A Framing Analysis of Chinese Political Discourse: Exemplified by the English Version of The 2021 Report on the Work of the Government

Abstract

This study, underpinned by critical framing theory, analyses the English version of The 2021 Report on the Work of the Government, instantiating the Chinese political discourse. First of all, this study extracts key semantic domains and keywords based on an online corpus processing program, Wmatrix. Second, metaphorical surface frames are identified in line with MIPVU, and then conceptual metaphors are summarized. It is found that the metaphorical frames WAR, ARCHITECTURE, and JOURNEY are activated in The 2021 Report on the Work of the Government by the use of such metaphorical words and expressions as a battle, lift out of, build, consolidate, speed up and step. This way of discourse framing is intended to construct the image of the Chinese government as a “leader” who encourages the Chinese people to join as “participants” in the state building. The traditional Chinese moral notion of Gongtianxia, 'the world being equally shared by all,' is the root of the discourse framing.