A Study Of Chinese Diplomatic Discourse On COVID-19 From The Perspective Of Cultural Discourse Studies

When COVID-19 broke out in China in early 2020,various doubts and accusations came along,such as “Chinese virus”,“nontransparent Chinese information disclosure”,and “WHO’s partiality for China”,which plunged China into a crisis of discourse and brought a great negative impact on China.Over the past three years,Chinese diplomatic subjects have actively responded to those doubts and accusations about China related to COVID-19 through diplomatic channels,and expressed China’s objective,real,and responsible positions and attitudes concerning COVID-19 to the international community.This thesis has schematized the six components of discourse in Cultural Discourse Studies with a triangular pyramid figure,and chosen three dimensions to analyze Chinese diplomatic discourse on COVID-19 with the concentration on its“culturality”.Three research questions are proposed accordingly here: What are the Chinese diplomatic positions and actions on COVID-19 in Dimension 1? What are the cultural relations between China and the discourse objects constructed by their interaction on COVID-19 in Dimension 2? What are the diplomatic purposes of Chinese positions and actions with cultural characteristics in Dimension 3?A corpus is built with 659 relevant texts collected from January 2020 to December 2022 from the official English website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China.The keywords,collocates,and concordance lines are searched by the corpus search tool Ant Conc 4.0.5 to obtain the vital discourse events and themes,providing data support for the three-dimensional qualitative analysis.The study finds that in Dimension 1 Act,China’s diplomacy expressed the diplomatic stances of “respecting science and facts”,“promoting cooperation” and“putting people first and building a community with a shared future for mankind”around the three major discourse events of origin-tracing of COVID-19,vaccine assistance and anti-epidemic actions.In Dimension 2 Act-Communicators-Culture,taking the United States,Africa,and the United Nations as examples,the discourse constructs the cultural relationship of cooperation between China and the three,but its cooperative relations have different tendencies: Sino-US tension,China-Africa friendship,and China’s support for the leadership of the United Nations.In Dimension 3 Act-Purpose-Culture,from the perspective of Chinese culture,the three diplomatic positions of “respecting science and facts”,“promoting cooperation” and“putting people first and building a community with a shared future for mankind”reflect the discourse objectives of de-stigmatizing,promoting development,pursuing common interests,spreading Chinese values and building partnerships,with the characteristics of Chinese culture of holistic,dialectical,balanced,harmonious and moderate thinking.In summary,this study analyzes China’s diplomatic stances and actions in response to COVID-19 in an overall and historical manner,and dialectically and critically interprets the “culturality” of China’s diplomatic discourse from the perspective of Chinese culture.In terms of theory and methods,for the first time,the empirical research on Chinese diplomatic discourse on COVID-19 is carried out from the perspective of Cultural Discourse Studies,which further expands the practice of Cultural Discourse Studies in the field of diplomatic discourse.In practice,through data processing and qualitative analysis,it provides references for China’s diplomacy on COVID-19 and other issues.