China’s Stance on Rohingya Refugees Issues in The Local Newspaper Through Corpus Sentiment Classification

Abstract

The predicament of the Rohingya refugees has garnered significant attention in China. The present study scrutinises the newspaper's language alignment to the representation of China’s stance on the Rohingya refugees. The primary objectives are twofold: firstly, to analyse the top ten salient nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and secondly, to evaluate the sentimentality of the aforementioned salient vocabulary and phrases. The present study employs a mixed-method approach with a corpus-driven research design. The corpus was procured from China Daily, comprising a total of 78 newspaper reports with 24,769 words and 1,013 sentences. The utilisation of Sketchengine and Atlas.ti, was selected. A wordlist of vocabulary has been produced for top ten salient nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The vocabulary was compared with the British National Corpus for keywords. Subsequently, the keywords were employed for trigrams and qualgrams. The presented materials consisted of concordances pertaining to phrases. The results were analysed sentimentally. The top ten salient nouns, verbs, and adjectives included Myanmar, people, Rohingya, be, have, say, more, human, and international. Then, keywords were compared to the reference corpus to select significant trigrams and qualgrams produced by Myanmar, Rohingya, migrants, Bangladesh and humanitarian. Sentimental analysis was performed on 60 linguistics items. Referring to the findings, the nation of China had a neutral stance. The findings suggest that scholars and politicians may benefit from a more empirical approach to analysing a nation’s stance, as opposed to relying solely on subjective interviews, as reported language can serve as a factual basis.