An Analysis Of American Political Discourses On "China Threat" From The Perspective Of Proximization Theory

The study of political discourses originated from the Political Rhetoric of ancient Greece.It was not until the 1980 s that linguists started to study political discourses from the perspective of linguistics.In the past,linguists have paid more attention to the features of discourse but ignored the cognitive process.In order to make up for this limitation,Cap put forward the Proximization Theory,a cognitive oriented discourse strategy,which studies how to make listeners perceive that far away entities are approaching and posing a threat to them.It can be used to explore the pattern of crisis construction and threat generation in political discourses.At present,most of the researches on the Proximization Theory are case studies,which are unable to achieve quantitative analysis in corpus.Therefore,this paper will analyze American political discourses based on the Proximization Theory with corpus tools.In recent years,there have been many political discourses advocating "China Threat" in the United States,which is a distorted interpretation of China’s rise by western countries headed by the United States.The study of such discourses will help us to correctly understand the political intentions of the United States.Therefore,this paper analyzes the “China Threat” in American political discourses to explore the following three research questions:(1).What are the lexical features of American political discourses on “China Threat” in the light of Proximization Theory?(2).What Proximization strategies are used in the American political discourses on “China Threat”?(3).What America’s political intentions are reflected by the American political discourses on “China Threat”?In order to answer the above research questions,the author collected 5 American political discourses on “China Threat” in each of the two periods of 1992-1999 and 2017-2019(for that the time of the outbreak of "China Threat" is characterized by distinct stages,and there were more related reports in these two periods)from the authoritative American diplomatic magazines(Foreign Affairs)and government official website(https://www.whitehouse.gov),to establish a small corpus of 58261 words,and made a quantitative analysis of the frequency of words reflecting “China Threat” in the corpus.Moreover,this paper makes a qualitative analysis of Proximization strategies used in the discourses and the political intentions reflected in the discourses by analyzing the related examples.The results show that: first,American political discourses on “China Threat” have the following lexical features: 1).In the discourse space of American political discourses,the nouns and pronouns representing the United States are located in the center,and the nouns and pronouns representing China are located on the edge,so as to close the psychological distance between the readers and the United States and widen that between China.2).Through the use of verbs of motion such as “be directed against” and “move towards”,and verbs of action such as “invade”,“threat”,and “attack”,readers can feel that China is approaching and posing a threat to the United States.3).By using abstract nouns with positive values such as “democracy”,“peace” and “civilization” to modify the United States,and the nouns with negative values such as “autocracy”,“dictatorship” and “hegemony” to modify China,so that readers can feel the opposition of values.Second,American political discourses uses the spatial proximization strategy shows that China is threatening the United States from the economic,military,and high-tech fields.The temporal proximzation strategy shows that the “China Threat” in American political discourses has developed from a kind of "predictive judgment" to an "ongoing reality",which creates a sense of imminent danger.The axiological proximization strategy shows the conflict of values between China and the United States,which strengthens the interest opposition.Third,the “China Threat” in American political discourses reflects America’s political intentions: to mislead the international public opining towards China and to curb China’s development.This paper analyzes the “China Threat” in American political discourses in the light of Proximization Theory.On the one hand,it helps to prove the explanatory power of the Proximization Theory towards the political discourses and deepen the readers’ understanding of this theory.On the other hand,it can help the readers better understand the real intentions of the United States to promote the “China Threat”,so as to form critical reading thinking.