Anglo-American Newspapers' representations of Tibet

What is it about?

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”.

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Why is it important?

It gives an empirical study of the new trend in the representations of Tibet in Anglo-American newspapers in the 21st century.

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