Political Rhetoric And The Transformation Of US Policy Towards China(1993-2018):Discourse Analysis From The Perspective Of Policy-making

The process of foreign policy-making can be affected by various factors,including domestic politics,bilateral relations as well as international politics.Furthermore,another factor that cannot be neglected is the policy maker's influence.As the one and most important agent in the policy-making process,the policy makers could take the initiative to make independent judgment on the external environment and situation based on their own cognitive framework and experience.Even though there are multiple factors which are considered to be influential to the policy,any factor has to be justified,selected,analyzed and filtered by the policy makers before it is finally represented in the final version of the policy in a designated way.Policy is made up of language,or more specifically,is a unique discourse in nature.Therefore,in order to ‘lead' or ‘shape' the policy in accordance with his cognitive framework,policy makers must control and manipulate the discourse of policy in a specific way,and persuading the audiences the rationality and legitimacy of the policy systematically.Such a discourse strategy adopted in the process of foreign policy-making is called political rhetoric.Succinctly speaking,there are three major steps for the practice of political rhetoric as a discursive strategy in a complete foreign policy process.Firstly,the shaping of situation.This marks the starting point of a policy-making process in which the policy maker should make a thorough investigation and analysis on the external environment and situation he faced.Then the policy maker is expected to carry out a narration designed in accordance with his judgment.The goal of the narration is to ‘encourage' the audiences to feel a sense of emergency and danger themselves.Secondly,identity tag.On the basis of the shaping of situation,the policy maker should identify the agent who caused and thus should be responsible for the current emergent situation.By constructing the identities of both ‘self' and ‘other' through certain discourse respectively,the policy maker need to explain to the audiences that how the ‘other' caused the situation,and what kind of impact it will bring to the interests of ‘self'.Finally,policy illustration.In this stage,the policy maker should illustrate what kind of actions will be taken to relive the current situation,to defense the interests of ‘self'.Political rhetoric can be viewed as a reflection of the cognitive logic and the way of thinking of the policy maker under certain circumstances,for it is a key way of realizing the policy target,and also an important impacting factor of the policy.Previous studies on foreign policies are largely rationalism-oriented,which concentrate mainly on objective factors' influence on policies while the subject factors' possible influence has been ignored to a large extent.This study aims to construct a policy analysis framework with political rhetoric as the central variable.The author draws important inspirations from previous studies in this field,especially the study of Rhetorical Political Analysis(RPA).The case study is the evolution of US policy toward China from 1993 to 2018.From the analysis,the author hopes to interpret the underlying motivations of the transformation of US's policy toward China from the perspective of discourse analysis.It is of both theoretical and practical significance of introducing the perspective of political rhetoric in analyzing foreign policy.Theoretically,through political rhetoric,the subject factor's influence can be further observed and recogni zed,which will make up the shortcoming of the current rationalism-oriented policy analysis framework,and will also benefit for the intensified understanding of the essence of certain foreign policies.Practically,to purse the study of political rhetoric in the field of policy analysis is a brand new way of analysis,which will not only be helpful for the promotion of policy-making,but will also raise the awareness of the necessity of adopting certain discursive strategy to better facilitate and defend for China's positive image as well as China's core national interests on the global arena.