Orientational metaphor in Chinese political discourse

The article analyzes the spatial language guidelines and their connotation in Chinese political discourse. The aim of the paper is to identify the features of propaganda in Chinese political discourse through analysis of orientational metaphors. The data include more than 50 recent articles on political topics published by the Chinese official news agency Xinhua. The present paper draws primarily on the methods of linguistic text analysis which reveals that the most productive types of spatial orientation are the antonymic pairs “up - down” and “forwards - backwards”. Statistics proves that metaphors with positive connotation “up is good” and “forwards is progress” prevail in Chinese political articles, indicating that the Chinese media try to focus the readers’ attention on positive events and try to mention the negative ones as rarely as possible. The findings may contribute to our understanding of political propaganda methods in Chinese realities.