National Identity Of China In COVID-19 Documentaries:A Multimodal Interaction Analysis

President Xi Jinping once said that telling Chinese stories can help China construct a responsible national identity.The documentary is a concrete form of the media to tell Chinese stories and is also a meaningful way to construct national identity.However,few studies have focused on the mechanism of how documentary constructs the national identity elements.Multimodal(inter)action analysis(MIA)is a theoretical and analytical framework to investigate identity production.MIA claims that identity elements are produced in social actors’(inter)actions through their concrete communicative modes and mediational means.Previous studies on MIA have focused predominantly on identity elements of social actors and daily(inter)actions,and little attention has been paid to the national identity elements and media.Therefore,this study selects documentary China’s Fight Against COVID-19 of CGTN as its research object,aiming to examine the mechanism of MIA applied in the documentary and analyze the production and construction of China’s national identity elements.This study focuses on two questions.The first question is:What kinds of national identity elements have been produced in the dominant(inter)actional context of documentary?The second question is:What kinds of China’s national identity elements have been constructed in the recessive(inter)actional context of documentary?To figure out the questions,the study first introduces the(inter)actional context concepts.The documentary involves two(inter)actional contexts.The first is the dominant(inter)actional context,referring to the context of the(inter)actions among social actors,environment,and objects.In this(inter)actional context,we can observe how social actors use communicative modes.The second is the recessive(inter)actional context,referring to the(inter)action between documentary filmmakers and materials of documentary.The documentary do not record the process of(inter)actions,but keeps the mediational means left by the(inter)actions.Based on the concept of two(inter)actional contexts,this study makes two datasets,one is the dataset of the dominant(inter)actional context,and the other is of the recessive(inter)actional context.In the dataset of the dominant(inter)actional context,51 social actors in the documentary are selected,and their data are clipped into 51 individual videos.In the dataset of the recessive(inter)actional context,the whole documentary is selected as its data.The study uses the Elan tool to annotate the communicative modes and mediational means of data in each(inter)actional context,and uses the analytical tool of MIA to analyze the annotation results horizontally and vertically.The study finds that in the dominant(inter)actional context,China produces its national identity elements as a nation with civic solid duty and sacrifice,solid national cohesion,solidarity,and dedication.In the recessive(inter)actional context,China is constructed as a nation with excellent leadership,bold decision-making,quick organization and mobilization capacity,and execution capacity.Besides,China produces its identity element as a member of the global community.This study is both theoretically and practically significant.Firstly,the present study proposes the concept of(inter)actional context,enriching the theory of MIA.Besides,it successfully applies MIA to analyze identity production in a documentary,which expands the application of MIA.