Confucius in The Times from 1785 to 2019: a diachronic news discourse analysis of newsworthiness

Abstract

Abstract This article diachronically analyses the variations in newsworthiness with regards to the conception of Confucius in the British newspaper The Times from its initial publication in 1785 to 2019. Adopting corpus linguistic methods and discursive news values analysis approach, this study examines news values through collocations and concordances of Confucius-centred instances. The results mainly lie in two folds. First, before 1840s, Confucius had been highly Westernized and religionized through analogy with Western philosophers, literary works, religious prophets, religious maxims, etc., which constructed proximity and eliteness to help alleviate the foreignness brought by the Chinese concept of Confucius and reduce the British audiences’ sense of distance. Following the increasing and continuous identification of Confucius with the Chinese identity in reporting, these methods (Westernization and religionization) of reporting had comparatively abated, as a consequence of which the media tended to present more Chinese contexts to market more full-scaled information related with Confucius. Second, the concepts of Confucius had been frequently metonymized for the national identity of Chinese, which dominantly framed the ordinariness of the Chinese people before 1880s, and gradually transformed into the elite Chinese identities after 1880s. With historical statistics and diachronic lens, the results of this study provided valuable historical data for social studies in the British context and improved on the findings of the existing studies of Confucius in Britain.