The Projection of China's National Image in President Xi Jinping's Speeches

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The Projection of China's National Image in President Xi Jinping's Speeches Journal of Literature and Art Studies, March 2019, Vol. 9, No. 3, 354-361 doi: 10.17265/2159-5836/2019.03.011 D DAVID PUBLISHING The Projection of China’s National Image in President Xi Jinping’s Speeches ZHENG Si-fen, CHEN Yu-lian South China Business College, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China In the 21st century, soft power has become an important element to evaluate a nation’s comprehensive strength. Meanwhile, as an indispensable part of soft power, national image receives more and more attention on the political stage. Since Chinese President Xi Jinping’s speeches have unique features and greatly reflect positive national images of China, many scholars start to analyze them from diversified perspectives. Based on Du Bois’ theory of “the Stance Triangle” and the Indexicality Principle, taking President Xi Jinping’s speech at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation for example, this paper expounds how President Xi achieves the evaluation, position, and alignment between the subject and object by means of overt labeling, implicature and presupposition, covert evaluation statement, and ideology-laden linguistic structure, in order to establish China’s national image. Through the analysis, the author intends to figure out how national leaders use various persuasive methods to achieve their political purpose. And the author hopes this thesis can provide a new perspective for further analysis on national leaders’ speeches. Keywords: Xi Jinping’s speech, national image, the stance triangle, the indexicality principle Introduction With the development of the world multi-polarization and economic globalization, the political, economic, and cultural ties among countries in the world become ever closer. Since its reform and opening up, China has actively participated in the international cooperation and competition and has opened wider to the outside world. Meanwhile, as an indispensable element of China’s soft power, the national image of China plays an important role in increasing China’s comprehensive national strength, economic power, and innovation ability, and greatly improves China’s international status. In such case, more and more scholars begin to thoroughly analyze texts like political speeches, diplomatic comments, and press conferences to figure out how the speakers have tried to successfully build the positive national image of China. Since political speeches by national leaders significantly present the country’s historical background, social ideology, and developing trend, Acknowledgments: The author wishes to acknowledge support from English Language and Literature, a key program in Guangdong Province, 2017 and the Research Team in South China Business College: The Association Project of Comparative Study of English and Chinese in the New Era (2017-298). ZHENG Si-fen, BA, Faculty of English Language and Culture, South China Business College, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China. CHEN Yu-lian (Corresponding Author), MA, Associate Professor, Faculty of English Language and Culture, South China Business College, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China. THE PROJECTION OF CHINA’S NATIONAL IMAGE IN PRESIDENT XI JINPING’S SPEECHES 355 the author attempts to propose a theoretical framework by integrating “the Stance Triangle” and the Indexicality Principle for the current research into President Xi Jinping’s speech at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, in order to figure out how President Xi establishes the profound national image of China. Theoretical Basis With the frequent interaction between countries, national leaders become more active in making speeches, whether to push their own points of views or to show their enthusiasm in responding beneficial calls all over the world. “Among various political speeches, national leaders’ speeches were characterized as a highly institutionalized speaking scene” (Gumperz, 1982, p. 55). Many Chinese scholars have tried to examine the characteristics of national leaders’ speeches with the help of different theories and from different perspectives. For instance, Jiang and Liu (2009) thoroughly analyzed meta-functions of Barack Obama’s victory speech in 2008 presidential election; Xu and Zhu (2014) analyzed President Xi’s speech within the framework of Kenneth Burke’s Rhetoric of Discourse Act; and Meng (2017), in order to make clear how national images of Egypt has been established in national leaders’ speeches, analyzed the use of person deixis and appraisal resources in Egypt’s President Sisi’s speech at UN. These studies have provided great enlightenment for the present study. In this thesis, the author attempts to propose a new theoretical framework by integrating “the Stance Triangle” and the Indexicality Principle together to analyze President Xi Jinping’s speech. As the essential theory, John W. Du Bois’ theory of “the Stance Triangle” provides a thread for analyzing the speech text, while the Indexicality Principle is taken as an approach for the detailed analysis of the strategies employed to present the positive national images of China. “The Stance Triangle” Theory “Stance can be approached as a linguistically articulated form of social action whose meaning is to be construed within the broader scope of language, interaction and sociocultural value” (Du Bois, 2007, p. 139). Du Bois arrived at five conceptual principles defining stance: (1) Stance-taking occurs on three levels as physical action, personal attitude/belief/ evaluation and social morality; (2) stance is public and perceivable, interpretable and available for inspection by others; (3) stance is interactional and it is collaboratively constructed among participants with respect to other stances; (4) stance is indexical, evoking aspects of the broader sociocultural frameworks or physical contexts; (5) stance is consequential, leading to real consequences for the persons or institutions involved. (Du Bois, 2007, p. 182) Stance plays a critical role from written texts to talk-in-interaction. Du Bois’ theory of the Stance Triangle came out as the major theoretical contribution for the analysis of stance in discourse. Being a triangle, this theory mainly comprises three key entities—the first subject, the second subject and the (shared) stance object, and three subsidiary acts—evaluation, position, and alignment. However, these three subsidiary acts do not evenly apply to those three entities; they play different roles to analyze the subject and stance object. According to Du Bois’ definition of the stance triangle, “stance is a public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means, of simultaneously evaluating objects, positioning (self and others), and aligning with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of the sociocultural field” (Du Bois, 2007, p. 163). Obviously, the first or second subject evaluates the stance object, which is considered as the standard to 356 THE PROJECTION OF CHINA’S NATIONAL IMAGE IN PRESIDENT XI JINPING’S SPEECHES reflect the subject’s position. Meanwhile, the two subjects align with each other, converge or diverge. Figure 1. Image of “the Stance Triangle” (Du Bois, 2007, p. 163). According to Hunston and Thomposon, evaluation in discourse performs three functions: (1) It expresses the speaker’s or writer’s opinion, and in doing so it reflects the value system of that person and their community; (2) it constructs and maintains relations between the speaker or writer and hearer or reader; (3) it organizes the discourse (2000, p. 241). In general, evaluation is the most salient approach to analyze the stance, because stance-takers can evaluate the object through various forms, such as tone, intonation, body language, lexical and syntactic devices. Positioning can be defined, provisionally, as “the act of situating a social actor with respect to responsibility for stance and for invoking sociocultural value” (Davies & Harre, 1990, p. 50). Positioning closely relates to subjectivity, a simple self-position. Subjectivity is similar to the concept of “stance”; however, its range is smaller than stance, that is, subjectivity only contributes to people while the stance can point to people’s emotion, value, attitude, and organizations’ behavior, proposal, and statement. “To articulate this kind of subjectivity, what is required is an orientation to a specific object of the speaking subject’s stance, combined with specification of a particular intentional relational, such as desiring, hating, liking, not liking and so on” (Searle, 1983, p. 110). Alignment usually happens between two stance-takers. Take the sentence “I agree with you” as an instance. In this sentence, the two different stance-takers are the first subject (I) and the second subject (you), and the predicate (the verb agree) greatly shows alignment that I support what you say or what you do. Until now, there are several ways to show alignment between stance-takers, such as, “by stance markers like yes or no, or gestures like a nod or a headshake, or any number of other forms that index some degree of alignment” (Du Bois, 2007, p. 144). The Indexicality Principle While the Stance Triangle we have discussed characterizes the stance of the stance-takers, the Indexicality THE PROJECTION OF CHINA’S NATIONAL IMAGE IN PRESIDENT XI JINPING’S SPEECHES 357 Principle is concerned with the identity of the stance-takers. Disparate indexical process of labeling,
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