Metaphor Study In Chinese Leaders' Diplomatic Discourse

Since the reform and opening-up policy,China’s overall national strength has been enhancing.Thanks to it,the world’s perception of China has been gradually changing.Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012,he has continued the concept of opening up and made achievements in all areas of national construction,especially in the field of diplomacy.He has attended a lot of activities and put forward some rhetorical images consciously in order to convey China’s public diplomacy concept and build the image of a friendly and peaceful country.But it is undeniable that the diplomatic world is relatively complicated and difficult to understand,far away from people’s daily life both in cognition and perception.It is found that in the field of diplomacy,leaders often use the combination of diplomatic discourse and metaphor to construct the meaning space.In the perspective of metaphor theory,this paper aimed to study and analyze the overseas signed articles and diplomatic speeches of the Chinese leader from November 15,2012 to March 17,2018.and three dominant metaphors were drawn:war metaphor,relationship metaphor and journey metaphor.Then the three metaphors were systematically studied on a micro level.The general idea was to identify the metaphor through the discourse features--to investigate the construction of the metaphor--to analyze the function of the metaphor.Through the research,it was found that the war metaphor plays a role in rendering the war atmosphere and arouses the public’s approval While easing the strong antagonism highlighted by the war metaphor,the relationship metaphor builds a friendly framework,enabled each country to recognize its own identity and strengthens the sense of responsibility.Journey metaphor is to turn ideas into action,urges all countries to act.At the same time,the logical relations among the three metaphors were shown on a macro level.Finally,on the basis of the analysis,the author investigated the deep meaning of the three selected metaphors from the two dimensions of history and reality.