Construing Community with a Shared Future in President Xi Jinping’s Diplomatic Discourse (2013–2018): The Role of Personal Pronouns we and they

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article investigates the role of personal pronouns we and they in building a community with a shared future in President Xi Jinping’s 61 diplomatic texts from 2013 to 2018. Adopting systemic functional linguistics and positive discourse analysis, the complementarity instead of opposition of the two personal pronouns are discussed under a holistic view with diverse category relations generated through ambiguous use (i.e. inclusion and exclusion) to explain how the community is discursively construed. The “Self/Other” dichotomy is replaced by a cline with we and they intertwined. The wandering use within and across each personal pronoun in the discourse contributes to the construction of the community with a shared future on four different levels, i.e. that for Chinese nation, for two countries, for a region and for mankind, with contextual consideration examined.