Firstly, Louw (1993) came up with the definition of semantic prosody, which is the “consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates” (Louw, 1993: 157). Until now, semantic prosody has been used in military field to explore certain deep military and political intentions, concealing them to gain the support from public. However, most of researches are on language teaching, dictionary compilation, translation, etc. Secondly, the term Cultural Discourse Studies is borrowed from Shi Xu (2010), who defined the discourse as the verbal communication events under certain historical and cultural circumstances. Besides, “cultural” is a set of rule or social relationship that exists in social practice activities. Cultural discourse studies are different from other studies, having distinctive characteristics at different levels of academic research. They combine the text and the relevant context to explore the structure, function and meaning of discourse. It deserves recognition that, in recent years, discourse analysis is combined with other social science to elaborate and criticize the function and meaning of speech expression in social life. Although language communication, communication theory and cultural discourse studies have been used in literary, political and military field, the theories or methods they use are borrowed from the non-defense or non-security fields which lack cross-culture or interdisciplinary.

1.2 Significance of the Study

Along with the calling for national security, it is much more fashionable for researchers to focus on political texts analysis than ever before. Many of them concentrate on the analysis from the perspective of policy, culture, psychology etc. Recently, some researches are in the view of linguistic among which the western discourse analysis plays a major role. However, it is relatively not objective to analyze the text from the western discourse analysis that is influenced by binary opposition (Shi Xu, 2015).

Military reports are written in English aiming to convey information. Such western discourse system stimulates the fear of world that leads to more complex and impressible relationships between China and other countries. Besides, the reason why this report can raise concern of lots of people is its influence. From the theoretical or legal point of view, the report has no impact on China policy of the White House. However, it is considered as the main criterion to find out China's military strength and intentions for people from all walks of life in the United States and some other countries. After the publication of the report, American scholars, members of Congress, government officials are prone to cite the content in the report to support their opinions. Hence, though this report cannot influence the policy directly, it can affect people’s attitude and judgements towards China.

To protect the legal rights of China, it’s urgent to raise our awareness to understand the deep meanings behind the military reports and seek an orient discourse system as soon as possible. Although there are a few researches on semantic prosody and cultural discourse studies in different fields, it deserves more attention to further studies in military field. What’s more, there have been a great number of researches on MPPRC from the perspective of critical discourse analysis, the use of modality and so on. However, there is less attention to the production and interpretation of cultural discourse studies in military texts. Taking the significance of semantic prosody and cultural discourse studies in military texts into consideration, it is of necessity to study it. This study is intended to analyze MPPRC based on the recent eight-year from the perspective of semantic prosody and analyze the historical background and rhetoric techniques from the perspective of cultural discourse studies.

1.3 Aims of the Study

Theoretically, MPPRC is seemingly an objective and authoritative journal on military. In fact, the report uses some negative words, and there are exaggeration and utterance deficiency to misguide westerners. In this thesis, the author will focus on the content of MPPRC from 2010 to 2017. This thesis tries to regard MPPRC and the context as a whole and analyze from the perspective of semantic prosody and cultural discourse studies. And the thesis is going to achieve the following aims: