The Genre of Political Portrait in the Chinese Mass Media in Russian: Values and Anti-Values

Abstract

The article deals with a genre variety of portrait essay - a political portrait. Proceeding from the assumption that the specificity of portrait essay in the Chinese Russian language media political discourse is determined, first of all, by the object of portrayal and the writer’s intention, the authors of the article analyze the category of communicative tone (V. I. Karasik) and come to the conclusion about the axiological markedness of the given category and its ideological variation. The system of values lying at the basis of the formation of the public opinion about a Chinese politician is presented as a dichotomy of “value/anti-value”, which allows regarding the axiological orientation of political portrait as the leading text-forming factor of this genre. The political portraits created by the Chinese language speakers are characterized by two main kinds of communicative tone - informative and ideological. The informative tone is actualized mostly in the biographical fragments of the essays. In its turn, the ideological tone appears in a whole range of positive/negative evaluations of the politician associated with it and forms an axiological dyad. The positive evaluations are given to ease, accessibility, closeness to the people, business competencies, professionalism, experience, courage, energy, decisiveness, readiness for action, perseverance, persistence, commitment, responsibility for one’s Motherland and the people, and patriotism. The anti-values in the essays under analysis are associated with external intervention and manifestations of irresponsibility. On the whole, the axiological priorities in the portraits of Chinese politicians are relatable, first of all, to the volitional sphere of man, and the genre of political portrait performs, to a great degree, the regulatory function relevant to efficient functioning of society at the present stage of its life.