Jing-Schmidt and Peng Lingua Sinica (2017) 3:2 DOI 10.1186/s40655-016-0017-9 RESEARCH Open Access Winds and tigers: metaphor choice in China’s anti-corruption discourse Zhuo Jing-Schmidt* and Xinjia Peng * Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract University of Oregon, Eugene ’ 97403, OR, USA This article examines metaphor choice in China s official anti-corruption discourse. Drawing on corpus data, we analyze the metaphors used by the Chinese Communist Party and its flagship newspaper, the People’s Daily, to frame the anti-corruption campaign and influence public perception. It is found that both embodied experience and cultural models are recruited as the metaphoric vehicles or source domains for the strategic profiling of different aspects of corruption and anti- corruption actions as the target domain. Additionally, metaphor choice is systematically different in the Chinese and the English versions of the party newspaper, reflecting that metaphor use is sensitive to sociocultural context, especially to the knowledge base within an epistemic community. Keywords: China, Anti-corruption campaign, Metaphor choice, Political discourse 1 Background During the transition from a planned economy to a market economy in the last three decades, China has experienced what many scholars call an “economic miracle.” At the same time, Chinese society is faced with “an extraordinary and serious epidemic of cor- ruption” (Meng 2014: 33). There seems to be a consensus among China scholars that the reforms that brought about liberalization and commercialization, and fueled the economic boom, also drove the surge of corruption by providing fertile soil for its rampant growth (Gong 2002, 2006; Guo 2008).