Changes in African Mainstream Media’s Perception of China’s “Belt and Road” Initiative: A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This paper applies the corpus-based critical discourse analysis to an investigation into diachronic changes in African mainstream media's perception of China's "Belt and Road" initiative. It built a corpus of Belt-and-Road-Initiative-related reports in African mainstream media AllAfrica from September 2013 to December 2020, and divided the corpus into three sub-corpora. Then, it made a critical analysis of the media discourses from the perspectives of key words, collocation and concordance lines. The analysis reveals that a bulk of explicit positive discourses indicating appreciation, recognition and active participation have been constructed in the reports of three stages, presenting that "Belt and Road" initiative promotes China-Africa and global economic development, but it also suggests a change of stance from full approval to implicit query and explicit criticism. Through the analysis from discursive and social practice, it is found that the reasons for the overall perception and diachronic changes are the long history and challenges of China-Africa cooperation as well as the influence of western media.