The discursive construction of the international dispute over the East China Sea: A multimodal analysis of evaluations in online newspaper editorials in the Chinese and Japanese press

Abstract

The conflict over the sovereignty of the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea has become intense since the Japanese government announced its purchase of the islands from a private owner in 2012. Since then, hostile attitudes have been seen in the press between the Chinese and Japanese governments regarding these islands. In order to understand how newspapers present international readers with opinions on the conflict, this article examines visual and written evaluations of the conflict in online English-medium newspaper editorials in China and Japan. To do this, a corpus of editorials published from 1 January 2012 to 31 December 2016 from Chinese newspapers and a Japanese newspaper was compiled. The analysis draws on an appraisal analysis to examine the visual and written evaluations of the texts. The study reveals that the Chinese and Japanese editorials’ visual images represent the conflict in their own respective favours by focusing on different entities, and using visual resources such as colour. The visual-written interaction analysis illustrates how different domains of evaluative meanings appear in the visual and written texts in the two sets of editorials.

Keywords:

• Newspaper editorials
• media discourse
• international conflict
• the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands
• visual grammar
• appraisal
• visual-written interactions

Acknowledgements

I thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank Guy Middleton for his language edit of the article and Professor Brian Paltridge for his advice and support for this article.

Disclosure statement

The author declares that he has no competing interests.

Authors' contributions

The project has been conducted by the author alone.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.