تمثيل الصين في خطابات ترامب حول كوفيد – 19تحليل الخطاب النقدي

REPRESENTATION OF CHINA IN TRUMP’S DISCOURSE ON COVID-19: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

This study aims at investigating the representation of China, throughout President Trump’s political discourses, concerning COVID-19. Although several studies focused on the character of Donald Trump such as Olimat S. (2020), Bustan & Alakrash (2020), Zhu and Wang (2020), these studies are characterized by limited data, which seem to be non-representative. Besides, several researchers have taken into consideration the COVID-19 virus, but none of them tackled it from Donald Trump’s view. Furthermore, none of the studies took into its consideration the struggle between America and China. Moreover, most of the studies focus on one type of discourse, whether written or spoken.
This study varies in its data, between press conferences and tweets. It is intended to reveal the hidden ideology behind Donald Trump’s speeches and tweets, toward China, concerning COVID-19. Three approaches are utilized for analyzing the data, which are: Halliday’s transitivity approach, Fairclough’s three-dimensional approach, and van Dijk’s ideological square. Halliday’s Transitivity approach is used to analyze the syntactic structures of Trump’s political discourse. The study focuses on investigating three processes: material, mental, and relational processes. Fairclough’s three-dimensional approach is used to analyze the semantic structures and investigate the lexical terms used by Donald Trump to refer to China. Fairclough’s framework is based on three various words value: the experiential, relational, and expressive value of words. Finally, van Dijk’s ideological square is used to reveal the hidden ideology.
The results of this study indicate that Trump’s ideologically charged discourse revolves around the construction of the “self” and the “other”. The findings reveal that before COVID-19’s outbreak, China (the other) is represented by positive characteristics by Trump, while after COVID-19’s outbreak; it is represented by negative characteristics. On the other hand, America (the self) is associated with positive actions and characteristics. The analysis shows that Trump blames China for spreading the virus intentionally; even he claims that COVID-19 is created in Wuhan labs. Terms such are: China Virus, Wuhan virus, Hong Kong virus, Kung Flu… etc. are highly existent in Trump’s discourses, holding China the whole responsibility for COVID-19.