The putative addressee in the persuasion of diplomatic discourse: China’s communication efforts through South African English-language newspapers

2021 ◽  
pp. 175048132110020
Author(s):  
Liping Tang

This article explores the putative addressee in the persuasion of diplomatic discourse by adopting White’s recent proposals as to putative reader/addressee positioning to specifically examine China’s communication efforts through South African English-language newspapers in the Xi Jinping era. Likemindedness is found to be predominantly construed, meticulously balanced with relative frequent construal of uncommittedness and very rare construal of un-likemindedness. And a set of 12 interrelated discourses are identified as fundamental ideological tenets in legitimating China’s African engagement and its vision of world order. Findings show that the classical political discursive strategy of Us/Them polarization is typically deployed. The analysis and discussion illustrates how White’s proposed framework can be systematically applied to offer new lines of analysis of persuasion and shed some light on understanding contemporary Chinese diplomatic discourse.

Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.


2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 420-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Steyn

Green, Sonn, and Matsebula's (2007) article is useful in helping to establish and develop whiteness studies in South African academia, and thus to shift the academic gaze from the margins to the centre. The article is published in the wake of three waves of international whiteness studies, which successively described whiteness as a space of taken-for-granted privilege; a series of historically different but related spaces; and, finally, as part of the global, postcolonial world order. Green, Sonn, and Matsebula's (2007) contribution could be extended by more fully capturing the dissimilarity in the texture of the experience of whiteness in Australia and South Africa. In South Africa whiteness has never had the quality of invisibility that is implied in the ‘standard’ whiteness literature, and in post-apartheid South Africa white South Africans cannot assume the same privileges, with such ease, when state power is overtly committed to breaking down racial privilege.


2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-58
Author(s):  
Paul Walters ◽  
Jeremy Fogg

The authors deal with six unpublished communications from Olive Schreiner to James Butler, Editor of the Cradock newspaper The Midland News and Karroo farmer between March 1893 and October 1905, as well as a reply from Butler to Schreiner. These documents are housed in the Cory Library for Historical Research at Rhodes University. Transcriptions by J. Fogg are appended. The heart of the article deals with Butler’s refusal to publish Schreiner’s “letter to the Women of Somerset East” which she had sent as a contribution to the protest meeting held in Somerset East on 12 October 1900 to mark the first anniversary of the declaration of the South African War. Keywords: Unpublished Schreiner Letters, South African War, Women’s Meeting Somerset East 12 October 1900, editorial policies, Cecil  Rhodes’s control of the South African English language Press.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-29
Author(s):  
Irshad Ahmed Kaleemi ◽  

In the ancient past, much of East Asia and China was connected to different trading regions of the world through Silk Road. It got its name on the main export item of the then China: Silk. Now China has taken the initiative to rebuild the Silk Road through its OBOR initiative. OBOR has two components in the shape of two projects: over land SREB and a 21st century MSR. Later, merging these two projects under one canopy, OBOR has been termed as BRI of China. This study attempts to answer the research question: One Belt One Road Initiative (OBOR) of China as the primer to a new geo-strategic hegemony for building the competitive Chinese world order would stabilize? A content analysis was performed on pivotal media coverage about OBOR. Since the ever first speech of the President of China, Mr. Xi Jinping in 2013, a media debate is there, on this Chinese initiative. OBOR is an effort to increase the regional connectivity to embrace a China oriented future. For them, this brighter future in the shape of an economic move for Chinese domination in the global affairs, while being the centre of global trade network. China would be celebrating its hundredth anniversary in 2049 and this is exactly the target date of completing the OBOR. A keyword analysis yielded through the speeches of Chinese President Mr. Xi Jinping on the global media networks alongwith the messages conveying Chinese aspirations of its coming out as the global economic lynch pin by the new Chinese geo-strategic hegemony under the canopy of connectivity and cooperation is the pivot of these well telecasted speeches. Keywords: Geo-strategy, Chinese geo-strategic hegemony, competitive Chinese world order, foreign policy, economic pivot, maritime, overland, port projects, infrastructure, connectivity, people to people contact.


2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo De Rezende Saturnino Braga

The foreign policy narrative of South Africa is strongly grounded in human rights issues, beginning with the transition from a racial segregation regime to a democracy. The worldwide notoriety of the apartheid South Africa case was one factor that overestimated the expectations of the role the country would play in the world after apartheid. Global circumstances also fostered this perception, due to the optimistic scenario of the post-Cold War world order. The release of Nelson Mandela and the collapse of apartheid became the perfect illustration of the victory of liberal ideas, democracy, and human rights. More than 20 years after the victory of Mandela and the first South African democratic elections, the criticism to the country's foreign policy on human rights is eminently informed by those origin myths, and it generates a variety of analytical distortions. The weight of expectations, coupled with the historical background that led the African National Congress (ANC) to power in South Africa, underestimated the traditional tensions of the relationship between sovereignty and human rights. Post-apartheid South Africa presented an iconic image of a new bastion for the defence of human rights in the post-Cold War world. The legacy of the miraculous transition in South Africa, though, seems to have a deeper influence on the role of the country as a mediator in African crises rather than in a liberal-oriented human rights approach. This is more evident in cases where the African agenda clashes with liberal conceptions of human rights, especially due to the politicisation of the international human rights regime. 


2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lu Hua ◽  
Matthew Galway

The emergence of Chinese liberalism carries with it a specific China-centric character that reflects both a Chinese and a foreign focus on the nation’s complicated domestic situation. As part of the research dialogue on the intellectual public sphere in China, this article provides a historical perspective of the development of contemporary Chinese liberalism and explores the complexities of those Chinese liberals’ engagement with a number of key issues in political thought, both among themselves and with their principal opponents, the New Left. We review four themes in these ongoing debates: the relationship between freedom and equality; the liberals’ demands for a more open civil society; their call for balanced social structures, including a mechanism for expressing interest; and their search for a new synthesis of Chinese tradition with a strong nation state. Contemporary Chinese liberals propose their visions for a China that operates within and against a Euro-American-dominated system. Thus, their interpretation of classical liberal texts is characterized by one of creative adaptation, and informed by both local and foreign intellectual resources. The article’s ultimate goal is to provide a deeper understanding of the internal debates among Chinese liberals, which may give a sense of the multifarious predicaments and opportunities that China’s intellectuals face as China attempts to pursue wealth, power, and a revitalized role in a new world order.


Author(s):  
Rajend Mesthrie

This chapter addresses how the history of English as a linguistic topic has been taught in one South African university. The author focuses on the traditional Old–Middle–Modern English trichotomy as well as colonial and postcolonial synchronic varieties. Subsequent to a curricular shift from historical to applied linguistics in English departments, students taking History of the English Language (HEL) come to the course with little or no background in Old and Middle English. The author offers practical examples of how he accommodated this change in student preparation. Additionally, he addresses how the postcolonial era and globalisation have “revitalised the story of English.” Pidgins, Creoles, and World Englishes problematise the earlier genealogy of the Standard Language, making a linear history less easy to uphold. The author’s discussion of his complementary “Pidgins, Creoles, and New Englishes” course includes helpful pointers to instructors teaching these varieties within a HEL course.


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