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DAS0010.1177/0957926519880036Discourse & SocietyLi and Zhu

Article

Discourse & Society

How does China appraise self 2020, Vol. 31(2) 153­–171

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discourse

Tao Li
Shanghai Ocean University, P. R. China

Yifan Zhu
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, P. R. China

Abstract
Political discourse is a major site where ideological construction of both Self and Others is
carried out. Based on a corpus of 98 political texts issued by Chinese governing bodies from
2000 to 2018, this study adopts Appraisal System to analyse the lexical items that indicate
attitudes towards China and other countries with a view to revealing the ways in which
China and other countries are appraised in Chinese political discourse. It is found that (1)
Chinese political discourse does represent the ideological square of positive Self-presentation
and negative Other-presentation, but more frequently it negatively evaluates China’s things
(appreciation) rather than its behaviours (judgement) while more negative appraisals are
used to describe Others’ behaviours rather than Their things, (2) interestingly, while China
upturns Others’ negative profiles, it also upscales negative presentation of Self; likewise, China
mitigates negative presentation of both Self and Others, (3) Chinese political discourse allows
more external voices when expressing its attitudes towards Self. The analysis shows that the
producers of Chinese political discourse skilfully use appraisal resources, sometimes implicitly,
to construct a subtle but dynamic ‘Self versus Other’ ideological structure in Chinese political
discourse, which enhances the understanding of China’s moderate view on itself and others in
its pursuit of national interests.

Corresponding author:
Yifan Zhu, Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800
Dongchuan Road, Minhang District, Shanghai 200240, P. R.China.
Email: aliciazhu@sjtu.edu.cn
154 Discourse & Society 31(2)

Keywords
Appraisal, Chinese political discourse, discourse analysis, ideology, ideological square, negative
other-presentation, positive self-presentation

Introduction
Political discourse, here in a narrow sense, refers to the ‘institution political discourse’
(Chilton, 2004: 72), including official documents, political speeches, press conferences,
and so on, that express a state’s policies and stance. The interplay between language and
politics, between political discourse and social realities has often become the focus of
discourse analysis. As Cedroni (2013) describes, ‘[T]he political language is the lan-
guage of power, .  .  . a contractual interaction that can determine cooperation or competi-
tion’. The analysis of political discourse does not simply reflect events which take place
in the world, yet interprets these events and formulates understandings, thus making a
new reality (Okulska and Cap, 2010: 4).
The past few decades have seen a growing wave of scholarship in the analysis of
political discourse (e.g. Cabrejas-Peñuelas and Díez-Prados, 2014; Cap, 2008, 2015;
Chilton, 2004; Fairclough, 1989, 2000; Fenton-Smith, 2007; Flowerdew, 2012; Gales,
2009; Hart, 2013; Martin and Wodak, 2003; van Dijk, 1998, 2005, 2015; Vertommen,
2013; Wodak, 1989, 2017). One of the key issues in political discourse analysis is to
identify evaluation resources and reveal the ideological stance hidden between the lines.
Among the frameworks of evaluation in discourse analysis, Appraisal System1 is
regarded as the most fully developed, systemic and elaborate framework of values in
discourse to describe the way language is used to evaluate, to negotiate social relations,
to adopt social stance and to reveal the ideology behind it (Thompson and Hunston,
2006: 308).
Appraisal System has been widely employed in recent years to analyse texts of many
different genres, including news reports (e.g. Bednarek and Caple, 2010; Huan, 2016;
White, 2012), literary discourse (e.g. Love, 2006; Page, 2003; Unsworth, 2015), business
discourse (e.g. Hommerberg and Don, 2015; Pounds, 2011), academic discourse (e.g.
Geng and Wharton, 2016; Hood, 2010; Sheldon, 2018), medical discourse (e.g. Adendorff
et al., 2009; Gallardo and Ferrari, 2010), and educational discourse (e.g. Kaktiņš, 2014;
Myskow, 2018), to name just a few. However, appraisal analysis of political discourse
still remains underexploited. It is particularly the case in the Chinese context while
China, as an important economic power in the international arena, has attracted much
attention to its policies and stance towards global issues that are largely encoded in
Chinese political discourse. Chilton et al. (2010) call the attention of discourse analysts
to the challenging research tasks in discourse in the Chinese context.
As Martin and White (2005: 92) argue, all utterances are seen as in some way stanced
or attitudinal. It is thus interesting to examine the ways in which China’s attitudes and
stance are represented in its political discourse and more specifically, what attitudes and
stance China takes towards itself and other countries. This article aims to identify the
ways in which China and other countries are appraised in Chinese political discourse and
to reveal the ideological stance affecting construction of the discursive appraisal profiles
of China and other countries.
Li and Zhu 155

This article then begins by offering a brief account of the analytical framework of
Appraisal System (Martin and White, 2005) followed by a broad overview of the state
of the art in political discourse analysis. Next, it outlines research design and method-
ology. It then turns to the Results and Discussion sections as to how Chinese political
discourse represents China’s attitudes towards itself and other countries and why it
displays as such. Finally, the article ends with Conclusive Remark section in which a
wider implication of this study is spelt out and potential avenues are proposed for
further investigation.

Appraisal system and corpus-based discourse analysis

Within the theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), Appraisal
System deals with ‘the means by which writers/speakers positively or negatively evalu-
ate the entities, happenings and states-of-affairs with which their texts are concerned’
(Martin and White, 2005: 2).
Appraisal meaning is illustrated by three sub-systems: attitude, engagement and
graduation. According to Martin and White (2005: 35), attitude is concerned with our
feelings, including emotional reactions, judgements of behaviour and evaluation of
things whereas graduation attends to grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified
and categories blurred and engagement deals with sourcing attitudes and the play of
voices around opinions in discourse.
Attitude involves three semantic domains of feelings: affect, judgement and apprecia-
tion. Affect deals with resources for construing emotional reactions, either positive or
negative, such as 开心 (happy), 自信 (confident), 焦虑 (anxious) and 厌烦 (bored);
judgement is concerned with attitudes towards social behaviours, such as how capable
someone is (e.g. 强健(robust), 幼稚(childish)), how ethical someone is (e.g. 礼貌(polite)
粗鲁(rude)). Finally, appreciation deals with meaning that construes our evaluations of
things, such as their impact (e.g. 迷人 (fascinating), 沉闷(tedious)), quality (e.g. 绝妙
(splendid), 丑陋(ugly)), complexity (e.g. 精确(precise) 含混(unclear)), and valuation
(e.g. 创造性(creative) 无用(worthless)).
Attitudinal value is endowed with an inherent property of gradability which displays
greater or lesser degrees of positivity or negativity. While investigating the attitudinal
meaning, the value of graduation has to be taken into account because it reflects the
degree of the speaker’s/ writer’s intensity. The sub-system of graduation operates with
the choices of upscaling or downscaling the degree of evaluations in relation to force
(with upscaling as raise, for example, 极大增强 (greatly increased), and downscaling as
lower, for example, 略低 (slightly lower)), which involves inherently scalar assessments
along the lines of positivity/negativity according to intensity or amount; and focus (with
upscaling as sharpen, for example, 完全平等 (complete equality), and downscaling as
soften, for example, 基本消除 (basically eliminate)), which scales the degree of evalua-
tion according to the prototypicality of a semantic category.
Engagement is concerned with the ways in which a discourse producer indicates his
or her stance towards the attitudinal value expressed and endeavours to limit the potential
audience’s response by reducing or expanding dialogical space. This sub-system covers
monogloss and heterogloss. It is labelled monogloss when bare assertions or a single
156 Discourse & Society 31(2)

Figure 1.  An overview of appraisal system (Martin and White, 2005: 38).

source of attitude occurs in a communicative context. By contrast, heterogloss refers to

locutions that allow more than one voice or dialogical alternatives. Heterogloss may be
either dialogically expansive or dialogically contractive. By dialogically contractive, it
means to restrict possible other responses, for example, 这些措施显然有利于经济发展
(These measures are certainly conducive to economic development). But if it says 这些
措施可能有利于经济发展 (These measures are possibly conducive to economic devel-
opment), it then opens up to other external voices, namely, dialogically expansive.
Appraisal System is illustrated in Figure 1.
Though not many, some previous studies have been conducted to apply Appraisal
System to political discourse analysis. Crespo-Fernández (2013) draws on Appraisal
System and critical political discourse analysis to examine Winston Churchill’s
speeches to uncover the way in which Churchill skilfully used dysphemism as weap-
ons to exert ideological control on his audience. Abasi and Akbari (2013) examine the
attitudinal resources in the discursive representation of three major candidates in the
Iranian presidential election. Their research results show that as central to an ideo-
logically invested strategy, evaluative linguistic resources are found to sharply dichot-
omise the political actors along a range of positive and negative value positions. Eley
and Adendorff (2011) carry out an appraisal analysis of transformational leadership
discourse. The results suggest that the unique sociopolitical context of South Africa
in 1996 enabled the writer to maximise the affect or judgement configuration to insti-
gate change in his ideal reader and thus establish strong, persuasive interpersonal
relations with his followers.
These aforementioned studies show that Appraisal System is a useful analytical
framework in political discourse analysis which helps identify the interplay between
Li and Zhu 157

language and ideological power, and the interpersonal relations between the speaker/
writer and their audiences by examining the distribution of appraisal resources. However,
very few studies have hitherto been found to adopt Appraisal System to analyse Chinese
political discourse.
As for research method adopted in the appraisal-based discourse analysis, most
research of this kind has predominantly relied on the analysis of individual text or of
a small collection of data (e.g. Gales, 2009). Though the corpus approach, as Martin
and White (2005) argue, ‘will play a crucial role in the development of the instantia-
tion cline’ (p. 260), few studies have been found to apply corpus approach to
appraisal-based discourse analysis. Among the very few studies relying on corpus-
based discourse analysis, the corpora that are used are limited to small-sized ones
(usually less than 30 texts and around 100,000 words). And most previous studies
focus on one sub-category of Appraisal System, for example, on engagement (Geng
and Wharton, 2016; Huan, 2016), graduation (Li and Hu, 2015), or attitude (Adendorff
et al., 2009; Cheung and Feng, 2019; Hommerberg and Don, 2015), which to some
extent did not present a whole picture of the appraisal profiles in the discourse under
investigation.
Large-scale corpora help avoid personal bias in discourse analysis to an extent, and
at the same time, a corpus approach allows researchers to capture the repeated patterns
in texts under investigation. Stubbs (2001) argues that ‘repeated patterns show that
evaluative meanings are not merely personal and idiosyncratic, but widely shared in a
discourse community’ (p. 215). The adoption of a corpus approach to identify these
repeated patterns that instantiate appraisal meaning can, therefore, help uncover the
shared cultural and ideological stereotype in the discourse community and the dis-
course producers’ stance and their alignment with the actual or potential audience
within the shared socio-cultural context.

Research design and methodology

Corpus for analysis
This article is aimed at revealing the appraisal profiles of China and other countries
in Chinese political discourse. To achieve this aim, a corpus of Chinese political dis-
course was built, which consists of work reports of the National Congress of the
Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CPC), work reports of the Central Chinese
Government, documents of the Ministries of the Central Chinese Government, and
white papers issued by the Central Chinese Government. As the year of 2000 is the
time when the Chinese Premier started to deliver government work report openly to
the public, we set the time frame from 2000 to 2018 to collect data for the corpus of
Chinese political discourse. All the documents were downloaded from the website:
www.China.com.cn, administrated by the State Council Information Office, an insti-
tute directly under the Central Chinese Government. All in all, 98 documents were
collected. This corpus helps to identify the patterns of the appraisal resources in
Chinese political discourse and reveal an ideological structure of the presentation of
China and other countries through these patterns.
158 Discourse & Society 31(2)

Different from English, no space exists between Chinese characters. To make it pos-
sible to use corpus software packages available, such as WordSmith, to deal with the
Chinese corpus, we segmented all the Chinese characters, which results in 816,351
words. We also tagged these words with parts of speech in order to retrieve all the coun-
try names. The software we used is ICTCLAS, the most widely employed Chinese POS
tagging and word segmenting software (Xiao, 2010), which covers the tagging of place
names. To ensure segmentation and POS tagging are correct, manual proofreading by
native Chinese speakers was also carried out.

Data collection
The procedures for collecting data are as follows. First, we retrieved all country names in
the corpus and divided them into Self-group and Other-group. The lexical items in Self-
group include ‘中国’ (China), ‘我国’ (our country), ‘中方’ (China’s side), and ‘祖国’
(motherland). Other-group covers all the lexical items referring to countries other than
China. After batch searches, 8194 concordance lines of lexical items in Self-group and
4197 lines in Other-group were retrieved in the corpus of Chinese political discourse.
Second, using software package WordSmith 6.0 (Scott, 2014), we generated all the
collocates ‘within the usual span of five words to the left and right’ (Baker et al., 2013:
238) of the lexical items in both Self-group and Other-group to identify the collocates
that potentially indicate attitudes towards China and other countries. The statistical com-
putation of collocation relation we chose is MI value (default setting) and the reference
corpus we employed contains The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese2 and The
Texts of Recent Chinese 2009,3 two balanced Chinese corpora, each having a size of
slightly over 1 million tokenised words. The collocates on the right side of the search
items were re-sorted by their frequency for further investigation. We chose the collocates
on the right side because syntactically in Chinese, lexical items appear on the right of the
search items, that is, China or other countries, depict either the nature or the behaviour of
these countries, thus contain rich appraisal resources which make possible to observe the
ways China and other countries are evaluated.
Third, following Bednarek’s (2008: 152) method, we analysed the appraisal lexis
twice with a sufficiently large time interval between the analyses. We then annotated and
categorised all the collocates within the framework of Appraisal System upon close read-
ing of each concordance line. Alongside this process, The Language of Evaluation
(Martin and White, 2005) and Handbook for Analysing Chinese and English Appraisal
Meanings (Peng, 2015) were also frequently consulted for help, and personal communi-
cations with James Martin, the main founder of Appraisal System, were also involved,
both in person and via email, particularly when dealing with problematic cases. All the
data generated were statistically computed with log-likelihood ratio test.

Results
This section will demonstrate how the discursive appraisal profiles of China and Other
countries are created through the use of appraisal resources. Data would be illustrated
specifically in different sub-categories of Appraisal System.
Li and Zhu 159

Figure 2.  A general profile of self and others in attitude.

Table 1.  A specific profile of self and other in attitude.

Affect Judgement Appreciation

  Self Others Self Others Self Others

Positive 245 13 3973 333 1694 57
Log-likelihood Ratio LLR = 127.77, LLR = 1662.96, LLR = 1022.02,
p = .000 p = .000 p = .000
Negative 14 2 78 317 147 198
Log-likelihood Ratio LLR = 3.85, LLR = 358.36, LLR = 79.59,
p = .050 p = .000 p = .000

LLR: Log-likelihood Ratio.

In the category of attitude

Based on the collected data, Figure 2 is drawn to illustrate in general the frequency of
attitudinal resources evaluating China and other countries.
It can be seen from Figure 2 that there are both positive and negative attitudinal
resources to evaluate China and other countries. However, China is evaluated predomi-
nantly in a more positive manner with a negative to positive attitudinal resources ratio of
4%. It is an opposite case to other countries, with such ratio of 128%. This suggests that
Chinese political discourse indeed echoes van Dijk’s Ideological Square of positive Self-
presentation and negative Other-presentation (van Dijk, 1998: 267; 2006).
As discussed in the Appraisal system and corpus-based discourse analysis section,
attitude deals with emotional reactions, judgements of behaviour and evaluation of
things, either positively or negatively. Specifically, we calculated the use of attitudinal
resources in different sub-categories of attitude, viz., affect, judgement, and apprecia-
tion. The distribution of these appraisal resources is displayed in Table 1.
160 Discourse & Society 31(2)

The data in Table 1 reassure the result that the producers of Chinese political dis-
course adopted the global ideological strategy of positive Self-presentation and negative
Other-presentation. However, it can be found that Chinese political discourse employs
more negative lexical units to collocate with Self when evaluating things (appreciation)
in China rather than expressing attitude towards China’s behaviours (judgement), while
there are more negative words that are used to describe Others’ behaviours (judgement)
rather than Their things (appreciation).
Some examples are retrieved from the corpus to illustrate the use of attitudinal
resources to appraise China and other countries.

1. 中国 人民 热爱 和平, 渴望 发展 [Hap Affect+]

Trans:4 The Chinese people love peace and cherish development.

2. 中国 坚定不移 地 走 和平 发展 道路 [Ten Judgment+]

Trans: China unswervingly takes the road of peaceful development.

3. 我国 发展 建立 了 良好 的 物质 基础 [Val Appreciation+]
Trans: China has built a solid material foundation and institutional conditions for development.

In Extract 1, ‘热爱’ (love) is a positive affect resource that shows the Chinese peo-
ple’s emotional reaction, that is, love peace. ‘坚定不移’ (unswervingly) in Extract 2, a
positive judgement resource, modifies China’s behaviour to develop itself in a peaceful
way and displays China’s tenacity, obviously in a positive way. In Extract 3, ‘良好’
(solid) is a positive appreciation resource that portrays China’s material foundation for
its development. All these three extracts illustrate that China is positively presented
respectively in affect, judgement and appreciation, three sub-categories of attitude.
However, more negative attitudinal resources can be found that are used to portray other
countries. For example,

4. 37 % 的 美国 女性 曾 遭受 网络 性骚扰 [Sec Affect-]

Trans: a total of 37 percent of (American) women said they had suffered some kind of online
harassment.

5. 针对 日本 侵犯 中国 钓鱼岛 主权 的 非法 行径, 中国政府 采取 [prop Judgement-]

Trans: In response to Japan’s illegal violation of China’s sovereignty over Diaoyu Dao, the
Chinese government has taken active and forceful measures . . .

6. 2011年 2月, 利比亚 局势 急剧 动荡[Rea Appreciation-]

Trans: In February 2011, the turbulent situation in Libya posed grave security threats . . .

‘遭受’(suffer) in Extract 4 negatively portrays the United States by describing

American women’s insecure reaction to harassment. In Extract 5, Japan is negatively
presented because ‘侵犯’ (violate/intrude) is a negative judgement resource and nega-
tively evaluates Japan’s behaviour of violating China’s sovereignty. Extract 6 is a case to
Li and Zhu 161

Table 2.  A profile of Self and Other in graduation.

Upscaling Downscaling

  Positive Negative Positive Negative

Self 1812 151 59 34
Others 62 130 7 39
Log-likelihood Ratio LLR = 1088.41, LLR = 18.40, LLR = 19.32, LLR = 11.71,
p = .000 p = .000 p = .000 p = .001

LLR: Log-likelihood Ratio.

illustrate the use of negative appreciation. In this case, the situation in Libya is described
as ‘动荡’ (turbulent), which implies a negative evaluation of Libya. These three extracts
exhibit the ways in which other countries are negatively presented in Chinese political
discourse through the use of attitudinal resources.

In the category of graduation

In accordance with the classification of graduation, the appraisal resources in this sub-
system were identified and grouped into different categories accordingly. Here, of note
is that unlike attitude, the polarity of positivity and negativity for graduation resources
refers to the polarity of their collocates in the contexts. The polarity of the collocates are
decided according to the following standards.
First, if the collocate of a graduation resource is an inscribed evaluative item that
displays its polarity of either positivity or negativity without being influenced by its co-
occurring texts, its polarity is then tagged as the polarity of the graduation resource.
Second, if the collocate of a graduation resource is an infused evaluative item, which
means that its polarity is not decided by itself, but by the joint semantic effect of its co-
texts, its polarity is thus analysed and tagged according to the specific context. For
example, in the concordance line ‘中国将努力解决好能源问题’ (The Chinese govern-
ment will strive to address the energy problem properly), ‘努力’ (make efforts/strive) is
an upscale force item because it is used to appraise China by intensifying its efforts to
solve its energy problem. ‘解决’ (solve) is considered as positive in that it, together with
its negative collocate ‘问题’ (problem), presents a positive joint semantic effect since
the problem has been or is about to be solved. In this case, we tagged ‘努力’ with a posi-
tive polarity. Table 2 illustrates the distribution of graduation resources in different
categories.
Two striking features can be identified from the distribution of graduation resources
in Table 2. First, the log-likelihood ratio test shows a significant difference between Self
and Others in upscaling category. Considering the total number of concordances, it can
be interpreted that in general, the positive portrait of China is predominantly upscaled
while the negative description of other countries is also upgraded, which again accords
with Ideological Square. Second, in the downscaling category the downscaling of posi-
tive description of Self is significantly more often than the downscaling of positive por-
trait of Others, and the frequency of downscaling the negative description of Others is
162 Discourse & Society 31(2)

significantly higher than that of downgrading the negative description of Self. This
seems contradictory to the Ideological Square of positive Self-presentation and negative
Other-presentation. Some concordance lines are extracted from the corpus to illustrate
the above points:

7. 中国 中 东部 地区 多次 出现 大 范围 雾 霾 天气 [force up Graduation]
Trans: Large-scale smog has appeared many times in China's central and eastern areas.

8. 突尼斯 的 经济 竞争力 进一步 提升 [force up Graduation]

Trans: Tunisia further moved up in the rankings.

9. 中国 石油 资源 比较 丰富 。
Trans: China boasts fairly rich oil resources.

10. 2016 年 美国 的 人权 状况 在 一些 重要 方面 继续 呈 恶化 趋势 。
Trans: Concrete facts show that the United States saw continued deterioration in some key
aspects of its existing human rights issues last year.

In Extract 7, ‘多次’ (many times) is tagged as an upscaling graduation item to

modify serious pollution in China’s central and eastern areas, a negative aspect of
China. The use of ‘多次’ upscales the negative description of China. By contrast,
Tunisia in Extract 8, a country from Africa with which China always tries to strengthen
relationships, is more positively presented because the positive description of Tunisia
– it moved up in the rankings – is upgraded through the use of ‘进一步’ (further), an
upscaling graduation resource. Extract 9 illustrates that the positive description of
China is downscaled. ‘比较’ (fairly) in this extract is a downscale graduation item,
functioning to give degrading evaluation of China’s richness in oil resources. Similar
to ‘比较’ in Extract 9, ‘一些’ (some) in Extract 10 is also a downscaling graduation
resource and functions to soften the negative evaluation of the United States, a coun-
try that China describes as ‘competitor and co-operator’.

In the category of engagement

Engagement involves projecting value positions of the producers of discourse by deny-
ing, affirming and acknowledging a possibility of external voices. Unlike monogloss that
deals with single voice statements, heterogloss is more representative in terms of the
value positionings of discourse producers and often encoded through various evaluative
lexis. We thus chose heterogloss for detailed analysis in this study. As previously men-
tioned, heteroglossic resources can be grouped into either dialogical contraction or dia-
logical expansion in their intersubjective functionality. Evaluative items in disclaim and
proclaim function to challenge, fend off, or restrict the scope of dialogically alternative
voices while those in entertain and attribute are used to open up the dialogic space for
other potential value positions. Table 3 illustrates the distribution of engagement
resources in both Self- and Other-categories.
Li and Zhu 163

Table 3.  A profile of Self and Other in engagement.

Self Others
Contraction Disclaim 82 98
Proclaim 133 23
Sum 215 121
Log-likelihood Ratio LLR = 0.68, p = .409
Expansion Entertain 254 32
Attribute 145 68
Sum 399 100
Log-likelihood Ratio LLR = 46.59, p = .000

LLR: Log-likelihood Ratio.

As can be seen from Table 3, Log-likelihood Ratio test shows that there is no statisti-
cally significant difference between Self- and Other-groups in terms of using dialogical
contraction, yet significant difference exists between Self- and Other-groups regarding
dialogical expansion. Some extracts are drawn from the corpus to illustrate the research
result regarding the use of engagement resources.

11. 但 菲律宾 故意 没有 援引 的 是,[disclaim Engagement]

Trans: However, the Philippines deliberately omitted a passage from that statement,

12. 中国 经济 有 潜力 、 有 韧性 、 有 优势, 中国 的 发展前景 一定 会 更好 [Proclaim

Engagement]
Trans: It also shows that the Chinese economy possesses potential, resilience, and strengths, so
we can be sure the prospect for China’s development is bright.

13. 美国 司法部长 也 承认, 由于 少数 族 裔 选举权 受到 身份证 法 的 限制, 使 部分 人

在 事实 上 被 剥夺 了 该 项 权利 [Attribute Engagement]
Trans: The U. S. attorney general also acknowledged, as the rights to vote of some ethnic
Americans were restricted by laws requiring proof of identity, some people are as a matter of
fact stripped of such rights.

14. 中国 多次 表示 愿意 为 谈判 作出 建设性 的, 与 自身 发展 水平 相 适应 的 贡献
[Attribute Engagement]
Trans: China repeatedly expressed its wish to make constructive contributions suited to its level
of development.

Extract 11 illustrates the use of disclaim resource ‘没有’ (not), a negation with the
textual voice positioning it as rejecting some contrary voices, saying the Philippines did
not quote a passage from that statement on purpose. ‘一定’ (sure/certainly) in Extract 12
is a proclaim item to openly announce that the discourse producer reaches agreement
with the potential addressees. Here in this context, the discourse producer uses ‘一定’ to
construe an audience who shares his highly positive estimation of China’s future devel-
opment. Both ‘承认’ (acknowledge) in Extract 13 and ‘表示’ (say/state) in Extract 14 are
attribute items which construe the communicative setting as dialogical expansive. Both
164 Discourse & Society 31(2)

of them ground the positioning in an explicit subjectivity, making dialogical space in the
commutative setting for those who might have different views.
Overall, by technically employing different engagement resources together with eval-
uative items in attitude and graduation, the discourse producers, sometimes implicitly,
invest their positioning in Chinese political discourse and present an appraisal profile of
China and other countries that serves China’s interests.

Discussion
Critical discourse analysis (hereafter CDA) regards language use as a social practice and
attempts to uncover the ideology and power relations in the interplaying process between
language, cognition and society. It also illustrates that ideology is linguistically encoded
and the most effective way to decode the ideologically demystified meanings is by study-
ing the discourse. One of the important models to deal with ideology by discourse analy-
sis is van Dijk’s Ideological Square. Here we also stress, as van Dijk (1998: 10) does,
ideologies are not inherently negative, nor limited to social structures of domination.
van Dijk (1998) argues that ‘a group self-schema is the core of all ideologies’ and ‘this
schema also explains the essential group-based, and self-serving nature of many ideolo-
gies’ (p. 129). In this argument, it is stressed that ideology has a group-based nature, and
that ideology is self-serving. Importantly, as van Dijk (1998: 130) argues, ideologies are
not primarily about what is true or false, but about the ways in which people represent
their beliefs about themselves and about the reality, truthfully or not. As for its group-
based nature, ideology is found to have a structure of the polarisation of in-group and
out-group, viz. Self and Other, which is considered as a prominent feature of the struc-
ture of ideologies (van Dijk, 2006). It is assumed that ideological discourse is generally
organised by an ideological square of positive Self-presentation and negative Other-
presentation.5 This can be illustrated as follows,

a. Express/emphasise information that is positive about Us.

b. Express/emphasise information that is negative about Them.

c. Suppress/de-emphasise information that is positive about Them.

d. Suppress/de-emphasise information that is negative about Us. (van Dijk, 1998: 267, 2006)

Since people acquire, express and reproduce their ideologies mainly through the use
of text or talk, one of the most important ways to reveal ideology is then to make a sys-
temic analysis of the discourse that conveys ideological beliefs or opinions. As van Dijk
(1998) states, ‘we want to know what ideologies actually look like, how they work, and
how they are created, changed and reproduced, we need to look closely at their discur-
sive manifestations’ (p. 6; originally italicised) because

[T]he ideological polarization between ingroups and outgroups – a prominent feature of the
structure of ideologies – may also be systematically studied at all levels of text and talk, e.g. by
analysing how members of ingroups typically emphasise their own good deeds and properties
Li and Zhu 165

and the bad ones of the outgroup, and mitigate or deny their own bad ones and the good ones
of the outgroup. (van Dijk, 2006)

Here it shall be stressed that ‘ideologies feature evaluative beliefs or opinions’ (van
Dijk, 1998: 33; originally italicised) and ideologies organise social attitudes (van Dijk,
2006). This is where Ideological Square mutualises Appraisal System in terms of dis-
course analysis.

The use of attitudinal resources

As we can see from Table 1, Chinese political discourse does represent van Dijk’s
Ideological Square of positive Self-presentation and negative Other-presentation. This
suggests that the producers of Chinese political discourse indeed adopted the global ide-
ological strategy of positive Self-presentation and negative Other-presentation, which is
consistent with, for example, Cabrejas-Peñuelas and Díez-Prados (2014). The produc-
tion of political discourse, whether in or out of China, is endowed with a purpose to serve
Self’s interests.
However, it is also found that the producers of Chinese political discourse used more
negative appreciation resources to appraise things in China rather than judgement
resources to evaluate China’s behaviours while they use more negative judgement
resources rather than appreciation resources to appraise other countries. Behaviours
usually involve voluntariness of the agent, while things are more related to situations
and happenings which are beyond the agent’s will. A more negative image of the agent
is presented in discourse if their behaviours, rather than their things, are evaluated in a
negative way. A closer examination shows that these negative things about China mainly
refer to pollution and corruption, the things that Chinese people often complain about
and that Chinese government is determined to combat. Therefore, a positive image of
China was created implicitly through presenting a conscientious Chinese government
willing to take responsibility of solving its problems.
The analysis shows not only the ideological structure of positive Self-presentation and
negative Other-presentation in Chinese political discourse, but also the ways in which
appraisal resources are employed skilfully to achieve such a contrastive appraisal profile.

The use of graduation resources

In terms of graduation resources, it is found that the producers of Chinese political dis-
course not only upturn the negative aspects of Others they also upscale China’s own
negative aspects; likewise, they mitigate negative presentation of both China and Others.
Such a result, which seems contradictory to Ideological Square model, sheds new light
on understandings of Self–Other relations and the often concomitant domination and
enmity (see Huntington, 1998: 32–33). While the history and philosophy of each country
may have unique attributes, every country has an interest in promoting national pride.
However, what is interestingly shown here is that there is a moderate tendency of ‘Self
versus Others’ mentality in Chinese political discourse. It shall be recognised as evidence
that Chinese political philosophy encourages a more dynamic relations between Self and
166 Discourse & Society 31(2)

Other in order to serve its interests, as Nordin and Smith (2018) argue that the Chinese
way of ‘co-constitution of Self and Other is both necessary and useful .  .  . can be the basis
for a dynamic of interdependent growth and change’ (p. 390).
However, one thing of note is that we did not distinguish different countries in Other-
group and categorise them all into Others, which requires further research. There would
be cases where some countries, even though in Other-group, are friendly states that fol-
low China’s ideology. There would be some countries in Other-group that do not support
China’s ideology yet do not reject it either. There are also some countries that reject
China’s ideology, yet it shall not be ignored that van Dijk (1998: 171) also argues that
‘[T]wo groups or organizations may have different ideologies (e.g. Catholics and
Muslims), but may well co-operate to realize a common goal, and jointly acquire or
defend shared interests’ and ‘[I]deological opponents may thus become allies in pursuing
the realization of the same goals’.
Another important factor worth mentioning is that ‘harmony’ as a prevailing phi-
losophy is much prized in both social and political life in contemporary China. Ever
since 1953 when Premier Zhou Enlai proposed the ‘Five Principles of Peaceful
Coexistence’,6 China’s diplomatic policies have always been attempting to establish
friendly relationships with other countries and not to risk making enemy, which has set
the tone of political discourse and contributed to shaping the political discourse in this
way. Such discursive practice also reflects China’s efforts to reach rapport with other
countries and its intention to make a more harmonious world, a political concept that
former Chinese President Hu Jintao and his successor Xi Jinping have been trying to
promote. It is widely accepted by Chinese people, including politicians, that a more
harmonious world may well fit the development of China. As Xi (2014) argues, ‘one
precondition for China’s concentration on its development is a peaceful international
environment’ (p. 266) and ‘a better world will make an even better China’ (p. 64).
Graduation resources used in Chinese political discourse reflect China’s political phi-
losophy to build partnership with other countries and its claims to make a more harmo-
nious world, and ultimately to serve China’s interests.

The use of engagement resources

In terms of engagement resources as is shown in Table 3, it is interesting to find that more
expansive engagement resources are employed when the discourse producers express
their attitudes towards Self, that is, China, which suggests they allow more dialogical
space for other potential challenging voices.
On the one hand, it can be inferred from the data that the producers of Chinese politi-
cal discourse took a firm stance and did not allow more voices in creating the discursive
positive-Self and negative-Other pattern. On the other hand, the results also reflect the
discourse producers’ efforts to align the readers, showing that the positive evaluation of
China is objective rather than an act of self-polishing, or in another way, the result dis-
plays their confidence in their positively appraising China.
Such argument can find evidence from the CPC’s political slogan ‘Four Matters of
Confidence’.7 In his speech of 1 July 2016, at the celebration of the 95th anniversary
of the founding of the CPC, Xi Jinping, the Chinese President and General Secretary of
Li and Zhu 167

CPC, added ‘confidence in its culture’ to the existing ‘three matters of confidence’ (con-
fidence in the socialist path, theory and system) proposed by the former President and
General Secretary Hu Jintao in 2012. The slogan ‘Four Matters of Confidence’, since
Xi’s speech, has been quoted and promoted in newspapers, magazines, even academic
journals, which forges itself as a part of China’s ideology.
For example, in the third symposium of the Series symposiums on Learning,
Publicizing, Implementing Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
for a New Era hosted by the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee, Chen
Peiyong, a Professor in the School of Marxism at Peking University, argues that ‘the
remarkable achievements we have made are strong enough to support our “Four Matters
of Confidence” . . . as a teacher, we must absorb the “Four Matters of Confidence” into
the whole process of education’.8 It is thus not difficult to understand that the slogan has
influenced every aspect of Chinese political activities, including the production of
Chinese political discourse where a positive appraisal of China is clearly presented to
echo the ‘Four Matters of Confidence’.
The positive Self-image represented in political discourse and the confidence dis-
played in positively appraising China also reveal Chinese government’s intention in pro-
moting a state-led nationalistic rhetoric which aims at ‘unifying the population as the
country goes through profound economic and social changes’ (Friend and Thayer, 2018:
6). The state-led nationalism is a powerful instrument to gain unwavering patriotic sup-
port from Chinese people considering the collective memory on national humiliation and
shame in the past two centuries, but the state-led nationalism is not necessarily a worri-
some problem as long as it is positive, well-controlled and fine-tuned to great pride in the
nation’s rejuvenation as it has been for many other countries.

Conclusive remark
In this article, we present an empirical analysis to examine the ways in which China
discursively appraises itself and other countries in Chinese political discourse. The
results show that Chinese political discourse does adopt the global ideological structure
of positive Self-presentation and negative Other-presentation. This is in line with van
Dijk’s Ideological Square.
A more detailed analysis within the framework of Appraisal System also shows that
the negative evaluation of Self is more often related to things (appreciation) in China
such as pollution while the negative evaluation of Others is often related to behaviours
(judgement), for example, invasion, eavesdropping. Another aspect worth of mention is
that more expansive engagement resources are employed when China presents its atti-
tudes towards Self, which implies that China is confident in its positive Self-presentation.
These findings show that China is skilfully using appraisal resources to, sometimes
implicitly, present a positive Self and negative Others, which also reveals Chinese gov-
ernment’s intention in promoting a state-led nationalistic rhetoric.
Another interesting finding from this empirical study is that the producers of Chinese
political discourse not only upturn the negative aspects of Others but also upscale China’s
own negative aspects. Likewise, the producers mitigate both negative presentation of
China and Other countries. This reflects China’s dynamic perspective in Self-Other
168 Discourse & Society 31(2)

relations which draws on the prevailing philosophy of harmony (not making enemy) in
the social and political life of contemporary China. The result also serves as evidence of
van Dijk’s (1998) argument that ‘ideological opponents may become allies in pursuing
the realisation of the same goals’ (p. 171). Ideology is a self-serving schema with a key
property of positive Self-presentation and negative Other-presentation illustrated in the
Ideological Square model. Yet, two groups, which may have different ideologies, may
well co-operate to achieve a common objective and jointly defend their shared interests.
The United States is a typical case in point. This indicates that the Ideological Square is
not a still but dynamic model, which means in different contexts, that is, in different
times, for different purposes, on different occasions, those Others can be a Self and part
of Self could possibly be Others.
This article proves itself to be valuable to the growing body of research in corpus-
based discourse analysis, particularly in the Chinese context. However, several questions
still remain to be further addressed: which countries in Other-group does China posi-
tively present and which ones does China negatively present in political discourse? On
which occasions will China positively/negatively present a specific country, for exam-
ple, the United States, Russia, Japan, India? It would also be interesting to investigate the
variations of attitudes towards Self and Others in Chinese political discourse from a
diachronic perspective.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This article is sponsored by the Major Project of the National Social
Science Fund of China ‘A study of the construction, translation and dissemination of Chinese
diplomatic discourse’ (17ZDA319). The authors would like to thank Prof. Kaibao Hu at Shanghai
International Studies University and Dr. Kyung Hye Kim at Shanghai Jiao Tong University for
their helpful suggestions. They also owe great thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their con-
structive comments.

Notes
1. Also known as appraisal theory. According to an interview with J. R. Martin, he recommends
the use of ‘appraisal system’ instead of ‘appraisal theory’ and explains that appraisal system
is an analytical tool within the theoretical framework of the SFL rather than a theory in itself
(Wang and Zhang, 2013).
2. The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese was built by Tony McEnery and Richard Xiao
in 2004. The corpus contains 500 2000-word samples of written Chinese texts sampled from
15 text categories published in Mainland China around 1991, totalling 1 million words. The
corpus can be downloaded from http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/2474
3. The Texts of Recent Chinese 2009 was built by a group of scholars headed by Xu Jiajin. The
corpus contains 1,066,347 words from 671 texts mostly published in 2009, covering 15 text
types. The corpus can be downloaded from http://corpus.bfsu.edu.cn/content/torch2019
Li and Zhu 169

4. All those documents have been translated into English by either the Central Compilation and
Translation Bureau or the State Council Information Office, two national translation insti-
tutes. The translations are available at http://www.china.org.cn/chinese/node_7160010.htm.
5. The model of Self versus Other has also been developed in some interesting works such as
Chilton (2014), Cap (2013, 2015).
6. Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence are as follows: (1) mutual respect for territorial integ-
rity and sovereignty, (2) mutual non-aggression, (3) mutual non-interference in each other’s
internal affairs, (4) equality and mutual benefit (5) peacefully coexistence.
7. ‘Four Matters of Confidence’ are as follows: Confidence in the path offers a firm assurance
about a promising future of Chinese socialism; confidence in the theories affirms a strong
belief that the theoretical framework of Chinese socialism is correct, scientific and sound;
confidence in the system manifests an abiding faith in the strengths and advanced nature of
Chinese socialism as a political system; confidence in China’s culture demonstrates a full
confirmation of the nation’s own cultural values and a deep trust in their vitality.
8. China Daily (31 May 2018). http://data.people.com.cn/rmrb/20180531/7

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Author biographies
Tao Li is a Lecturer at the Centre for Corpus Research, Shanghai Ocean University. His research
interests cover corpus-based linguistic and translation studies, discourse analysis. He has pub-
lished papers in Discourse, Context & Media, Modern Foreign Languages, Contemporary Foreign
Languages Studies, Journal of PLA University of Foreign Languages.
Yifan Zhu is a Professor of Translation and Intercultural studies at the School of Foreign
Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the associate Director of Baker Centre for
Translation & Intercultural Studies. She publishes scholarship in Translation studies, Intercultural
studies and Corpus-based translation studies. Her articles appear in journals such as Translation
and Interpreting Studies, Chinese Translator’s Journal, Contemporary Rhetoric, Journal of
Foreign Languages, Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Foreign Languages Research,
and so on.