Critical Metaphor Analysis Of Xi Jinping:the Governance Of China

Public speeches delivered by political leaders are an important part of political discourse.In public speeches,the speaker uses various strategies and skills to transmit his/her intentions to the audience and achieve certain purposes.This is especially true in contemporary China,where Chinese Communist Party,the sole governing party,attaches great importance to communicating its governing philosophy to its population of over 1.3 billion.It would be of some academic significance,therefore,to examine how this set of philosophy is discursively constructed and delivered to people by means of public political speeches.The author of this thesis randomly chooses 20 speeches by Xi Jinping in The Governance of China(Volume I and Volume II)and applies Charteris-Black’s critical metaphor analysis to make qualitative analysis of the speeches based on some quantitative statistics.Integrating van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach to critical discourse analysis,the thesis explores contextual factors influencing the choice of metaphors in Xi’s speeches,as well as the functions of the metaphors in discursively constructing the Chinese Dream.It is discovered that among the 9 metaphor types mostly used in most discourses,the most frequently employed ones in Xi’s speeches are journey metaphors(35.1%),building metaphors(24.0%),war metaphors(20.7%),organism metaphors(8.9%),and family metaphors(7.3%),followed by some less prevalent types like water metaphors(1.7%)and machine metaphors(1.6%),and some rare cases of disease metaphors(0.5%)and weather metaphors(0.4%).There are historical,cultural,cognitive as well as pragmatic reasons for preferring specific metaphor types to others,especially when compared with those metaphor types preferred by American presidents.Metaphors help to successfully construct the manifold values of Chinese Communist Party into a more easily understandable ideological model--it takes time,hard work and unity to realize the Chinese Dream.Metaphors also help construct the image of China as both a development seeker based on Chinese characteristics and a peace lover longing for a community of shared future for mankind.