New Trend, but Old Story: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study of Tibet Imaginations in Anglo-American Newspapers

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a corpus-assisted discourse study of the representations of Tibet in five influential Anglo-American newspapers from 2000 to 2015. The findings suggest that while representations of Tibet revolved predominantly around political, religious and cultural discourses, they have become increasingly politicized since 2008. Driven by both politics and myths, Tibet was either constructed as a land under the “totalitarian rule” of the Chinese government or “objects of gaze” with its mythical and exotic religious practices and cultural arts. This was further reinforced by the negative representations of the Chinese Communist Party as “totalitarian”, “repressive” and “atheist” and the positive representations of the Dalai Lama as a “spiritual leader” and “peace lover”.

KEYWORDS:

• Tibet
• corpus-assisted discourse study
• critical discourse analysis
• news
• corpus linguistics

Additional information

Funding

The writing of this article was supported by the ‘MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences’ (ID No.: 16YJC740046).