Abstract
The China-UK Joint Declaration on Building a Global Comprehensive Strategic Partnership for the 21st Century is one of the fruits of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent official state visit to the Great Britain. As a typical and important diplomatic language document, the Joint Declaration deserves scientific research. In this paper, based on the six process types of Halliday’s Transitivity system, we attempt to disclose the diplomatic thinking underlying the employment of process types and make a contrastive study of the diplomatic thinking of both China and the UK. The research leads to three findings. Firstly, the high frequency of material process clause in both Chinese and English versions reflects the “Action thinking”, a shared diplomatic thinking adopted by the two nations. Secondly, the Chinese version employs more relational process clauses than the English version, which is an indication of the “Relationality thinking” underlying Chinese diplomacy and it is much less emphasized or even absent in British diplomacy. Thirdly, the analysis of the mental process clauses reveals that China has an “Inclusive thinking” in its diplomatic exchange with Britain whereas the UK a “Friendship thinking”.
Highlights
The past decades witness a reinvented China emerging as the world’s second largest economy with tremendous changes in both the country itself and the international environment it faces
Material process has a high frequency in both the Chinese version and the English version, which reflects the “Action thinking”, a shared diplomatic thinking adopted by the two nations
We probe into the correlation between different process types and the diplomatic thinking underlying the linguistic forms and a contrastive study on the diplomatic thinking of China and Britain is conducted
Summary
The past decades witness a reinvented China emerging as the world’s second largest economy with tremendous changes in both the country itself and the international environment it faces. Li and Hu (2009) employ the functional approach to analyze the diplomatic language, their study mainly focused on the characterization of such features of diplomatic language as normalization, evaluation, negation and some particular verbs often used in the diplomatic documents. This analysis is far from satisfactory in that it takes as its core the description of basic features of diplomatic language with examples, which makes it somewhat superficial. China adopts an “Inclusive thinking” in its diplomatic exchange with Britain whereas the UK a “Friendship thinking”
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