China’s Building of International Discourse System Against COVID-19 Pandemic—From the Perspective of Proximization Theory

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic, China has been actively leading international cooperation in fighting the virus. However, The US and some other western countries have repeatedly passed the buck to China, which has posed greater challenges for the building of China's international discourse system against such backdrop. To this end, this paper focuses on the official discourse of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs themed on “fighting against the COVID-19 Pandemic”, and construes the strategies of building China's international discourse system against the context through the analytical tool—cognitive-pragmatic model of proximization theory, thus exposing the hidden ideology as well as the false propaganda of the western countries toward China and providing intellectual support for China to transform its development advantages in the field of hard power into those in soft power.