Comrades or contenders: A corpus-based study of China's Belt and Road in US diplomatic discourse

Abstract

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has received both praise and criticism within global settings. American stance, however, has been interesting sounding diplomatically more intricate. BRI’s opponents view it being hampered by impediments rather than facilitated with opportunities, while its advocates see opportunities instead of challenges because of its being in global limelight. While all parties have valid justifications for their express or tacit positions, they emphasize on the legitimacy of the status quo. To investigate these significant researchable inquiries, the study exclusively aims at examining the inherent ideologies and inconsistencies witnessed in the presentation and re-presentation of China's Belt and Road Initiative in US public diplomacy media outlets. Our findings reveal that China's image has been constructed differently at US diplomacy public media outlets hence establishing it as a major dimension worth inquiry. The study also shows that media attention and direct responses to the BRI in the United States view it through a lens of politically engineered problems. However, the diplomatic logic of the United States differs from the entire philosophy behind the BRI project as the BRI image has observed a drastic change from positive in re-presentation to being neutral rather somewhat negatively perceived.

Representations of Naya Pakistan: A corpus-based study of Pakistani media discourses

“…Herein, the notion of Naya Pakistan is interrogated for PTI's departure from pre-election promises. In one particular case, the linguistic strategy of manipulation is in evidence when a Tribune writer attempts to attribute the blame for the national airline PIA's failure to PTI (Afzaal et al, 2019(Afzaal et al, , 2022.…”

“…Wodak (1987) argues that it is a form of social abuse, discursive interaction, and cognitive mind control exercised through talk, text, and visual messages. Manipulation is done in such a way that it does not even make people aware that they are being manipulated by the discourse and it usually happens when people lack specific knowledge (Afzaal et al, 2019(Afzaal et al, , 2022. The study examines whether media discourses under investigation are characterized by such manipulation.…”

“…In regard to how populism operates through language, it has been argued that emotionality is a key aspect of populist rhetoric (Wirz, 2018: 1114). The populist style entails the use of emotionally-charged and slogan-like language (Mazzoleni, 2003: 5) which deploys “verbal radical-ism and symbolic politics with the tools of contemporary political marketing to disseminate (…) ideas among the electorate” (Betz and Immerfall, 1998: 2). Further, populism persuades people by appealing to their feelings and establishing a false sense of solidarity, with populist leaders relying on the “identification of sameness among [their] members and incite[ment of] suspicion of those who might question the message” (Mostov, 2021: 1).…”

Corpus-based analysis of shifts in China’s diplomatic stance across seven decades (1949–2018)

“…In addition, the corpus approach is a more effective research method than other methods, and its results can be verified ( Leech, 1993 ). As it is based on the linguistic data that people use, it is not subject to interference from the researcher’s personal intuition or judgment, ensuring that the research results are more realistic, reliable, and objective ( Hu, 2011 ; Afzaal et al, 2022a , b ). The procedure comprises three major steps.…”

“…To better disseminate its ideas to the international community, China must construct a diplomatic discourse system characterized by Chinese characteristics as well as a shared future for humankind ( Sun, 2017 , Lu, 2018 , Ma and Ma, 2018 ). Studies ( Xu, 2017 ; Liu, 2018 ; Afzaal et al, 2019 , 2022a , b ) show that differences in US and Chinese diplomatic press conferences reflect their different national interests, ideologies, and cultural traditions, and the increased use of competitive and antagonistic lexical items in China and India’s diplomatic discourse indicates the pluralism and instability between these two countries.…”