Accommodated Social Imaginaries: How the U.S. and China Framed their 2018- 2020 Trade Dispute

Author: Yishan Wang

Degree: Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Carnegie Mellon University, 2024

My dissertation explores how the U.S. and China frame the same events differently to their domestic and international audiences during the 2018-2020 Phase 1 trade dispute. By analyzing a small, focused corpus of paired communications in Chinese and English editions of newspapers, this study examines how each country adjusts national representations to align with variable audiences who differ in terms of language, knowledge, and cultural context, strategically crafting what I term “accommodated social imaginaries.” While previous scholarship on discourses of U.S.-China relations has tended to focus on monolingual texts in English or have treated texts written in both English and Chinese as interchangeable translations, I argue that this treatment of artifacts risks an oversimplification of the different audiences addressed in multilingual news reports, tacitly collapsing important differences between texts that speak to different rhetorical situations. I account for these shifts in information adaptation mainly through theories of framing (Entman, 2004), that is, the construction of reality to the exclusion of alternative visions, and recontextualization (Fairclough, 2003), that is, the movement and redefinition of a stretch of discourse taken from one context to another. With this theoretical apparatus, I trace how agents who control various language editions are responsive to the tacit and sometimes competing expectations of both international and domestic audiences. My key finding is that Chinese and U.S. newspapers construct divergent realities for their readers, emphasizing different aspects of the trade dispute to garner support and sympathy from different constituencies. Overall, my dissertation aims to offer a more nuanced understanding of the U.S.-China trade dispute by examining multilingual texts and showing how these texts can mean different things to audiences who differ in their linguistic and historical knowledge and backgrounds.