning of Communism but equates Communism in contemporary China, which is more often referred to as socialism with Chinese characteristics in Chinese official narrative, to Communism of Cold War. That is, the Post recalls the model of the Soviet Union, which is characterized by one powerful leader and a strong central government, to discern the economic, political and cultural system of today’s China. Does having a Communist Party naturally yield to individual unfreedom? Are individual autonomy bound to be suppressed in asymmetry power relations? Can the concepts of Marxist Communism or Communism of the Soviet Union be applied to the Chinese society, considering a related ideology, socialism with Chinese characteristics, is predominantly discussed and enforced in China since late 1980s? If the dominant ideology of contemporary China is Communism, which itself is a debatable assertion, how does this ideology exactly operate with other multifarious historical, sociocultural and political particularities of mainland China? Failing to answer these questions due to its negligence, or maybe disregard, of China’s local sociocultural and political dynamics, the Post and the BBC impose their conception of Communism, which itself is a stereotypical understanding, upon contemporary China. Besides evoking individualism, the Post and the BBC doubt the collective identity of Chinese, and thus to some extent, refute nationalism that underpins Xinhua’s delineation of the Chinese society. By over-using words such as “Uighurs” and “Muslim” to refer to people from Xinjiang, the Post and the BBC might try to claim that because of their distinctive origins, the

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historical memories and cultures of Uighur and Han persist to remain divided. By showing reluctance to acknowledge that different ethnic and religious communities identify with one another—one core assumption that underlies Xinhua’s conception of China, the Post and the BBC resolve the communal bonding between Han and Uighurs and further subordinate the collective identity of being Chinese to their separate ethnic identities. Additionally, The Post and the BBC downgrade the national identity of Chinese via imagining and rendering that ethnic minorities are suffering from discrimination and oppression. However, evident supports are absent. The two news agencies seem to stretch the Scene of Communism and censorship, which is presented as a “fact” without specifying the situational conditions of China, to construct a Scene of oppression. That is, the Post and the BBC might try to indicate Uighurs as an ethnic minority is bound to be oppressed, in the event that the Chinese society is ruled by a Communist Party who is used to censor mainstream media and online space. A Communist Party, an authorative government, strict censorship and wide-spread discrimination against ethnic minority are all lumped together in the Post and the BBC and are presented to their readers as a package. Overall, the negative calibration of current Chinese society seen in the Post and the BBC seem to be informed by concepts such as individual freedom, equality, and democracy. Though freedom, equality and democracy have each of them several different meanings depending on the context they are used, the Post and the BBC first define them through the lens of the West, and then misapply them as the default standard to perceive and mischarge the social and political structure of mainland China.

Summary At first sight, the reporting of the Kunming Attack from Xinhua, the Post and BBC seem all to be reasonable. Xinhua associates itself with a nationally-oriented political system to assert that with an effective government playing the role of leader—who are executing laws to safeguard the properties and lives of citizens, and are mediating the conflicts of interest between different social actors—the resources of a society are better distributed and different social actors are cooperating in harmony. The Post and the BBC, then, champion individual freedom over social order. They stress that individuals have the right to resist and subvert the government if their personal interests cannot be expressed or realized. All the three news agencies, however, are reluctant to acknowledge their political and ideological positionalities, but claim their own versions of reality are the absolute truth. Failing to recognize their own political interestedness when understanding China, both the two sides are trapped in their ever functioning terministic screens, resulting in meaningless reproduction of stereotypes about themselves and their counterparts. The critical-dramatistic reading of the three news reports I enacted in this chapter, then, is an initial step to move the two sides out of their own frameworks. I hope to make both sides become aware of some of their deeply held ideological assumptions. I believe only when being conscious of how the undergirding interpretive networks condition our conception and construction of realities can we embrace the inevitable differences in a cross-cultural communication, and discover the opportunities for identification from the distinction and division.

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Chapter 4 Conclusion

It is easy for us to miss the specificity and localness of our own practices and think we have general, abstract, even universal meanings…In fact, the situated, social, and Discourse nature of meaning often becomes visible to us only when we confront language-at-work in languages and cultures far distant from our own. James Paul Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (78)

As a language major, I am constantly amazed, and sometimes dismayed, by the intriguing power of language in carving and shaping realities. I cannot help but agree with Gee that oftentimes we have taken for granted the reality as presented to us through language and have stopped appreciating or questioning the many layers of histories and cultures entwined with the language we use. Usually it is when we encounter discourses produced by another community that we start realizing we perceive the world from a particular angle. The reporting of the Kunming Railway Station Attack is one of these instances manifesting how we are defined but also confined by our approaches to realities. From the Chinese mainstream media, and most typically, from Xinhua News Agency, I read a reluctance to overtly address the tension in Xinjiang. Major news outlets in the United States and the Britain, on the other hand, uproot the event from its historical, political and sociocultural sites and categorically impose their concepts of democracy, equality, individual freedom and ethnic rights on the understanding of China. Upset by the images of mainland China that emerged out of these news reports, I started this project by asking how different cultures experience language to create versions of reality. I locate my main interest in the interplay between knowledge-making in texts and the influencing contextual dynamics. Specifically, my purposes of this study are three-fold. I aim to unpack the news coverage of the Kunming Attack by two discourse communities. I then create a methodology, which I believe is much in need to address reality-construction in news reports as a genre of public discourse. I further offer my analysis of three news items as an example of deploying my proposed methodology to study the textual construction of reality, and the way the politics and ideologies function to mobilize and legitimatize these structured images. One obvious limitation of my analysis must be pointed out, though. I delimit my scope within three news reports that I justify to be representatives of two discursive communities. Still, engaging additional data from a wider range of media outlets can more solidly verify the two ideological tendencies that I demonstrate in this project. As Gee cautions us, though “definitive proof” might not exist in empirical studies, we must hold an open attitude to finding possible evidence that “go against our favored views” (13-14). After all, my interpretation of the entire situation, that is, the news coverage of the Kunming Attack, is based on my formulated hypotheses and is certainly inflected by the historical, sociocultural and ideological contexts which I come from. This project also leaves me several sites to build on in future studies. A follow-up

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research would incorporate methodologies of comparative rhetoric to better explore the shifting historical and institutional landscapes where cross-cultural communication traverses. In Chapter Three, when I compare narratives told by different communities, I am concerned that if I articulate stereotypical ideological differences. Such a feeling grows stronger when I use phrases such as “by contrast” and “on the other hand” to demonstrate the competition, contradiction and contestation between Xinhua, the Post and the BBC. “The art of recontextualization” as a comparative methodology alerts us to the tendency to “project the self onto the other,” and the inclination to “erase the self with the others alterity” (Mao, “Writing the Other” 47). As Mao explicates in “Writing the Other into Histories of Rhetorics,” the art of recontextualization particularly emphasizes observing the discursive practices of two communities “in their own contexts” and to explain and critique their ideological underpinnings “on their own terms.” Methodologies along this comparative lens, then, would help us circumvent ourselves from speaking in binary and hierarchical terms, unpack the complexity of cross-cultural communicative situation where temporal and spatial contingencies, multiple cultural traditions, and competing power relations are interwoven, and motivate us continuously reshape and rewrite our interpretations. Employing the art of recontextualization to revise my analysis of Xinhua’s reporting of the Kunming Attack, for instance, might include a historical review of nationalism, such as its various configurations in different historical phases. Tracing the path nationalism evolves in Chinese histories would map out its connectivity to the archive of sociocultural constrains, and thus reveals the nuances of meanings this term carries from the past into a here-and-now situation. Besides, a future study might also examine post-colonialism, Marxism, and the reviving Confucius as the prevalent ideologies of the Chinese society, and their intersections with nationalism. Additionally, current China-U.S. relationship and the accordingly international political situation might also be relevant aspects to investigate if we want to tease out a more complete network made up of cultural narratives and political beliefs. Bringing this wider spectrum of situational dynamics into discussion, then, would help us better comprehend the operating of discourses and its rhetorical construction of realities within the context of contemporary mainland China. To take a step forward, future research might also draw upon the rhetoric of “borderland” (Anzaldúa) and “contact zone” (Pratt) to further disrupt and rewrite the perceived boundaries between China and the West. My current project might be a first step of studying the participation and intervention of politics in discursive construction of realities because I concentrate on sketching out the ideological frames of different camps. I have not yet fully discussed the means the two sides move out of their own terministic screens. In Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie, Mao expounds a rhetoric of “togetherness-in-difference,” renewing our understanding of concepts such as “difference” and “hybridity” that are central to cross-cultural communication, and envisioning a “rhetoric of becoming” and a dialectical interaction that are much needed when different cultures come into contact. Mao’s “togetherness-in-difference,” hence, offers a project like mine specific strategies to bridge different discursive communities with incongruent ideologies. In this sense, looking into borderland rhetoric—the rhetorical

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practices in the sites where ideological concepts of different cultures are not just yoked into a same conversation but are also contesting and dialoguing with each other—could help us rethink and challenge the division between different cultures and further lead us out of the troubling China/the West binary. The reporting of the Kunming Attack taught us valuable lessons. In this project, I strive to tease out the aspects where division occurs, on the belief that the strength of comparing the news coverage from two discourse communities lies in bringing some of the community-specific values that we have gradually cease to notice visible to us. Beneath the varying discursive constructions of contemporary China is the ever-present ideology, enacting itself in relation to the historical trajectory, cultural tradition, social particularities and political shaping of the discourse community where the reality is perceived, reiterated and evaluated. Differences between discourse communities, then, should not be viewed in pejorative terms. After all, differences and resemblances are indispensable. I hope my analysis of different understandings concerning the Kunming Attack gives us a reflective moment to detach ourselves from our routine thinking pattern and to critically converse with the contexts which we are so closely embedded in. Committed to pursue the common grounds for communication, I hope my project as the first step towards understanding the frames of both ours and our interlocutors could open up possibilities for identification—an opportunity that might hardly come to us if we cling to discourses of our own.

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Works Cited “About Us.” Washingtonpost.com. n.p., n.d. Web. 17 Jan. 2015. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Print. Bazerman, Charles. “Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts.” What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Eds. Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. 83-96. Print. Bazerman, Charles, and Paul Prior. Introduction. What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. By Bazerman and Prior. Eds. Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. 1-10. Print. Bell, Allan. The Language of News Media. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991. Print. Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2nd ed. New York: Bedford St. Martin's, 2001. Print. “Brief Introduction to Xinhuanet.” Xinhuanet. n.p., n.d. Web. 17 Jan. 2015. Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. 1945. New York: George Braziller, 1955. Print. ---. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method. 1966. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968. Print. ---. A Rhetoric of Motives. 1950. New York: George Braziller, 1955. Print. Covino, William A., and David A. Jolliffe. “What Is Rhetoric?” Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries. Eds. William A. Covino and David A. Jolliffe. Needham: Allyn and Bacon, 1995. 3-26. Print. Crowley, Sharon, and Debra Hawhee. Ancient Rhetoric for Contemporary Students. 3rd ed. New York: Longman, 2004. Print. Fairclough, Norman. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London and New York: Routledge. , 2003. Print. ---. Discourse and Social Change. Malden: Blackwell, 1993. Print. ---. Language and Power. New York: Longman, 1989. Print. ---. Media Discourse. New York: Edward Arnold, 1995. Print. ---. Political Discourse Analysis as a Method for Advanced Students. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print. Foss, Sonja K. Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration & Practice. 2nd ed. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1989. Print. Foucault, Michel. “The Discourse on Language.” The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. 1972. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books, 2010. 215-37. Print. ---. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973. Print. Fowler, Roger. Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Print. Garrett, Peter, and Allan Bell. “Media and Discourse: A Critical Overview.” Approaches to

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Media Discourse. Eds. Allan Bell and Peter Garrett. Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 1998. 1-20. Print. Gee, James. Paul. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. Halliday, Michael. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold, 1978. Print. Hart, Roderick P. Modern Rhetorical Criticism. Glenview: Scott, Foresman/Little, Brown Higher Education, 1990. Print. Machin, David, and Andrea Mayr. How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: a Multimodal Introduction. London: SAGE, 2012. Print. MacNealy, Mary Sue. “Discourse or Text Analysis.” Strategies for Empirical Research in Writing. New York: Longman, 1999. 123-47. Print. Mao, LuMing. Reading Chinese Fortune Cookies: The Making of Chinese American Rhetoric. Logan: Utah State UP, 2006. Print. ---. “Writing the Other into Histories of Rhetoric: Theorizing the Art of Recontextualization.” Re/Theorizing Writing Histories of Rhetorics. Ed. Michelle Ballif. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 2013. 41-57. Print. “Public Purposes.” BBC.com. n.p., n.d. Web. 17 Jan. 2015. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91. New York: MLA, 1991. 33-40. Print. Sullivan, Patricia, and James Porter. Opening Spaces: Writing Technologies and Critical Research Practices. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997. Print. van Dijk, Teun A. News as Discourse. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988. Print. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002. Print.

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Appendix

Appendix 1 A News Report from the Xinhua News Agency Retrieved from http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-03/02/c_126208696.htm on Jan. 2015

At least 28 dead, 113 injured in Kunming railway station violence March 2, 2014

KUNMING, March 2 (Xinhua) — Twenty-eight civilians were confirmed dead and 113 others injured Saturday in a railway station attack in southwest Chinese city of Kunming, authorities said. It was an organized, premeditated violent terrorist attack, according to the authorities. The authorities also said five suspects were shot dead but their identities have not been confirmed yet. President Xi Jinping has urged the law enforcement to investigate and solve the case and punish the terrorists in accordance with the law. A group of knife-wielding people attacked the Kunming Railway Station in the capital of southwest China's Yunnan Province at around 9 p.m., causing death and injuries, said the city police. A Xinhua reporter on the spot said several suspects have been controlled, while police are still questioning people in the station. The reporter said that firefighters and medical workers have arrived on the scene, and injured people have been rushed to hospital for emergency treatment. The arterial road of the station has been cordoned off. A doctor with the Kunming No.1 People's Hospital told Xinhua over the phone that medical workers of the hospital are busy treating the injured, adding that they are still unsure of the exact number of casualties. According to Xinhua reporters at the hospital, a dozen of bodies were seen at the hospital. As of 0:00 a.m. Sunday, more than 60 victims in the attack have been sent to the hospital, emergency registration records showed. Chen Guizhen, a 50-year-old woman, told Xinhua at the hospital that her husband Xiong Wenguang, 59, was killed in the attack. “Why are the terrorists so cruel?” moaned Chen, holding her husband's ID card in blood with her trembling hands. The couple, both farmers from the Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture, bought Sunday tickets to the eastern province of Zhejiang for their new urban jobs and planned to stay over the waiting room. “I found his ID card on his body. I can't believe he just left me,” she cried. Yang Haifei, a local resident of Yunnan, told Xinhua that he was attacked and sustained

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injuries on his chest and back. Yang said he was buying a ticket when he saw a group of people rush into the station, most of them in black, and start attacking others. “I saw a person come straight at me with a long knife and I ran away with everyone,” he said, adding that people who were slower were severely injured. “They just fell on the ground,” he said. At the guard pavilion in front of the station, three victims were crying. One of them named Yang Ziqing told Xinhua that they were waiting in the station square for a 10:50 p.m. train to Shanghai, but had to escape when a knife-wielding man suddenly came at them. “My two town-fellows' husbands have been rushed to hospital, but I can’t find my husband, and his phone went unanswered,” Yang sobbed. Pictures on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, show local police patrolling the station. Bodies in blood can be spotted on the ground in the pictures. Doctors were seen transporting injured people to a local hospital. A Weibo user screen-named “HuangY3xin-Dione,” who was dining in a restaurant near the railway station, said that she was “scared to death,” adding that she saw a group of men in black with two long knives chasing people. According to Kunming railway bureau, train departures have not been affected. The incident has fueled massive anger among the people across China, with netizens severely condemning the violent attacks on social websites like Sina Weibo and WeChat, a popular instant messaging service. The attacks at the station might have created blood and violence, but it has also awakened a strong sense of justice and strength among us. We strongly condemn violence, and we call on people to stop circulating bloody pictures, read a message on WeChat. On Sina Weibo, netizens are spreading the word of stopping the circulation of bloody photos on the Internet. “Stop publishing bloody photos, because that’s just what the thugs want,” a Weibo user with the screenname “Fuzhaolouzhu” wrote on her Weibo account. Another Weibo user screennamed “CakeryCupcakes” said she hopes mainstream media could provide immediate and transparent report. “We should not forward unconfirmed information and bloody pictures to avoid more panics,” wrote the user. The security management bureau under the Ministry of Public Security called the incident a “severe violent crime” at its official Sina Weibo account. Now, the situation is gradually going stable, and the injured have been treated, while police are investigating the case, it said. “No matter what motives the murderers hold, the killing of innocence people are against kindness and justice. The police will crack down the crimes in accordance with the law without any tolerance. May the dead rest in peace,” it read. The Kunming Railway Station, located in the southeastern area of the city, is one of the largest railway stations in southwest China. It was put into operation in 1958.

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The latest violent terrorist attack that caused most civilian deaths happened in June last year in Lukqun Township of Turpan Prefecture in farwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. A total of 24 people were killed and 23 others were injured in the attack. On October 28 last year, a jeep crashed at downtown Beijing's Tian'anman Square, causing five deaths and 40 injuries. Police found gasoline, two knives and steel sticks as well as a flag with extremist religious content in the jeep. The police later identified the deadly crash as a violent terrorist attack.

Appendix 2 A News Report from The Washington Post Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/knife-attack-at-chinese-train-station-leaves-28-dead-mor e-than-100-injured/2014/03/01/0b20ed8e-a195-11e3-9ba6-800d1192d08b_story.html on Jan. 2015

Knife-wielding attackers kill 29 at Chinese train station; more than 100 injured March 1, 2014

BEIJING – A group of knife-wielding assailants burst into a train station in southern China late Saturday night and slashed to death at least 29 people and injured more than 100 others, according to state media. The government-run Xinhua News Agency described the Kunming train station assault as a “premeditated violent terrorist attack” and identified the group of more than 10 assailants as Uighur separatists from China’s restive Xinjiang region. Authorities shot dead four of the assailants and arrested one, according to Xinhua. Local news in Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan province, depicted gruesome scenes of victims sprawled on the train station floor splattered in blood. A coordinated attack of this size and nature is rare in China. China’s leaders quickly responded with statements from top officials, and the country’s top security officials were en route to the scene. The mass stabbing comes at a particularly sensitive time as top officials from China’s Communist Party are gathering for their most important public meeting on Wednesday, an annual convening of its largely rubber-stamp legislature in Beijing. In a sign of the incident’s sensitivity, many comments about the attack on Chinese social media were censored, and the news did not appear on the front pages of many newspapers. China’s President Xi Jinping ordered “all-out efforts” to punish the attackers, “crack down on violent terrorist activities in all forms, safeguard social stability and guarantee the safety of people’s lives and property,” according to Xinhua. Meng Jianzhu, head of China’s domestic security, and Guo Shengkun, minister of public security are on their way to Kunming, state media said. Yang Haifei, a local resident, told state media the station transformed in an instant into a

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scene of panic and confusion, with everyone running away from the men in black. Yang said he was slashed in the chest and back. Those who were slower in getting out of the way were the most severely injured, he said, “They just fell on the ground.” Xinhua quoted a 50-year-old farmer at the local hospital who said her husband was killed in the attack. Chen Guizhen said she and her husband had bought tickets for new jobs in a nearby city. Xinhua described her holding an ID card covered in blood belonging to her husband and saying, “Why are the terrorists so cruel?” The train attack comes on the heels of a spate of incidents that Chinese authorities have identified as acts of terrorism, including a jeep that crashed into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in October. The jeep killed three who were inside and two pedestrians and injured at least 40 others. Authorities attributed the attack to men who appeared to be Muslim extremists, and a resulting increase in anti-terrorism security since then has focused on ethnic minorities, particularly Muslim Uighurs in the Western region of Xinjiang. Many Uighur leaders have condemned the violence but also continued to report oppression by the official policies of China’s authoritarian government and by widespread discrimination within Chinese society.

Appendix 3 A News Report from the BBC Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-26402367 on Jan. 2015

China mass stabbing: Deadly knife attack in Kunming March 1, 2014

An attack by knife-wielding men at a railway station in Kunming in south-west China has left at least 29 dead, the state news agency Xinhua says. Another 130 people were wounded in what authorities said was a “premeditated, violent terrorist attack.” Four suspects were shot dead, one arrested and other are being sought Xinhua said. City officials said evidence implicated militants from the western region of Xinjiang, but this was not verified. President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang have sent condolences to the victims and their families. President Xi urged “all-out efforts” to investigate the attack. “Severely punish in accordance with the law the violent terrorists and resolutely crack down on those who have been swollen with arrogance,” Xinhua quoted the president as saying. Pools of blood Witnesses said that the men, who were mostly dressed in black, attacked people at random. A survivor named Yang Haifei, who was wounded in the back and chest, told Xinhua he had been buying a train ticket when the attackers rushed into the station. “I saw a person come straight at me with a long knife and I ran away with everyone,” he

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said. He added that those too slow to flee were cut down. Some who escaped were desperately looking for missing loved ones. Yang Ziqing told Xinhua she and her husband had been waiting for a train to Shanghai “when a knife-wielding man suddenly came at them.” “I can't find my husband, and his phone went unanswered,” she said. Social media users in China posted pictures of the attack on the internet, but correspondents say they are being taken down. Images seen by the BBC show men and women lying on the floor in pools of blood following the attack. Kunming officials, quoted by Xinhua, later said that evidence at the scene showed it was “a terrorist attack carried out by Xinjiang separatist forces.” Xinjiang is home to the Muslim Uighur minority group which has a long history of discord with Chinese authorities. State broadcaster CCTV said top security official Meng Jianzhu would travel to Kunming to oversee the handling of the investigation.

Appendix 4 Agents of the Three News Reports

Table 1 Xinhua News The Post The BBC Attackers 1. suspects (unclear 1. attackers, 1. knife-wielding (Agent) identities), assailants, men, suspects; knife-wielding knife-wielding 2. militants from people; people, the western 2. terrorists; 2. Uighur region of 3. murderers, thugs separatists Xinjiang; Xinjiang separatist forces Citizens 1. civilians, local 1. victims, a 1. victims, (counter-agent) residents; 50-year-old survivors, Yang 2. injured people, framer Haifei, Yang casualties, victims, 2. witness, Yang Ziqing and her Chen Guizhen and Haifei husband; her husband Xiong 2. social media Wenguang, Yang users Ziqing 3. witness, Yang Haifei 4. netizens, Weibo

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and Wechat users, HuangY3xin-Dione (a Weibo user), Fuzhoulouzhu (a Weibo user), CakeryCupcakes (a Weibo user) Chinese 1. authorities, the 1. authorities; 1. Chinese authorities security 2. China’s leaders, authorities; (additional management topic security 2. President Xi counter-agent) bureau, Ministry of officials, China’s Jinping, Premier Public Security; President Xi Li Keqiang, top 2. President Xi Jinping, Head of security official Jinping; China’s domestic Meng Jianzhu 3. City polices, security Meng 3. Kunming Kunming railway Jianzhu, Minister officials bureau; of public security Guo Shengkun; Chinese domestic Xinhua reporter(s), 1. Xinhua News the state news media Xinhua Agency, Xinhua; agency Xinhua (additional 2. mainstream counter-agent) media, state media; 3. local news Other media the BBC, (BBC) correspondents Emergency firefighters, medical assistants workers, doctors (additional counter-agent) Uighurs Uighur leaders, Muslim Uighurs, (co-agent) Muslim Uighurs, minority group ethnic minorities Attackers of the terrorists, religious Muslim extremists, June and the extremists Muslim Uighurs October violence (additional co-agent)

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Appendix 5 Acts of the Three News Reports

Acts in the Xinhua News Attackers (Agent) Subtopic 1: Suspects were shot dead. Subtopic 2: A group of knife-wielding people attacked. Attackers (additional co-agent) Subtopic 3: Terrorists caused heavy casualties in Xinjiang in June, 2013. Subtopic 4: Religious extremists attacked civilians in Beijing in October, 2013. Citizens (counter-agent) Subtopic 5: Civilians were dead or injured in Kunming Railway Station Attack. Subtopic 6: Civilians were dead or injured in a terrorist attack in Xinjiang in June, 2013. Subtopic 7: Civilians were dead or injured in a terrorist attack in Beijing in October, 2013. Subtopic 8: Victims Chen Guizhen and Yang Ziqing cried over their lost families. Subtopic 9: Witness Yang Haifei retold the chaos. Subtopic 10: Witnesses “Huang Y3xin-Dione” recounted the scene on the Chinese social networking media, Weibo. Subtopic 11: Netizens circulate pictures on Weibo and Wechat, showing the city police are restoring order. Subtopic 12: Netizens condemned violence on Weibo and Wechat. Subtopic 13: Netizens called for justice. Subtopic 14: Netizens called to stop circulating brutal pictures about the attack. Subtopic 15: Netizens ask for immediate and transparent report from the mainstream media. Authorities (additional counter-agent) Subtopic 16: Authorities defined the Kunming Railway Station Attack as a terrorist attack. Subtopic 17: Authorities have not yet confirmed the identities of the suspects. Subtopic 18: Authorities confirmed the suspects were shot dead. Subtopic 19: President Xi urges investigation and punishment in accordance with the law. Subtopic 20: The Ministry of Public Security made statements on Weibo, condemning the attack is a sever crime, emphasizing the situation is under control and calling for justice. Subtopic 21: The Ministry of Public Security expresses his sympathy to the victims. Subtopic 22: City police reported the attack. Subtopic 23: City police are investigating the attack Subtopic 24: City police are restoring order in the Station. Subtopic 25: Kunming Railway Bureau kept order and the train departure were not affected. Chinese domestic media (additional counter-agent) Subtopic 26: Xinhua reports that the situation is under control. Subtopic 27: Xinhua reports that city police is investigating. Subtopic 28: Xinhua reports that firefighters took actions to help. Subtopic 39: Xinhua reports that medical workers and doctors are treating casualties.

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Subtopic 30: Xinhua interviews victims. Subtopic 31: Xinhua interviews witness. Emergency assistant (additional counter-agent) Subtopic 32: Medical workers and doctors took immediate actions to minimize casualties.

Acts in the Post Attackers (Agent) Subtopic 1: A group of knife-wielding people attacked Kunming Railway Station. Attackers (additional co-agent) Subtopic 2: Muslim extremists launched an attack in Beijing in October, 2013. Uighur leaders (co-agent) Subtopic 3: Uighur leaders condemned the Kunming Attack. Subtopic 4: Uighur leaders reported oppression by the Chinese government. Citizens (counter-agent) Subtopic 5: Victims told their experiences to the state media Xinhua. Subtopic 6: Witnesses told their stories to Xinhua. Authorities (counter-agent) Subtopic 7: Authorities shot dead suspects. Subtopic 8: China’s leader made statement. Subtopic 9: Head of domestic Security and Minster of Public Security went to the scene immediately. Subtopic 10: Authorities took down pictures of the attack from the social media. Subtopic 11: President Xi urges punishment. Subtopic 12: Authorities identified the October attack to be a terrorist activity by Muslim extremists. Subtopic 13: Authorities increased security in Xinjiang after the October attack, keeping an eye on Muslim Uighurs. Chinese domestic media (additional counter-agent) Subtopic 14: Xinhua reported an attack took place in Kunming Railway Station. Subtopic 15: Xinhua defined the attack to be a violent attack. Subtopic 16: Xinhua confirmed that the assailants are Uighur separatists. Subtopic 17: Xinhua reported that authorities shot dead suspects. Subtopic 18: Xinhua reported the experience of the victims. Subtopic 19: Xinhua interviewed witnesses. Subtopic 20: Xinhua reported that President Xi urged punishment and sought for stability. Subtopic 21: The local news depicted gruesome scene.

Acts in the BBC Attackers (Agent) Subtopic 1: A group of knife-wielding people attacked Kunming Railway Station. Citizens (counter-agent)

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Subtopic 2: Citizens are dead or injured in Kunming Railway Station. Subtopic 3: Victims told Xinhua their loss and pains. Subtopic 4: Witnesses told their experience to Xinhua. Authorities (counter-agent) Subtopic 5: Pictures about the attack are taken down. Subtopic 6: Authorities identified the attack to be a terrorist activity. Subtopic 7: Chinese top official Meng Jianzhu travelled to Kunming. Subtopic 8: City officials said militants from Xinjiang launched the attack. Subtopic 9: President Xi and Premier Li send condolences to victims and their families. Chinese domestic media (additional counter-agent) Subtopic 10: Xinhua reported an attack took place in Kunming Railway Station. Subtopic 11: Xinhua reported that suspects are shot dead. Subtopic 12: Xinhua reported survivors’ stories. Subtopic 13: Xinhua reported that President Xi urged to punish for justice. Subtopic 14: Xinhua reported top security travelled to Kunming. The BBC Subtopic 15: The BBC reported bloody scene. Subtopic 16: Correspondents say pictures are being taken down from the social media.

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