A Critical Discourse Study of the Construction of Alibaba’s Corporate Image in Chinese and American Newspapers

Abstract

With the development of China’s digital economy, the corporate image of Chinese Internet enterprise has also become a focus of academic attention. In order to study the corporate image of Chinese Internet enterprises in the digital economy period, this paper takes Alibaba, a leading Chinese Internet enterprise, as the research object. This paper establishes Chinese News Corpus and English News Corpus and analyze characteristics of lexical collocation, concordance line and semantic prosody. It is found that by categorizing Alibaba’s strong collocations, the images of Alibaba’s enterprises that Chinese and American newspapers focus on include the image of the enterprise’s workers, products, services. It is concluded that the image of Alibaba’s employees has a positive influence in Chinese newspapers, while the image in American newspapers is more negative, including sexism. The image of Taobao, Alibaba’s main product, is a platform that contributes to raises the income of the rural population in the Chinese newspaper, while it is a platform for fake products in the American newspaper. Alibaba’s services are portrayed in the Chinese newspaper as diverse services platform and a provider of digital solutions for China’s smart cities, but in the U.S. press as a monopolistic platform subject to the Chinese government.