2020 年以来，新冠疫情席卷全球，国内外新闻媒体从不同角度对疫情进行了广泛报道。作为首位向世卫组织报告疫情的国家，中国如何应对疫情更是成为了世界各国的关注焦点，涉华疫情舆论纷繁复杂。《华盛顿邮报》是美国主流媒体之一，同时也是世界十大报纸之一，具有极大的舆论及政治影响力。由于其自身立场和利益，《华盛顿邮报》涉华新冠疫情报道罔顾事实，极力渲染中国负面形象，抹黑和污名化中国。

       新闻报道常常隐蔽地通过语言和认知机制将社会意识形态呈现给读者，来影响读者的判断和思考，实现自身话语的合法化。 因此，本文旨在认知批评话语分析的理论框架下，选取《华盛顿邮报》在 2020 年 1 月至 2022 年 7 月的涉华新冠疫情报道自建语料库，研究其使用何种认知机制来影响读者的思考和立场，及其如何通过认知机制来污名化中国，并进一步分析其背后隐藏的社会原因。

       本研究发现，《华盛顿邮报》主要使用了隐喻、图形-背景理论和趋近化策略三种机制。首先，在批评隐喻分析框架下，通过构建“战争”“阻碍”“竞赛”“戏剧”等具体源域，“抗击疫情”这一抽象目标域得以建构。其目的是塑造中国的负面形象，如虚假信息战争、中国抗疫是美国的阻碍、疫苗竞赛、中国不透明角色等。其次，在图形-背景理论框架下，《华盛顿邮报》主要通过突显新闻标题和不同句子结构中的“图形”来吸引读者的注意力。新闻标题中的“图形”多污名化中国发动宣传战、隐瞒疫情调查、中国病毒、疫苗外交等负面信息；不同句子结构中的“图形”，包括陈述句、疑问句、强调句、倒装句，多突显中国疫苗可信度低、数据不真实以及疫情初期不及时应对等虚假负面描述。最后，在趋近化策略的使用上，《华盛顿邮报》着重使用空间趋近化策略，其次是时间和价值趋近化策略。其极力构建话语空间的消极边缘实体及其负面的意识形态价值。它主要将中国政府、病毒和武汉实验室识解为话语空间的消极外部实体，将美国、民众和医护识解为话语空间的积极中心实体，来建构外部实体威胁向中心实体的非合法化入侵的动态认知空间。《华盛顿邮报》污名化中国的抗疫行为,其背后的原因主要为中美政治和意识形态差异、中美经济竞争、中美历史和文化差异、以及新闻媒体的商业价值追求。

       本研究一定程度上突破了现有对涉华新冠疫情报道的语言和社会层面研究，从不同思维认知层面揭露其潜在操控读者思考的认知机制而达到污名化中国的目的，以期帮助读者提高新闻报道的识别解读能力，形成对中国抗疫的客观认识，并为新闻媒体工作者提供合理化建议。

Since 2020, the novel coronavirus pandemic has swept across the global. Domestic and foreign news media have reported extensively from different angles. As the first country to report the outbreak to WHO, China's response to the pandemic has become the focus of attention around the world and the China-related COVID-19 news reports are complicated. The Washington Post, one of the mainstream media in the United States and one of the top ten newspapers in the world, has great public opinion and political influences. Due to its own stance and interests, The Washington Post's China-related COVID-19 reports are mostly in total disregard of the facts and spare no effort to play up China's negative image, smear and stigmatize China.

News reports often present social ideologies through language and cognitive mechanisms to influence readers' judgment and thinking and achieve the legitimization of their own discourse. Therefore, under the theoretical framework of critical cognitive discourse analysis, this paper selects China-related COVID-19 reports in The Washington Post from January 2020 to July 2022 to build a corpus, with the purpose of studying what cognitive mechanisms it uses to influence readers' thinking and stance, how it stigmatizes China through these cognitive mechanisms and further analyzing the social reasons hidden behind.

The findings are as follows. The Washington Post mainly uses three mechanisms, respectively metaphors, figure-ground theory and proximization strategies. Firstly, under the framework of critical metaphor analysis, the abstract target domain ANTI-PANDEMIC RESPONSE can be constructed in terms of concrete source domains, such as WAR, OBSTRUCTION, COMPETITION, DRAMA. Its purpose is to shape the negative images of China, such as the disinformation campaign, China's response to pandemic being the obstruction to the United States, vaccine race and China's non-transparent role in the pandemic. Secondly, under the framework of figure-ground theory, The Washington Post aims to attract readers' attention by highlighting figures in news headlines and different syntactic structures. Figures in news headlines are employed to stigmatize China's image of waging propaganda campaign, the deception of the COVID-19 investigations, China virus and vaccine diplomacy. Figures in different syntactic structures, including the declarative sentence, interrogative sentence, emphatic sentence and inverted sentence, smear China's negative information, such as low efficacy and safety of Chinese vaccines, untrustworthy of China, China's concealment and the belated action to pandemic. Thirdly, from the perspective of proximization strategies, it is found that the spatial proximization strategy is the most frequently used, followed by the temporal and axiological proximization strategies. The Washington Post focuses on constructing the negative peripheral entities in discourse space and their passive ideological values. It construes "Chinese government, virus and Wuhan Laboratory" as negative external entities in discourse space, and construes "the United States, people and medical staff" as positive central entities, so as to construct a dynamic cognitive space in which external entities threaten to invade central entities. The Washington Post stigmatizes China's fight against the pandemic with the reasons of political and ideological difference, economic competition, history and culture difference, and the commercial value of news reports.

To a certain extent, this study breaks through the existing studies on the linguistic and social levels of China-related COVID-19 reports and reveals cognitive mechanisms that potentially manipulate receivers' thinking to stigmatize China from distinct cognitive levels. It is expected to help readers improve their ability to identify and interpret news reports, form an objective understanding of China's fight against COVID-19, and provide rational suggestions for news media workers.

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