Misreading of Political Discourse During Transcultural Communication

1 Introduction

On March 18, 2022, Chinese President Xi Jinping made a video call with U.S. President Joe Biden, saying, “The U.S. has misperceived (misreading, wudu) and miscalculated China’s strategic intention” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, 2022). Misperception and misreading are frequently used in political discourse (Benjaminsen et al., 2015), which not only hinders transcultural communication but also causes uncertainty and even confrontation. This phenomenon has attracted the attention of politicians, commentators, and others alike. It has been given a lot of explanatory power, especially when it comes to describing the difficulties and dilemmas of transcultural communication. However, despite its great popularity and scholarly attention in the field of literary criticism studies, limited research has been done to explore the conceptualization and mechanisms of misreading in political discourse. As a widely observed phenomenon, misreading is still underrepresented in the realm of transcultural communication of political discourse. Thus, it is imperative to look into how misreading is understood and how it manifests itself in cross-cultural communication.

Using a methodological framework based on the theory of “encoding-decoding,” (Hall, 2003) the current study examined the discourse around the Belt and Road Initiative and the Alaska Talks (also known as the China-US talks in Alaska). In this regard, transcultural communication of political discourse is viewed as an “encoding–decoding” process, during which misreading emerges. Based on the results of the analysis, the present study identified three types of misreading in the process of transcultural communication of political discourse: oppositional misreading, cultural misreading, and accidental misreading.

In general, this research contributes to the knowledge of political discourse and transcultural communication by clarifying the conception and mechanisms of misreading. Specifically, the identification of three types of misreading in transcultural communication of political discourse provides additional insights for future interdisciplinary research in the fields of political communication and transcultural studies. Furthermore, this study underscores the necessity to learn more about the social, economic, cultural, and religious backgrounds of the target audiences during transcultural communication.

2 The Concept of Misreading

Misreading as a concept is widely adopted in the field of literary criticism studies (Rodman, 1997). Its conceptualization has experienced two distinct but coherently related stages: the traditional stage and the postmodernist stage. The traditional stage is marked by the rise of receptive aesthetics in the 1960s, emphasizing interpretation based on intentions and historical contexts. At this stage, misreading is parallel with misunderstanding and misinterpretation. In the postmodernist or deconstructionist stage, the understanding of misreading is shifted from an author-oriented to a reader-oriented approach. Distinguished from the previous stage, the postmodernist stage reconceptualizes misreading as creative interpretations (De Bolla, 2014), which means that readers create a “second text” while reading and add created value to the meaning along with the “original text” (Bloom, 1997). In this context, readers can form their own interpretations of the text based on their personal perspectives or experiences, freeing themselves from the authority and constraints of authors. Therefore, Iser (1979) argues that literary works are neither the original author’s text nor the reader’s interpretation of the text, but exist between the two, which is the result of the interaction between the source text and the reader.

Misreading was first introduced by Bloom (1997) as a strategy for subject writers to overcome the “anxiety of influence.” Miller (2003) argues that literary traditions or classical writings exert more of an “anxiety of influence” on writers. “Influence – more precisely, ‘poetic influence’ – has been a catastrophe, not a gospel, from the Enlightenment to the present. If it has energized people anywhere, it has done so with a ‘misreading,’ with a deliberate, even perverse, revision” (p. 78). This anxiety is the subject writer’s desire for originality and for the power of the word to be immortal. Bloom (2003), in A Map of Misreading, further argues that the subject of misinterpretation is incarnated as a “powerful poet” and is not only engaged in the activity of reading but also in the process of literary creation, which is essentially an act of misreading by two powerful poets. In essence, Bloom’s misreading theory considers misreading as a strategy to transform from reading to subjective creation. Bloom’s contribution indicates the move of literary studies from the stability of texts and authors toward a critical stance on time, authority, and interpretation in the history of culture (Said, 1976). Here, misreading is a creative interpretation, a response to and a defense against the hegemony and influence of precursors and original text.

In contrast to Bloom (2003), who restricts misreading to the creative field of the subject writer, Derrida and Attridge (2017) reject the subject and see reading as a linguistic frolic and a textual orgy, thus leading “misreading” into postmodern deconstructionism (Rabkin, 1983). Deconstructionist theories argue that the meaning of a text is indeterminate and deferred, and the readers are on an equal footing with the author. The first level of deconstructionist misreading is from within the language. Derrida (2016) argues that the energy of linguistic symbols does not point to a unique referent, but constantly points to the other and that in the difference between the “energy-referent” of symbols, the original meaning of symbols is constantly erased, and new meanings are acquired. The concept of symbols itself is altered yet easy to read, destroyed (Belyea, 1992). The second level of deconstructionist misreading is the allegorical reading within the text. According to De Man (1979), “the paradigm of all texts consists of a metaphor (or system of metaphors) and its deconstruction” (p. 205). The relationship between allegorical reading and reality is multilayered and opaque. As the meaning of allegory expands indefinitely, each fixed meaning is subverted by other meanings, thus failing to reach the ultimate meaning of the reading. It can be seen that both subjective misreading (Bloom, 2003) and deconstructionist misreading (Derrida, 2016; De Man, 1979) are creative and subjective acts, intentional departures from the meaning of the text by the creative subject to escape the confines of tradition or the reading process.

The postmodern misreading theory breaks with the static, closed notion of the text in traditional misreading theory, considering the text to be open, uncertain, and have gaps (Gadamer, 2013) the subjectivity of the reader is strengthened and gradually freed from the shackles of the author. The reader creates a “second text” in reading and adds value to the meaning along with the original text. According to Gadamer (2013), a text is not “to be understood in terms of its subject matter but as an aesthetic construct, as a work of art or ‘artistic thought’” (p. 173). In this vein, the text is conveyed as an unconscious production, and the interpreter aims to endow the text with meaning. This understanding of misreading abandons the author’s original intention and tries to generate meaning in the fusion of multiple readers’ horizons. As a result, misreading as a concept is gradually legitimized in postmodern theories.

Besides, there is a philosophical (Derrida, 2003) and cultural (Miller, 2003) turn in misreading theories. Derrida (2003) broadens the concept of misreading from literary criticism to a type of social, political, and philosophically related cultural criticism. In Grammatology, Derrida (2016) points out that there is nothing outside the text, which means that there are no cultural practices that are not defined by frameworks that are “caught up in conflicting networks of power, violence, and domination” (Baker, 1995). According to Derrida, “everything is textualized,” “there is nothing beyond the text,” and, there is a distinction between text in the narrow sense and the broad sense (Wang, 2011). A text in the narrow sense is a symbol with a certain meaning composed of language or words. In the broad sense, the text refers to all forms of symbols and their social, political, historical, and cultural contexts. Derrida’s theory of misreading contributes to literary criticism from the perspective of culture. Miller (2003) thoroughly promoted the shift of “misreading” from the field of literary and culture studies, adding the rhetorical theory of misreading to this research agenda and started to combine the study of form with the study of culture.

3 Political Discourse and Misreading

Misreading as a concept has been widely discussed in the field of literary and cultural studies, which regards the meaning of a text as jointly constructed by the writer and reader. In this vein, misreading is regarded as a positive creating process, as demonstrated in the theories of “poetic misreading” (Bloom, 1997) and postmodern misreading (Derrida, 2016; Gadamer, 2013; Miller, 2003). Misreading as a phenomenon is also widely observed during the transcultural communication of political discourse. However, in contrast with the positive understanding of misreading in literary and cultural studies, misreading of political discourse seems to be a relatively negative phenomenon that transmitters effect to avoid. For instance, the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has often been claimed to be misread by Western politicians and media. As a result, People’s Daily and China Daily released several articles to explain what has been misread. Chen (2015) claims that “some foreign scholars and media have misread the Belt and Road Initiative” and Liu (2017) wrote an article and tried to dispel the misreading of BRI from foreign media. Despite the fact that “misreading” is a frequently observed phenomenon in political communication, little research has been conducted to conceptualize what misreading is and what types of misreading emerge during the transcultural communication of political discourse.

Political discourse is a contested concept, which can often be “identified by its actors or authors, viz, politicians” (Van Dijk, 1997, p. 12). Indeed, a majority of research on political discourse is about the text, speech, and talk of professional politicians (Chilton & Schäffner, 2002), or political institutions (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997), drawing “our attention to the political potential of language” (Wilson, 2015, p. 400). Beyond the textual understanding of political discourse, Van Dijk (1997) argues that political discourse should be defined contextually. The contextual definition suggests that the research on political discourse “should not be limited to the structural properties of text or talk itself, but also include a systematic account of context and its relations to discursive structures” (Van Dijk, 1997, p. 15). In this regard, this study conceptualizes political discourse as contextualized social practices of political articulation. Articulation refers to “the practice of bringing together pre-existing discursive elements in a particular way in a (hegemonic) bid to construct a more or less novel arrangement of meaning” (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, p. 105). Such construction of political discourse links the theoretical framework of social reality (meaning) advocated by Laclau and Mouffe (1985) with Fairclough’s (1992) operational framework, seeking a more comprehensive understanding of the nature, intention, manipulation, and potential consequences of the discursive struggle.

To better analyze the political articulation process, Fairclough (1992) proposed an operational framework that consists of a dichotomy of linguistic and non-linguistic social practices, the latter of which is performed by an interplay of multiple components: actors (participants); actions (performances); modes (performance style); times and space (platforms); and materials (memes). Thus, to depict a full picture of the meaning-creation processes, political discourse analysis should be conducted beyond the construction of linguistic elements, to tap into the complex interplay of all components involved, such as the tense among different social actors (forces) in manipulating, affecting, and dominating the articulation and its deviations.

In addition to the aforementioned nature, political discourse construction also features a process of recontextualization. Such a process is usually planned and executed with specific intentions and desires for potential consequences and is, therefore, also termed manipulation (Van Dijk, 2006). As one of the crucial concepts in critical discourse analysis, it is observed in many social practices of articulation, such as populists’ discourse of being the true representation of the people. Populist discourse manipulation includes social power abuse (sovereign power of the people), cognitive mind control (interfering with comprehensive processes to form a biased mental model), and discursive interaction (populist ideology of we “pure” people versus the “corrupt” elite).

Such a constructionist and contextualized understanding of political discourse enable us to investigate how misreading emerges during the transcultural communication of political discourse. First, regarding political discourse as a meaning (ideology) articulation process means that there is a coding process of embedding meaning (ideology) into political discourse. Second, the articulation of political discourse is not without intention, which means the transcultural communication of political discourse is often with certain aims, goals, or purposes. From this intentional perspective, the transcultural communication of political discourse can be understood as a process of transforming a dominant ideology that is embedded in political discourse into a mainstream ideology of society. Third, the articulation of political discourse also means that political discourse is manipulated and recontextualized by actors. These intentional, manipulated and recontextualized features of political discourse allow the emergence of misreading of political discourse during transcultural communication, because audiences may refuse to accept the deliberate and manipulated political discourse. Thus, the actors, politicians, and institutions of political discourse often clarify the meaning and fill in any gaps in the process of transcultural communication to avoid misreading and misunderstanding. However, given the variety and distinctive social and cultural settings, misreading and misunderstanding seem unavoidable. The question is, what mechanisms underlie the misreading of political discourse in the process of transcultural communication?

4 Research Methodology

Based on the research questions, three types of data were collected. The first type of data is news reports on the Belt and Road Initiative from China Daily and People’s Daily. News reports on the Belt and Road Initiative from Western media were collected as a second data set. The New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, The Guardian were selected since they represent the dominant views and attitudes of Western society. Data was collected from Factiva news database (Factiva is a news database owned by Dow Jones with nearly 33,000 sources in 28 languages [Factiva, 2019]) with the keyword “the Belt and Road Initiative” or “One Belt, One Road.” The third type of data concerns the discourse revolving around the China–US talks in Alaska. The details of the data set are demonstrated in Table 1.

The data is analyzed by a methodological framework that combines critical discourse analysis (CDA; Fairclough, 2013) and news discourse analysis (NDA; Van Dijk, 2013).^[1] To be specific, Fairclough’s (2013) three-dimensional analysis of text, discourse practice, and social practice is applied as a theoretical framework, while Van Dijk’s (2013) NDA is used as a specific technique. NDA not only provides means to analyze news in terms of lexical and grammar, but also enables one to delve into the thematic, iconographic, rhetorical, and stylistic structures of news. This mixed methodological approach is necessary as it offsets the potential strengths and weaknesses of each method when it is applied individually. For instance, CDA (Fairclough, 2013) provides a macro-framework for discourse analysis, but, it does not explicitly address how to connect these three dimensions. NDA (Van Dijk, 2013) investigates news discourse at the micro-level of lexicon, grammar, and rhetorical levels. Thus, this combination offers an avenue that bridges the micro-level of analysis with the macro-level of text, discourse, and social practice.

The identification of three misreading is based on Hall’s (2007) “encoding–decoding” theory. The “encoding–decoding” model is a dominant paradigm that was proposed by Hall (2007) in his famous article “Encoding and decoding television discourse.” Hall (2003) highlights “encoding” and “decoding” as two determinate moments. Encoding is a message construction process, which is dependent up on numerous factors, such as audience’s knowledge-in-use and other wider socio-cultural and political culture. Decoding, the other determinate moment, is a meaning realization process which involves the interpretation and translation of coded information into a understandable form. Hall (2007) argues that there are three types of decoding, which are dominant-hegemonic, negotiated, and oppositional. Hegemonic decoding means that the audience adopts the same interpretive structure as the coder’s professional coding (Huang, 2002). With this position, the audience participates in the decoding process under the influence of the dominant ideology. When decoding is negotiated, the audience accepts only a portion of the collected meaning and interprets the negotiated meaning accordingly. The audience is in a mixed position of accepting and rejecting meanings. On the one hand, audiences acknowledge the dominant hegemonic message; on the other hand, they are not willing to completely accept the message the way the encoder intended. Oppositional decoding indicates that the audiences interpret the connotative meanings of a message in an oppositional way. The audience adopts a different interpretive framework than the coder and disregards the message, meaning, and connotations conveyed by the coder. Oppositional decoding is not a mistake, but rather a criticism of dominant decoding; it is the power of meaning resistance. If oppositional decoding is a misreading of the coder, this misreading is not unconscious but rather a conscious, systematic result. So, misreading is a form of selective cognition that tries to avoid the causes of differences by using a pluralist framework.

In accordance with three types of decoding, three types of misreading can be identified. The first type of misreading is termed cultural misreading, which is conceptualized from the perspective of negotiated decoding, where the meanings of the texts are negotiated due to cultural differentiation. When the negotiations between the encoders and decoders fail, it may lead to the second type of oppositional misreading. Oppositional misreading, which consciously decodes the original texts in an opposing manner. The third type is accidental misreading, indicating that the decoders accidentally misread the texts. Accidental misreading is often an unconscious mistake (Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Misreading mechanism of political discourse in transcultural communication.

5 Misreading of Political Discourse in Transcultural Communication

In accordance with Hall’s (2003) paradigm, transcultural communication of political discourse can also be understood as an “encoding–decoding” process. Three types of misreading, conscious and unconscious, may happen during the decoding process of transcultural communication in political discourse, namely, cultural misreading, oppositional misreading, and accidental misreading.

6 Conclusion

This research conceptualized three types of misreading in transcultural communication of political discourse, which moves our understanding of misreading from a perspective of “right or wrong” to a nuanced typological understanding of it. Due to the differentiation between civilizations, cultural misreading of political discourse is prevalent during transcultural communication. It refers to interpreting the meaning of political discourse in line with the decoders’ cultural presuppositions, cultural traditions, and ways of thinking. Rather than a “wrong” understanding, cultural misreading is a culturally influenced way of interpretation, which is often fragmented, unsystematic, and unconscious (Le, 1995). It is inevitable during the transcultural communication of political discourse. However, if the negotiations fail between the two cultures, and between the encoders and decoders, this may result in oppositional misreading. Oppositional misreading of political discourse, similar to Bloom’s (2003) “poetic misreading,” challenges the hegemony of encoders, decoding the original texts in an opposite way, which is ubiquitous in transcultural communication. Accidental misreading emerges when a decoder unconsciously misunderstands or misinterprets the meaning of the encoders. Accidental misreading is different from cultural misreading. In cultural misreading, the meaning is negotiated between the encoders and decoders due to cultural differentiation. Accidental misreading occurs when decoders misunderstand or misinterpret the meaning of encoders while attempting to comply with encodes.

By providing a theoretical framework, this study contributes to a better understanding of the misreading of political discourse. It conceptualizes three categories of misreading based on Hall’s (2003) three types of decoding, which move our understanding from literary and cultural studies to political discourse analysis, from a “right or wrong” perspective to a cognitive understanding of misreading. However, the analysis is limited in that it only looks at misreading of political discourse from media reports; future research should examine how misreading emerges at the individual level and how much misreading emerges as a result of cultural differentiation.