The Rhetoric of Partnership: A Critical Discourse and Semiotic Analysis of Chinese President Xi's Address on CPEC Launch in Pakistan

Abstract

The paper presents a Critical Discourse Analysis of the Chinese President Xi’s powerful rhetoric delivered on 21 April, 2015, during his visit to Pakistan to launch China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The speech served many purposes but mainly it played an instrumental role to convey a strong brotherly connection the both countries share. The paper analysis the semiotic perspective as well. The choice of words in the speech also represents power relationship. Since, the speech proved to be a sensation in town not only in China and Pakistan but all over the world, it has been marked as one of the most impactful rhetoric by him. The present study intends to explore the underlying discursive strategies, socio-political construction and de-construction of the political frames in Xi’s speech, in the mirror of Critical Discourse Analysis. The speech has been analyzed under the framework of Van Dijk’s (1993) Socio Cognitive Approach to investigate the ideological (macro) structures operating in the rhetoric to emphasize in-group and de-emphasize out-group members to influence the Chines and Pakistani audience. In a semiotic perspective, this study analysis the images taken from the video of the speech, to suggest how factors contribute in an image to convey multiple meanings to make the speech appealing, motivating and powerful. The images carry codes and signs to convey the implied meaning. This is known as politics of representation. This research has been conducted under multi-modal approach of visual semiotics (2006) by Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen to identify and analyze these codes. The study will guide the future researchers who desire to research and learn CDA and semiotics as the main research discipline.