Constructing Chinese Cultural Identity Internationally in Translated Political Discourse

Abstract

Political discourse is generally assumed to deal with politics, on issues such as policies, power and ideology; however, it also involves cultural issues, thus playing a role in cultural transmission and cultural identity construction. The international addresses delivered by Chinese President Xi Jinping in and outside China are good examples of political discourse that take culture into account. In President Xi’s international addresses, he quoted extensively from Chinese culture to construct an identity of a peace-loving China that seeks peaceful and harmonious co-existence with other nations. How President Xi constructed Chinese cultural identity as a peace-loving nation is of much research interest. To answer this question, we built a corpus of President Xi’s international addresses, which is composed of 145 texts of English versions delivered between 2013 and 2022 on various occasions. We investigated how Chinese cultural identity is constructed in translated political discourse by means of corpus analysis. By analyzing the high-frequency content words, the first-person plural pronoun “we”, LDA topic modeling, and sentiment, we found that a Chinese cultural identity of a peace-loving nation that seeks harmonious relationships with other countries had been constructed in President Xi’s international addresses. Based on the corpus-driven analysis, it is argued that political discourse can also serve as a good channel to construct cultural identity.