A Contrastive Critical Cognitive Study Of China-US Diplomatic Discourse On The COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic,as an emerging public health emergency,poses a significant challenge to the global governance system of public health security.In the face of the global crisis,countries have launched an unprecedented battle against the pandemic.The anti-pandemic measures taken by China and the United States have attracted worldwide attention.Based on critical metaphor analysis and proximization theory,by means of UAM Corpus Tool 6.0 and Ant Conc 3.5.8 software,the study investigates metaphors and proximization strategies in the COVID-19 diplomatic discourses in both China and the United States.First,the corpora of the Chinese and American diplomatic discourse on the COVID-19 pandemic are built.Second,from the perspective of critical metaphor analysis,the similarities and differences in the employment of metaphors in both China and the United State are microscopically explored so as to unveil the distinctive attitudes and ideologies involved.Last,the construction of the discourse space in diplomatic discourses on the COVID-19 pandemic in China and the United States is examined,and thus the discourse strategies reflected in proximization strategy are macroscopically elaborated.The research findings are as follows:(1)Five metaphors are frequently used in the Chinese COVID-19 diplomatic corpus,namely the war metaphor(35.5%),journey metaphor(22.2%),building metaphor(15.5%),human metaphor(11.7%),and chess game metaphor(7.2%).The five metaphors with the high proportion of usage in the American corpus involve war metaphor(33.1%),competition metaphor(24.9%),plant metaphor(19.7%),journey metaphor(13.0%),and human metaphor(5.0%).(2)There are differences in the attitudes towards epidemic prevention and control conveyed by the metaphors in the Chinese corpus and the United States corpus.China employs war metaphor to express a positive attitude towards antiepidemic efforts,building metaphor to convey the diplomatic idea of building a community of common health for mankind,and chess game metaphor to exhibit a comprehensive view of responding to the epidemic.Nevertheless,the United States views the anti-epidemic measures of countries as a competition for global leadership through war and competition metaphors,and highlights the destructive nature of COVID-19 and difficulty of epidemic prevention and control through the plant and journey metaphors,conveying a negative attitude towards anti-epidemic efforts.(3)Both China and the United States adopt proximization strategy in diplomatic discourse on the COVID-19 pandemic.With regards to spatial proximization strategy,compared with the United States,Chinese strategies are fewer than the United States,but the Inside-Deictic-Center(IDC)entities within the Chinese discourse space are more extensive,aiming to arouse public awareness of the urgency of anti-epidemic measures and to legitimize the measures.In terms of temporal proximization strategy,China centers on the transfer of the temporal concept of “future-present”,emphasizing the lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and calling on the international community to continue to respond to the pandemic crisis.In terms of axiological proximization,China utilizes significantly more positive values than the United States,constructing a positive image of a people-centered country,advocating the establishment of a community with a shared future for mankind,and presenting a positive image of anti-epidemic efforts.The United States,on the other hand,constructs the ideological conflict between China and the United States using negative values,in order to manipulate the virus origin tracing issue to stigmatize China,and makes attempt to stigmatize the pandemic,label the virus,and politicize origin tracing.By adopting a discourse analysis approach that integrates critical metaphor analysis with proximization theory,this study investigates in detail the ideologies and discourse strategies underlying COVID-19 diplomatic discourse in both China and the United States.Theoretically,it expands the research dimensions of critical cognitive discourse analysis.Meanwhile,in the postpandemic era,it may shed some insights for enhancing national discourse capacity,improving international discourse power,and constructing a diplomatic discourse system with Chinese characteristics.