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This article explores Alicia Little’s presentation of foot-bound women in her travelogues and periodical essays. Her exploration of the anti-footbinding movement saw the dissemination of Western feminist ideas in China. However, as the article demonstrates, this cross-cultural exchange was a dominantly Western feminist movement compromised by an enlightenment project based on the notion of modern womanhood or colonial modernity. To understand the background, the article gives an overview of the history of footbinding, followed by the representation of foot-bound women in Little’s travelogues to unpack the idea of modern womanhood. Her presentation of Christianity offers important clues to understanding her writings on the anti-footbinding movement. This article also explores how Little presents her feminist and Christian ideas of modern womanhood, that are at odds with the traditional Chinese womanhood. In contextualizing Little’s role in the anti-footbinding movement, this paper reveals the complicated dynamics between Western feminism, the patriarchal Chinese society, and foot-bound women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nanjing Imperial Examination Museum of China is founded upon the historical remnants of Jiangnan Gongyuan (Jiangnan Imperial Examination Hall) and the enduring heritage of the Chinese Imperial Examination System. This system, prevalent for over a millennium, interwove state interests with individual aspirations through Confucian education. Within this context, Jiangnan Gongyuan served as a state agency that projected dreams of order and authority. The dreams continued in the contemporary Chinese Dream discourse of national rejuvenation, seamlessly integrated into the logistical narrative structure of the Nanjing Imperial Examination Museum of China. This article draws on primary sources from archival materials, interviews, visitors' reviews, and fieldwork data to illustrate the ongoing logistical manifestation, complemented by current curation and spatial strategies of the museum. Beyond the logistical framework, this paper proposes an alternative approach to viewing the intricate roles of museum curators within Chinese national/provincial museums. These roles include three-dimensional functionalities: logistical agents displaying diffusive state authority, cultural institutions balancing ideological propaganda with commercial profits, and public spaces encouraging widespread engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper used the corpus-based critical discourse analysis to explore China's image represented in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) mainstream English newspapers between 2010 and 2020. Findings show that China is usually reported in a very positive light. Cooperation is the main tone of diplomatic relations between China and the GCC. They have signed a series of strategic cooperation agreements and memorandums of understanding to strengthen a comprehensive and long-term bilateral strategic partnership. Moreover, China is depicted as the GCC's important trading partner, which is very strong in the economic power and plays an important role in the world economic system. A strong economic complementarity and the historical friendly relations between the two sides are the main contributing factors for the positive representations of China in their mainstream English newspapers. However, the stereotyped "China as a Demon" image in the Western media is occasionally constructed in the GCC English newspapers because of the Western news agencies' domination of the flow of international news through the Arab media and private ownership of the daily newspapers in the GCC states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a critical review of Nye's conceptualization of soft power, this paper extends the literature by examining how Chinese diplomatic actors deploy cultural soft-power discursive practices when publishing opinion pieces in the British press to construct the attractiveness of China. It conducts a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. Findings show that they strategically deploy charm offensive, defensive denial and Othering offensive to construct a distinctively positive Chinese Self and a positive Us as inclusive as possible under the influence of ideological square. The identified major topoi are characterized by imbuing China's foreign policies and its world vision with Chinese traditional cultural and moral values, hopefully to justify China's extensive use of the economic prowess to gain soft power, and justify its ability and incentive to play a more important role in global governance. It sheds some light on understanding Chinese diplomatic actors' distinctive cultural soft-power mediated discursive practices in the general context of a non-Western government communicating and engaging with Western audiences. It also contributes to the understanding of China's strategic thinking and its world vision in the Xi Jinping era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts a corpus-based critical discourse study of the representations of the National Congresses of the Communist Party of China (NCCPC) in China Daily (CD) and The New York Times (NYT) in the past two decades. It is found that the shared keywords in the CD corpus and NYT corpus tend to suggest different discursive constructions of the same event in different social-political contexts. The different representations of the NCCPC can be revealed in the three types of discourse-historical discursive strategies (referential or nomination strategies, predicational strategies, and perspectivation strategies). CD prefers to construct the NCCPC as important political events and brand China's political system, China's contribution to world stability and prosperity in reporting the events. By contrast, NYT tends to construct them as events of power transfer and point towards criticisms of China's political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the rise of China in the international sphere, Chinese discourse has received more and more attention from scholars of various disciplines. A bibliometric analysis maps the landscape of Chinese discourse studies (1994–2021) from the Web of Science, mainly concerning its research productivity, research focus and research impact, to investigate contemporary and future trends through co-authorship, co-occurrence, co-citation and citation analysis respectively. Studies on Chinese discourse were found to expand continuously. Discourse analysts are increasingly interested in media discourse, political discourse, regional discourse (especially Hong Kong and Taiwan) by adopting corpus approach with various analytical frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As China's narratology studies begin to draw attention from international scholarship, this article aspires to map the current development of narratology in China with the main focus on renowned Chinese narratologists such as Dan Shen, Biwu Shang, Xiuyan Fu, and Weisheng Tang. In particular, this article seeks to comb the Chinese narrative research underpinned by and further contributing to the tenets of Western narratology, as well as to scrutinize the thriving schools of Chinese narratology that take Chinese narrative as its main concern. Based on a review of the situations of narratology in China, especially during this decade, this article concludes with tentative suggestions for the future evolution of narratology in China, and looks forward to the future when narratology with unique Chinese nationality can be widely recognized by the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study has conducted a diachronic analysis of law and order metaphors in a self-compiled corpus of China's Government Work Reports (CGWR) over a span of 22 years (2000–2021). By mapping target domains with source domains, we categorized four major types of legal metaphors, including building, physical object, journey, and living being, among which physical object was overwhelmingly predominant. Our analysis suggests metaphorical expressions that highlight physicality more than specificity will constantly remain in use because the stability and universality of such metaphors are conducive to the dissemination and reinforcement of legal thoughts. Additionally, there is a direct correlation between legal metaphors and the government's economic, political, and social concerns, as evidenced by increasing attention paid to various security issues and new challenges in China. Given that the rule of law with Chinese characteristics becomes more institutionally recognized and systematically theorized, legal metaphors are implemented in a top-down manner to justify the exercise of power in CGWRs, making Chinese people identified with the governing philosophy and further contributing to the ideological construction of discourse. This study is thus conducive to a general but insightful understanding of how political stances are embodied and reinforced persuasively in discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast with the vital role China has played in global climate governance in recent years, it is rare to see the research on its foreign-language media representation of this issue. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, this study examines how China's flagship English-language newspaper China Daily communicates climate change (2010–2019) to international audiences and how it represents China and the US as well as China–US relations regarding climate issues. Results show that through the use of specific modalities and other collocates of China and the US, the newspaper constructs China as a responsible major country and the US as a capricious and self-centered nation while emphasizing the importance of their cooperation on climate actions. The ways it represents this issue can be interpreted with regard to pragmatism and the China Dream of national rejuvenation endorsed by the Chinese government. To have a stable environment for sustainable development of China and the whole world, China is willing to avoid confrontation and work together with the US and other countries in combating climate change though competition may remain in such related fields as green energy, as indicated by China Daily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power transition creates distinct social discourses, forming new identities in the process. This article takes the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) as an epoch-making historical event and features the transformation of practices and power plays within the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra (SSO), the oldest symphony orchestra in Asia, before and after the PRC (from the 1920s to the early 1950s). This article aims to understand the transition of political power and subsequent identity negotiation within music and the broader context in Shanghai and China. The SSO was initially established by and catered for Western settlers in Shanghai. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took over Mainland China in 1949, it first purified the SSO's ethnicity. Due to Sino-Soviet relations, the SSO was used as cultural diplomacy to reaffirm China's position in the socialist bloc. Materials for this research are mainly collected from the SSO Archive and Shanghai Municipal Archive, generally overlooked by existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]