The “Chinese Dream” as a discursive symbol

5.2.1 The strategic use of “we”

The use of the first-person plural, i.e. “we,” is a strategy of constructing the collective identity of the Chinese Dream discourse. It echoes the nomination strategy of DHA that aims at discursively constructing social actors, social objects, phenomena, events, processes, and actions by using membership categorization means (Reisigl and Wodak 2009: 95). The use of “we” is rightly a kind of strategy to categorize membership in a socialpolitical context. It is a vital linguistic device to construct the collective identity of a group, community, and nation. According to Wei and Duann (2019: 765), the first-personal plural subject (“we”) as a discursive strategy is able to “create national collectivity, construct legitimization, and forge alliances in changing socio-political contexts.” An examination of the CDSC reveals that the pronoun “we” and its possessive and objective forms (“our,” “us”), occurs 280 times in total, making them the most frequent personal plurals, compared with “they” (“them,” “their”) with 137 instances. Ideologically, “Us” vs. “Them” is a discursive distinction of membership categorization to construct “friends/insiders” and “enemies/outsiders” (Leudar et al. 2004).

Excerpt 1:

The Chinese Dream is the dream of our nation and every Chinese. As long as we close ranks and pursue this common dream with great determination, we can create enormous strength to achieve it and enjoy vast space for each and every one of us to fulfill our own dreams. All the Chinese who live in our great country in this great age share the opportunity to pursue excellence, realize our dreams, and develop ourselves along with our country. With a dream, opportunities and efforts, all beautiful things can be created. We the people of all ethnic groups in China should bear our mission in mind and make concerted efforts to turn the wisdom and strength of our 1.3 billion people into an invincible force. (Xi’s speech at the 1st Session of the 12th National People’s Congress, 17/3/2013)

In Excerpt 1, the 1st person plural pronouns (“we,” “our,” and “us”) are used as a discursive strategy to construct a collective identity as members of the Chinese nation. Within the collective identity of the Chinese nation, “we” has become a symbol of the social actor to achieve national rejuvenation of the Chinese Dream. Through the use of “we,” President Xi’s speech aims to activate identity recognition in every Chinese person. Specifically, the “we” can be divided into different groups/entities both semantically and contextually. It can refer to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), CCP leadership, CCP members, Chinese government, Chinese populace, and also overseas Chinese. In this way, the inclusive “we” unites all possible “friends/insiders” at least discursively. However, in a critical sense, this reflects an ideological manipulation of discourse that is difficult to perceive for ordinary people, since they unconsciously categorize themselves into a certain “Us” group. It further presents a so-called “banal nationalism,” as “it draws people’s attention to the unobtrusive and familiar scenarios in their daily life that constantly remind them of a common identity of ‘us’ as against ‘other’” (Wang 2017: 832). Admittedly, the strategic use of the inclusive “we” in the rhetoric of Xi’s political speech greatly enhances his emotional power and illocutionary force.

5.2.2 Parallel structure

Parallel sentence structure (also parallelism) is a salient discursive pattern that shows the speaker’s/writer’s attitude in their argumentation regarding certain topics. It can enhance the speaker’s/writer’s stance and tone on a specific topic and further argue that the topic/claim is good or bad, right or wrong, and truth or fallacy. This reflects the argumentation strategy proposed by Reisigl and Wodak (2009: 95) in DHA, which is to justify which claim is normatively right and which is fallacy. In Xi’s speeches, parallel structure is used to offer various attributes to shape the Chinese Dream and to further argue its positive qualities.

Excerpt 2:

The Chinese Dream pertains to the past and the present, but also the future. [……]

The Chinese Dream is the dream of the country and the nation, but also of every ordinary Chinese. [……]

The Chinese Dream is ours, but also yours, the younger generation. [……](from Xi’s speech on the occasion of National Youth Day of China, 4/5/2013)

Excerpt 3:

To realize the Chinese Dream, we must adhere to the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics. [……]

To realize the Chinese Dream, we must carry forward the Chinese spirit. [……]

To realize the Chinese Dream, we must build up cohesive strength. [……]

To realize the Chinese Dream, we must pursue peaceful development. [……]

(from Xi’s speech “The Chinese Dream will benefit not only the people of China, but also [the people] of other countries,” May/2013)

In Excerpt 2, three parallel sentences attribute different qualities to the Chinese Dream. First, they put the Dream into a temporal dimension that relates to the past, present, and future. The Dream thus links the Chinese people’s historical memory to China’s present situation and then projects a presumably “bright” future onto China on a discourse-historical level. Second, it explains that the Dream is a great top-down plan from country/nation to the public. Third, the Dream is situated in the specific context of a speech to young people on Youth Day, which emphasizes the importance of the role of youth in Chinese national rejuvenation. It can be observed that each of the three parallel sentences has its respective topics for argumentation, namely, the past/present/future of the Chinese Dream, the owner of the Chinese Dream, and the role of youth in achieving the Chinese Dream.

The structure of parallel sentences is a typical structure used in Chinese political discourse. Excerpt 3 transparently shows this parallel sentence structure. The repeated use of “to realize the Chinese Dream, we must + do something” emphasizes that Xi’s four ideas and attitudes are of the same level of importance. These ideas are namely “adhere to the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” “carry forward the Chinese spirit,” “build up cohesive strength,” and “pursue peaceful development.” Significantly, the modal verb “must” strongly enhances Xi’s tone and stance. According to Biber (2006: 99), the use of modal verbs can better express the speaker’s stance and attitude and seek to reach the purpose of persuasion, especially “must,” which refers to necessity and obligation.

5.2.3 Cultural symbols of intertextuality

Intertextuality means that “texts are linked to other texts, both in the past and in the present” (Reisigl and Wodak 2009: 90). Intertextuality is usually realized by quotations, appropriations, or reproducing prior texts in the present texts. The intertextual strategy echoes DHA’s perspectivization strategy, which is realized by the devices of “deictic, quotation marks, discourse markers/practices” (Reisigl and Wodak 2009: 95). In Xi’s speeches, he tactically appropriates cultural symbols in intertextual representation, which is typically to quote classic Chinese political-philosophical thoughts to propose his points of view. On the one hand, the historical discourses are fused into Xi’s discourses; on the other hand, the cultural symbols and political connotations behind these discourses are also inserted into his narratives. This is illustrated in the examples below.

Excerpt 4:

“One must both have great ambition and make tireless efforts to achieve great exploits.” China is still in the primary stage of socialism and will remain so for a long time to come. (from Xi’s speech at the 12th National People’s Congress, 17 March 2013)

Excerpt 5:

We often say, “Empty talk harms the country, while hard work makes it flourish.” This means we must first get down to work. (from Xi’s speech at a meeting with national model workers, 28 April 2013)

In Excerpt 4, Xi skillfully quotes an ancient political aphorism to encourage his fellow party members to make an effort to work for China’s socialist path. The aphorism, “One must both have great ambition and make tireless efforts to achieve great exploits” (“功崇惟志, 业广惟勤”) is derived from an ancient Chinese political classic, the Book of Documents (《尚书》), that records the thoughts and speeches on the governance of the country of the rulers of the Shang (商朝 1600–1046 BC) and the Zhou (周朝1046–256 BC) dynasties. Similarly, in Excerpt 5, Xi paraphrases a discursive fragment (i.e. “Empty talk harms the country, while hard work makes it flourish” (“空谈误国, 实干兴邦”) derived from Gu Yanwu (顾炎武 1613–1682), a philosopher in the Ming Dynasty (明朝 1368–1644), who criticized the cultural-political elites’ “pure talk” (清谈 “qing tan” in pinyin) in the Wei-Jin Period (魏晋时期220–420). “Pure talk” (or “pure conversation”) means that political and intellectual elites are keen to argue “about loftier, or more ‘philosophical’ issues such as the meaning of dao or the relationship between humane tendencies and emotions or talent” (D’Ambrosio 2016: 624). “Pure talk” is considered a disadvantage to the implementation of political policies and undermines the governance of the state (Liu 2005). Here, Xi requires his audiences, the working class, to work hard and make achievements, but not engage in empty talk. Quoting from Gu Yanwu’s discourse can be seen as a recontextualized strategy, which uses Gu’s words to express Xi’s ideas in a new context. More importantly, it links the cultural symbols (e.g. Gu Yanwu and his thoughts) with the present social context of China, showing an extralinguistic historical intertextuality.

In short, the appropriation of cultural symbols in intertextuality shows that Xi’s political rhetoric strongly draws on Chinese cultural traditions, because cultural/philosophical tradition is generally seen as “the source of moral values, guidance, authority, and legitimacy” (Cao and Wu 2017: 2) in Chinese society. The next section will shift from Xi’s official discourse to media representations of the Chinese Dream and examine how did different global media interpret and reshape the discourse using what kinds of news frames.

5.3.1 The CD’s representation

The CD is an official English newspaper that operates on behalf of the voices of Chinese government. The CD’s representation of the Chinese Dream is highly consistent with the official ideology and stance of China’s authorities. It is discursively shaped as a great, glorious, and achievable national goal, as well as beneficial to other countries.

Using “Chinese dream*” as a search item (where “*” refers to a possible suffix to the item, and the search item is also applied in the SCMPC and the NYTC), the CDC generates 737 hits. Figure 1 presents typical sample concordances of “Chinese dream” within the L10–R10 context (a span of 10 words left and right) in the corpus.

Figure 1:

Sample concordance lines for “Chinese dream” in the CDC.

“Chinese dream” is a node word (or keyword in context, KWIC for short) whose surroundings are co-occurring with positive or pro-positive lexical items in the corpus. It can be seen that “Chinese dream” co-occurs with positive words and phrases, such as “great,” “greatest,” “long-cherished wishes,” “come true,” “renaissance,” “realize,” “open a new chapter,” “fulfill (fulfilling/fulfillment),” “Chinese zeitgeist,” and “a great rejuvenation of the nation.” Further examining the total 737 concordance lines for looking into the discursive semantic presentation, it shows that “Chinese dream” in the CDC has the semantic preference of “national rejuvenation, progress, development, and great pursuit” in 86.16% (635 out of 737) of the total instances. The other semantic preference of “political concept, proposal, and idea” occupies 12.75% (94 out of 737) of the instances. Only 1.09% (8 out of 737) of the instances occur with negative lexical items, such as “Chinese dream is vague,” “Chinese dream will remain elusive.” Yet, these negative descriptions actually are from the Western criticisms that were quoted by the CD in order to respond to them.

The term “Chinese dream” in the CDC thus has a largely positive semantic prosody of “national rejuvenation, progress and development.” The positive representation of the Chinese Dream in the CD news stories indicates that the CD’s news norms and reporting stance are oriented toward political propaganda, aiming to shape a positive image of China in the world and counter Western criticisms.

In addition, the CD’s news coverage also touches upon topics related to culture, economy, trade, technology, regional affairs, and international relations with Western powers. More importantly, the news representations of the Chinese Dream in the CD focus not only on “collectivistic attributions of the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation” (Hou 2018: 317), but also on individual interests (see Excerpt 6).

Excerpt 6:

The “personal Chinese Dream”, for instance, focuses on the well-being of individual citizens and thus modifies traditional notions of the primacy of the collective over the individual. “In other words, to fulfill properly the national Chinese dream is to fulfill properly the personal Chinese dream,” he said. (from “Experts interpret the Chinese Dream,” CD, 8 December 2013)

In Excerpt 6, the CD’s news coverage directly quoted a foreign expert’s interpretation of the “personal Chinese Dream,” which seeks to get rid of the stereotype of Chinese culture that strongly emphasizes the collective interests of state but commonly neglects individual interests. Yet, the case of individual interests is just “the well-being of individual citizens,” which is very broad and abstract. Generally, individual interests in the Chinese political context are not about the case of Western individual (political) rights, such as personal freedom of speech, but rather they usually refer to material matters, such as a good job, a beautiful house, and a car. Moreover, in Chinese traditional culture, personal interests have actually long existed and were sometimes emphasized by Chinese rulers in different dynasties, but they could be sacrificed for the sake of the state (or emperor). In this sense, it cannot be said that the “personal Chinese Dream” “modifies traditional notions of the primacy of the collective over the individual.” However, on must admit that the portrayal of the individual Chinese Dream in CD makes the discourse more appealing.

In sum, the CD’s representations of the Chinese Dream essentially reflect Xi’s original official discourses. The core frame of representing the Chinese Dream in the CD can be summarized as having a Chinese national-centric orientation. Using this frame, the CD emphasizes Chinese nationalism and the ruling Party’s leadership, though other broad topics are touched upon. As China’s state media outlet, the CD applies news frames that are based on the Chinese government’s ideology while at the same time trying to compete for legitimation and recognition of the Chinese Dream in global societies.

5.3.2 The SCMP’s representation

Hong Kong enjoys greater press freedom than Mainland China given the “one country, two systems” principle. In its coverage of the Chinese Dream, the SCMP presents a diverse stance and multiple voices. In the SCMPC, “Chinese dream” occurs 281 times in total. A close reading of the concordance lines reveals that the lexical choices contain pluralist attitudes toward the Chinese dream.

The SCMP’s representations show different features. In Figure 2, the Chinese Dream is not associated with solely positive attributes, as in the CDC, but also entails a range of doubts. The Chinese Dream is described as “lack[ing] that universal appeal” and “not the dream of the people of China.” The SCMP reflects attitudes such as there being a need to rethink “what the Chinese dream really means” and that it is just a “so-called” dream. From these discourse samples, the SCMP poses a critical attitude to it. Moreover, as one of the local prestige newspapers, the SCMP’s shaping of the “Chinese Dream” is unavoidably linked with Hong Kong society. Since Hong Kong is a part of China, the “Chinese Dream” should also be the Hong Kong people’s dream. But the question is, what is the Hong Kong people’s Chinese Dream? In SCMP’s news stories, “Hongkongers’ democracy dream” was presented as the answer, indicating a kind of pro-democracy political inclination.

Figure 2:

Sample concordance lines for “Chinese dream” in the SCMPC.

However, the SCMP did not portray a purely negative Chinese Dream. It also described the positive sides of the Dream discourse. For instance, “the realization of the Chinese dream will lead to an improvement in people’s lives,” “the Chinese dream is about solving China’s problem,” “national rejuvenation,” and “a great national renewal.” In addition to the positive and negative portrayals of the discourse, there are neutral descriptions, e.g. “Xi’s Chinese dream concept.” These lexical choices and semantic shaping echo the predication strategy in DHA, which uses “evaluative attributions of negative or positive traits” (Reisigl and Wodak 2009: 95) to shape discursive objects.

Examining all of the 281 concordance lines, it is found that “Chinese dream” in the SCMPC has the positive semantic preference of “Chinese leadership’s pursuit, roadmap, state development, and national revival” in 36.65% (103 out of 281) of the instances; the negative semantic preference of “vague, slogan, and undemocratic” occupies 25.27% (71 out of 281) of the instances; and the neutral preference of “political concept, plan, ideology, and discourse object” is 38.08% (107 out of 281). This thus forms a mixed semantic prosody of “Chinese dream” in the corpus that comprises positive, negative, and neutral semantic phenomena in a wholistic view. In other words, it presents a more balanced orientation of news reporting.

It can be further observed that SCMP’s representations show a pluralist political orientation. Different from the CD, which strictly adheres to China’s official stance, the SCMP is open to different political stances, while simultaneously enhancing the credibility of the news discourse, whether its news stances are pro-Beijing, pro-democracy, or neutral. The following two samples illustrate both pro-Beijing and pro-democracy.

Excerpt 7:

Tsang said: “The Chinese dream is not the dream of the people of China freely articulated by them. It is ‘the Chinese dream’ to be articulated on their behalf by Xi and the Communist Party.” (from “Just what is Xi Jinping’s Chinese dream and ‘Chinese renaissance’?” SCMP, 6 February 2013)

Excerpt 8:

Xi’s “Chinese Dream” envisions a strong, rejuvenated nation that has regained its central role in the world. Xi places the Communist Party, and himself, as promoters of that dream and has initiated ambitious plans to see that dream come to fruition. (from “Xi Jinping, the face of rising China, is the strong leader it needs,” SCMP, 17 October 2017)

It is obvious that Excerpt 7 shows a strong critique of the Chinese Dream and directly points out that it is not the Chinese people’s dream at all, but only the CCP’s dream. The “dream” discourse is just a manipulation of ideology and discourse (van Dijk 2006). This stance opposes China’s official ideological narrative, suggesting an ideological orientation of pro-democracy. In contrast, in Excerpt 8, a supportive position of pro-Beijing is shown. It explains positively that the Dream is to make China become a strong country to recover its central role in global order.

The analysis shows that the SCMP’s news representation does not fall on one side, but rather attempts to cover different voices and stances. This kind of news frame here is defined as a multiculturalist-oriented frame. The multiculturalist perspective means accounting for diverse sociopolitical and cultural norms, meanwhile allowing existence of different and even conflicting political stances. In fact, the multiculturalist orientation is based on Hong Kong’s multicultural society (Jackson and Nesterova 2017), which is the social base of this ideology.

In summary, the SCMP adopts a multiculturalist-oriented frame to construct a multifaceted Chinese Dream. From this angle, it neither fully converges with China’s official narrative nor completely diverges from it. Instead it provides an open dialogue platform containing multicultural and multi-political orientations.

5.3.3 The NYT’s representation

The Chinese Dream in the NYT is framed as a discourse object that has been subjected to a series of questions. In the NYTC, “Chinese dream” only occurs 70 times in total, making its corpus size considerably smaller than that of the CDC and the SCMPC. Although the frequency is relatively small, “Chinese dream” in context still provides rich samples to analyze. By using the combination of lexical selection and rhetorical devices, a largely negative Chinese Dream is presented in the NYT.

The NYT sees the Chinese Dream as a kind of political rhetoric featured in the Chinese leader’s authority. The nationalist ideology is highlighted in NYT news stories. For example, in the first three concordance lines in Figure 3, the attributes of “Chinese dream” were described as “a nationalist note,” “patriotic unity under one-party rule,” and “nationalistic paean.” Ideologically, the NYT exposed that the Chinese Dream aims to mobilize Chinese nationalism/patriotism to unite the Chinese populace. Moreover, it interpreted “Chinese dream” as a political slogan, for example, “Mr. Xi has championed the slogans of the ‘Chinese dream’” and “Mr. Xi’s signature slogan,” and negatively shaped it by using negative lexical items or phrases, such as “a vaguely defined promise,” “so-called,” “elusive,” “bombastic” and “obscures.” However, the last concordance line shows a relatively positive description of the Chinese Dream.

Figure 3:

Sample concordance lines for “Chinese dream” in the NYTC.

Further examination of all instances of “Chinese dream” in the corpus reveals that 25.71% (18 out of 70) of the instances show the semantic preference of “China’s development/pursuit, reform, and global significance”; 22.86% (16 out of 70) demonstrate the semantic preference of “political concept, idea, and plan”; and 51.43% (36 out of 70) reflect the negative semantic preference of “vague, undemocratic/authoritarian, nationalist slogan, and threatening.” The negative preference occupies the largest share. Therefore, the NYT creates a largely negative semantic prosody that the Chinese Dream is full of nationalism, alien, obscure, and potentially a threat to Western societies. This shows the NYT’s critical attitude and also reflects the perspectivation strategy of DHA, which shows one’s point of view regarding to a specific issue/discursive object (Reisigl and Wodak 2009: 113).

Undeniably, the NYT enjoys a high reputation in global news coverage. However, its coverage has salient US-centric orientation and even ideological bias. When it comes to framing non-Western issues, for instance China’s sociopolitical affairs, it prefers to occupy the moral high ground based on the criteria of US values to criticize others. The coverage of the Chinese Dream by the NYT thus shows a strong critical stance and also irony, shaping a negative China. This is illustrated in Excerpt 9.

Excerpt 9:

Mr. Xi’s self-assurance is not surprising, but his words and deeds betray a deep vein of insecurity. The talk of 1.3 billion people dreaming the same “Chinese dream” can’t hide the fact that China’s leaders continue to be plagued by nightmares not unlike those that haunted them in 1989. (from “The Elusive Chinese Dream,” NYT, 27 December 2014)

Excerpt 9 shows that the NYT presents a critical attitude toward the Chinese Dream. It points out that the Chinese leadership is still worried about the communist regime’s security, though massively nationalist propaganda is still continually being constructed. Moreover, an important historical Chinese event is recontextualized into the current discourse. Discourse is historical and “every discourse-historical analysis is itself time-related, connected to the perspective of a present” (Reisigl 2017: 54). The NYT deliberately alludes to a historical moment that the Chinese government is unwilling to make the public remember. That is the Tiananmen event of 1989, when a large-scale student movement broke out in Beijing’s Tiananmen square. It puts the Chinese Dream into a discourse-historical context, triggering target readers’ historical memory that the student movement was ruthlessly suppressed by the military. This is also a discursive manipulation (van Dijk 2006) that activates the target readers’ sociohistorical cognition regarding a particular event. Such negative lexical words/metaphors as “plague,” “nightmare,” and “haunt” are used to describe the challenges that the current Chinese leadership faces from history and also the present.

Obviously, the NYT as an elite US newspaper acts on behalf of US interests and democratic-freedom values. As a bystander of Chinese politics and society, it commonly judges China based on US values. Therefore, the NYT takes a US-centric “othering” frame to reshape the original connotations of “Chinese dream.” The “othering” perspective means negating others based on one’s own sociocultural norms, political system, and ideologies. The US-centric “othering” frame hereby refers to negating others (e.g. China) based on the sociocultural norms, political system, and so-called universal values (e.g. democracy, freedom, human rights) of the USA. Within this frame, China is shaped as the “other,” combining traditional Chinese totalitarianism with communist ideology that is different from the US-led Western democratic world. This reflects the long-standing Western stereotype that sees China as an oriental “other” (Ooi and D’Arcangelis 2017: 270). In this regard, the NYT’s representations diverge from what the Chinese Dream means in a Chinese context.

To sum up, the NYT takes a US-centric “othering” frame to construct a negative and threatening Chinese Dream in its news stories. This Dream is questioned by the NYT, potentially suggesting that US journalist elites hold skeptical and critical opinions of China. More importantly, the NYT, as a globally influential newspaper, reinforces the negative stereotype of China in Western societies to some degree.