The Images of China in Political Cartoons of Foreign Media

Abstract

This study was an attempt to conduct a multimodal discourse analysis of a corpus of 10 political cartoons with animals about China published in foreign media. It was guided by the qualitative research design employing discourse analysis as an approach, specifically employing descriptive and analytical techniques to explore how foreign media conveyed the hidden cultural connotations and communicative intentions to the world in political cartoons through multimodal discourse analysis from the perspective of function and cognition and finally revealed the images of China in political cartoons of foreign media. This study grounded its analysis and discussion on generic features, semiotic resources utilized, relationship among semiotic modes, three meta-functions construed, metaphors, images of China construed, and finally proposed a functional-cognitive analytical framework for political cartoons. The findings revealed the cultural connotations in political cartoons were meant to create a specific negative impression of China, and to convey a particular political message to the viewers. The communicative intentions were to shape and promote China's political, economic, military threats, hegemony in all aspects, and construed the images of China as economically, politically, and militarily threatening, domineering, hypocritical, bullying, cunning and greedy, which was catered to the foreign ideological purpose of "China Threat Theory".