The Sino–US trade war in political cartoons: A synthesis of semiotic, cognitive, and cultural perspectives

Economic globalization has resulted in more frequent trading frictions, some of which have escalated into trade wars such as the one between China and the US. Drawing on the same corpus built by Zhang and Forceville (Zhang, Cun & Charles Forceville. 2020. Metaphor and metonymy in Chinese and American political cartoons (2018–2019) about the Sino–US trade conflict. Pragmatics and Cognition 27(2). 476–501), and complementing insights of that paper, this paper investigates how the Sino–US trade war is metaphorically and metonymically constructed in 129 Chinese and American political cartoons respectively from a synthesized perspective. Based on comparative analyses, cross-cultural similarity and uniqueness in the semiotic, cognitive, and cultural aspects can be concluded as follows: (a) at the expression level, the shared dominant mode configuration pattern of metaphor and metonymy requires extra-textual knowledge to identify the target domain/concept while the source domain/vehicle concept is pinpointed through pictorial resources; (b) at the cognition level, “us” and “them” are distinctively evaluated by using the metonymy BODILY REACTION FOR EMOTION, cultural symbols, and the Great Chain metaphor. The Chinese cartoons converge on disapproving of “them” while the American cartoons converge on disapproving of “us” and diverge on conceptualizing “them”; (c) a variety of cross-cultural default scenarios are employed in the Chinese cartoons whereas the American cartoons utilize non-default scenarios influenced by only American cultures. Both aim for persuasiveness by employing emotionally charged source domains/vehicle concepts, but to different audiences.

REISSNER–NORDSTRÖM SPACE–TIME IN THE TETRAD THEORY OF GRAVITATION

We give two classes of spherically symmetric exact solutions of the coupled gravitational and electromagnetic fields with charged source in the tetrad theory of gravitation. The first solution depends on an arbitrary function H(R,t). The second solution depends on a constant parameter η. These solutions reproduce the same metric, i.e. the Reissner–Nordström metric. If the arbitrary function which characterizes the first solution and the arbitrary constant of the second solution are set to be zero, then the two exact solutions will coincide with each other. We then calculate the energy content associated with these analytic solutions using the superpotential method. In particular, we examine whether these solutions meet the condition, which Møller required for a consistent energy–momentum complex, namely, we check whether the total four-momentum of an isolated system behaves as a four-vector under Lorentz transformations. It is then found that the arbitrary function should decrease faster than [Formula: see text] for R → ∞. It is also shown that the second exact solution meets the Møller's condition.

REISSNER–NORDSTRÖM SOLUTIONS AND ENERGY IN TELEPARALLEL THEORY

We give three different spherically symmetric spacetimes for the coupled gravitational and electromagnetic fields with charged source in the tetrad theory of gravitation. One of these contains an arbitrary function and generates the others. These spacetimes give the Reissner–Nordström metric black hole. We then calculated the energy associated with these spacetimes using the superpotential method. We find that unless the time-space components of the tetrad field go to zero faster than [Formula: see text] at infinity, one gets different results for the energy.