Abstract
Communicators have a range of referential options to represent individuals and groups, who in Critical Discourse Analysis are often termed “social actors” or “participants”. These choices allow communicators to place people in the social world and highlight certain aspects of their identity while downplaying others. Choosing one social category instead of another means foregrounding certain features and backgrounding others, leading to different views and interpretations of the persons represented. This paper takes a quantitative study of the social actors represented in Jamil Anderlini’s article on China’s panda diplomacy published in the Financial Times, identifying and analyzing referential strategies adopted in representing participants involved in the social practice, mainly focusing on the discussion of such representation means as inclusion/exclusion, assimilation/ individualization, association/dissociation and their indications for the revelation of the writer’s attitudes, beliefs and political stance. The study reveals that the writer’s representation of participants tends to be bi-polarized, holding sharply different attitudes towards the main social actors—China, foreign countries and zoos, researchers and FT, depicting China as a crafty, deceptive, and intimidating manipulator of panda diplomacy while other countries as innocent, ignorant and helpless victims. This difference can be partly explained by Teun van Dijk’s “ideological square” in which China is a typical out-group, emphasized as a communist, authoritarian country in opposition to the democratic West to which the writer belongs.
Highlights
Recent decades have seen rapid growth in China’s economic strength
Van Leeuwen based his inventory of social actor representation on Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL)
Patterns of Representation of Social Actors To address my research questions of ideology in the article “How the panda became China’s diplomatic weapon of choice”, I will limit myself to observations concerning patterns of representations most relevant to ideological revelation: Exclusion/Inclusion, Assimilation/Individualization and Association/Dissociation [12,13]
Summary
Recent decades have seen rapid growth in China’s economic strength. With its increasing presence in the international society, China is eager to enhance its “soft power”– a word coined by Harvard Professor Joseph S. This article, written by Jamil Anderlini, explains how pandas are the best representation of China’s soft power, and how the Chinese government uses pandas to exert political and cultural influence. He argues that while many see pandas as lovable animals worthy of conservation, the exchange of pandas between China and other nations is laden with symbolism, used today to seal important trade deals and alliances. He points out that while the population of captive pandas is increasing, threats to their natural environment is far from certain.
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