On the Economic Discourse Research from the Perspective of Appraisal Theory: Text Mining Analysis on Evaluation of China’s Economy in Foreign Academia

This study aims to investigate the overall awareness and attitude of foreign academia towards China’s economy, providing a rationale and reference for clarifying international public opinion, constructing China’s foreign economic discourse system, and improving China’s ability to promote its foreign economic discourse.Based on the Appraisal Theory, a new three-dimensional evaluation analysis framework was proposed, and topic modeling and text mining methods were adopted to investigate the evaluation of China’s economy in foreign academia.The study yielded the following findings: (1) Foreign academia mainly focuses on five economic fields: the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s financial reform, China’s economic reform, China’s role in global economy, and Sino-US economic relations.(2) There are significant differences in the evaluation of these five economic fields by foreign academia.A more positive attitudes were found towards China’s economic reform, China’s role in global economy, and the Belt and Road Initiative, while a little bit negative attitudes were found towards China’s financial reform and Sino-US economic relations.(3) Significant differences were found in the attitude lexica resources used by foreign academia to evaluate these five economic fields.