A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of a Propaganda Image—Taking the Official Homepage of One Belt and One Road Economic and Cultural Development Center as an Example

Abstract

Nowadays, China is overwhelmed by the thoughts of “One Belt and One Road Economic and Cultural Development”, which was proposed by President Xi Jinping in 2013. That is the main reason why we choose the propaganda image of One Belt and One Road Economic and Cultural Development Center, an official homepage (http://www.oborecdc.org), as research target. And we call it “One Belt and One Road Multimodal Discourse” for convenience in this paper. This paper, applying Kress & van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar theoretical framework, is studied with qualitative analysis from three aspects, which are representational function, interactive function and compositional function. Besides, based on the specific social and cultural context, the paper gives a specific analysis of how different semiotic resources work together to produce a integrated meaning system. It is founded that: 1) For representational function, “One Belt and One Road Multimodal Discourse” belongs to a conceptual image, which includes the classification process and symbolism process; 2) As for interactive function, the designer builds the interactive relationship with viewers by using frontal-horizontal angle of view; 3) In composing the whole image, due to the different value of information, the designer composes the image by using different location, size and color. Specifically speaking, the central writing system belongs to the main mode, while the other visual modes mainly complement or highlight it in order to effectively realize the total meaning of the whole image; 4) Based on specific social and cultural context, the designer combines the historical symbol-Silk Road and cultural symbol-Chinese Red with realistic Symbol-globalization, to realize the complete meaning of “One Belt and One Road Multimodal Discourse”. It is theoretically and practically significant to do this research. Theoretically speaking, it enriches the relative research on static multimodal discourse analysis. In practice, it helps viewers to understand the implied meaning of “One Belt and One Road Multimodal Discourse” better.