Transcultural political communication from the perspective of proximization theory: A comparative analysis on the corpuses of the Sino–US trade war

Abstract

Previous studies have shown the operational potential in political discourse analysis from the proximization perspective. This study adopts a cross-disciplinary approach to analyze political communication across transcultural contexts, especially in the cyber discourse space. Based on the spatial–temporal–axiological (STA) model, we compare the journalistic discourses on two social media platforms by China Xinhua News Agency (CXNA), an official speaker for China worldwide. The corpuses are constructed with microblogs on Weibo in Chinese and Twitter in English containing key words of Sino–US trade war. It is found that the speaker has shaped different realities of discourse in accordance with the cultural contexts and proximized from corresponding dimensions to increase political legitimacy.