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Metaphors in Political Discourse of Hong Kong and China:

A Comparative Study on

Policy Address and Report on the Work of the Government

Wang Zihan

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for

the degree of Master of Arts in English Language Arts
Department of English
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
 Table of Contents
Abstract .......................................................................................................................... 4
Acknowledgement ......................................................................................................... 6
List of Figures ................................................................................................................ 7
List of Tables ................................................................................................................. 8
Style Conventions .......................................................................................................... 9
Abbreviations ............................................................................................................... 10

Chapter 1 Introduction.............................................................................................. 11
1.1 Overview ............................................................................................................ 11
1.2 Background ........................................................................................................ 12
1.2.1 China and Hong Kong ................................................................................. 12
1.2.2 Policy Address and Report on the Work of the Government ...................... 14

Chapter 2 Literature Review .................................................................................... 16

2.1 Conceptual Metaphor Theory ......................................................................... 16
2.2 Corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis .............................................. 18
2.2.1 Corpus linguistics ........................................................................................ 18
2.2.2 Critical discourse analysis ........................................................................... 20
2.3 Studies on metaphors in political discourse ....................................................... 22
2.4 Political metaphor studies in the Chinese Context ............................................. 25
2.5 Research Question .............................................................................................. 28

Chapter 3: Methodology............................................................................................ 30
3.1 Data collection.................................................................................................... 30
3.2 Metaphor identification and corpus analysis ...................................................... 31
3.3 Metaphor interpretation and explanation ........................................................... 34

Chapter 4: Findings and Discussions ....................................................................... 36

4.1 Overview ............................................................................................................ 36
4.2 linguistic findings in the corpora ........................................................................ 39
4.3 Analyses of major metaphors ............................................................................. 44
4.3.1Metaphors in relation to JOURNEY ............................................................... 44
4.3.2 Metaphors in relation to BUILDING.............................................................. 50
4.3.2 Metaphors in relation to PLANT ................................................................... 53

2
 4.3.2 Metaphors in relation to CONFLICT ............................................................. 55
4.4 Critical analysis of major metaphors .................................................................. 58

Chapter 5 Conclusion ................................................................................................ 61

5.1 Summary ............................................................................................................ 61
5.2 Limitations and future research ......................................................................... 62

Notes ............................................................................................................................ 64
References .................................................................................................................... 65
Appendix ...................................................................................................................... 69
Appendix 1 ........................................................................................................... 69
Appendix 2 ........................................................................................................... 70

3
 Abstract

Metaphors in political discourse like political speeches and the media press are

researched extensively both in Western and Chinese contexts. But two prominent

governmental documents, the Report on the Work of the Government (RWG) by

the Chinese government and the Policy Address (PA) by the Hong Kong

government are seldom studied in the field of linguistics. Drawn upon methods and

perspectives of corpus linguistics (CL) and critical discourse analysis (CDA), this

research project examines and compares how metaphors are used in the Report on

the Work of the Government and the Policy Address from 1997-2014, With a

broader investigation of the discursive and narrative construction of social reality

through metaphors, I identify a number of metaphors in the two political discourses.

Modelled on Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) proposed by Charteris-Black

(2004), the project also shows integrated procedures of identifying and analysing

metaphors. By means of sample texts reading, and analysing the compiled corpora,

it is found that metaphors that are most frequently used in the two discourses are

based on four source domains: JOURNEY, WAR, BUILDING and PLANT. Some

linguistic features are also identified for facilitating the analysis of metaphors.

Although major source domains and purposes for using metaphors are generally

similar, there are also significant differences in how metaphors are employed in the

two discourses. The similarities and differences should be interpreted with the

consideration of social, political, and ideological conditions of the Chinese

mainland and Hong Kong. Metaphors and their effects on the audience are

explained with ‘image schemata’ from Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). The

metaphors in the two discourses are usually used for conceptualising and thus

simplifying and representing the descriptions of economic and social development,

4
since economic growth is the focus of both governments. The battle against

corruption, which employs metaphors in relation to CONFLICT, is also an important

narrative of the Chinese government. In addition, the RWG adopts an relatively

unemotional and authoritative narrative in the view of its uses of JOURNEY

metaphors and cautious uses of single first pronouns, whereas the PA attempts to

connect with its audience by means of JOURNEY metaphors, which is similar to

Western political discourse.

5
 Acknowledgement

I would like to express my deep gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Li Lan. She gave
me so much help for my research. She is very patient with my process of this
research project. When I lost the confidence and the direction of my research, she
always encouraged me to carry on and helped me to clear up my confusions. I have
learned so much from her. Without her guidance, this thesis could have never been
finished.

I would also like to thank Dr. Dennis Tay for his suggestions on my study.

I would like to thank my parents. Without their support, I would not have been able
to begin this Master’s study. Despite unpredicted difficulties, they have always
been there to help and encourage me. I’m deeply indebted to them. This research
project is an invaluable and amazing journey for me.

6
 List of Figures

Figure 4.1 Overview of metaphors according to source domains ............................... 38

Figure 4.2 Example in concordance of ‘combat’ ......................................................... 57

7
 List of Tables
Table 3.1 Details of the two corpora of China and Hong Kong .................................. 31
Table 4.1 Metaphors of major source domains and examples ..................................... 37
Table 4.2 Tokens of first-person pronouns in the two corpora .................................... 40
Table 4.3 Keyword List of the PA corpus ................................................................... 42
Table 4.4 Keyword List of the RWG corpus ............................................................... 42
Table 4.5 Shared keywords in the first 40 keywords of the two corpora .................... 43
Table 4.6 Metaphorical uses in relation to JOURNEY................................................... 45
Table 4.7 Metaphorical uses in relation to BUILDING .................................................. 50
Table 4.8 Metaphorical uses in relation to PLANT ....................................................... 54
Table 4.9 Metaphorical uses in relation to CONFLICT ................................................. 56

8
 Style Conventions

It has been an accepted practice in cognitive linguistics that upper case is used for

underlying conceptual metaphors that can represent abstract thoughts. And specific

metaphors that are discussed may be with quotations or italics. For example, the

conceptual metaphor underlying ‘unswervingly take the road of Chinese socialism’

and ‘achieved remarkable progress along the path of socialism’ is SOCIAL

DEVELOPMENT IS A JOURNEY. And underlying source domains like JOURNEY and

CONFLICT are also capitalized. Besides, lemmas used in the corpus and displayed in

the tables are also capitalized for representing all inflected forms of a word. Any

lack of consistency, and errors in applying the style conventions are entirely mine.

9
 Abbreviations
BNC British National Corpus
CCP Chinese Communist Party
CDA Critical discourse analysis
CL Corpus linguistics
CMA Critical Metaphor Analysis
MIP Metaphor Identification Procedure
PA Policy Address (施政報告)
PRC People’s Republic of China
RWG Report on the Work of the Government (政府工作報告)
USAS UCREL Semantic Analysis System

10
Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Overview

Metaphors in political discourse like political speeches and media press on political

issues are researched extensively in Western and Chinese contexts. But two

prominent governmental reports, the Report on the Work of the Government

(hereafter, RWG) by Chinese Premiers and the Policy Address (hereafter, PA) by

the Hong Kong Chief Executives, are seldom studied in the field of linguistics. This

research project examines and compares how metaphors are used in the RWG and

the PA, drawn upon methods and perspectives of critical discourse analysis (CDA)

and corpus linguistics (CL). With a broader investigation of the discursive and

narrative construction by means of the employment of metaphors in the two

political discourses, major source domains and target of metaphors are identified.

Modelled on Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) proposed by Charteris-Black

(2004), the project also shows some integrated procedures of identifying and

analysing metaphors. It is shown that most frequently used metaphors in the two

discourses mainly are based on four source domains: journey, war, building and

plant. Although source domains and purposes for using metaphors are generally

similar, there are also significant differences in how metaphors are employed in the

two discourses. The similarities and differences should be interpreted with the

consideration of social, political, and ideological conditions of the Chinese

mainland and Hong Kong.

11
1.2 Background

1.2.1 China and Hong Kong

‘Neither Hong Kong nor Mainland China is a democracy’, but both are trying to

reform and both have remarkable achievements in economic development (Cheung,

2012). Both China and Hong Kong has drawn considerable attention around the

world, in terms of their remarkable economic growth, and special political

conditions.

The relations between the Chinese Mainland and Hong Kong, over a century,

have been complicated, and there are still many issues to be addressed and

problems to be solved (Flowerdew and Leong, 2007; Tsang, 2007; Mathews et al,

2008, pp. 22-57). The policy of 'One country, two system', which was initially

proposed by Chinese political leaders for Taiwan, has been followed in Hong Kong

since sovereignty over Hong Kong was transferred from Britain back to China in

1997.

It is interesting and important to investigate what differences indeed are there

between the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong in terms of political discourse since

there are 'two systems'. According to the Basic Law, which is authorised by

National People's Congress (NPC) of People's Republic of China (PRC), Hong

Kong executes high degree of autonomy. But the Chinese government has gained

more and more influence on Hong Kong's economy and politics in the last 17 years,

especially since 2003 (Flowerdew, 2005; Wu, 2007; Cheung, 2011). This seems to

be unsurprising given the facts that the PRC now is the second biggest economy in

the world and that Hong Kong, due to its small size and other geological features, is

highly dependent on the Mainland's socioeconomic and natural sources. Cheung

(2011), however, argues that Hong Kong, despite only being an Special

12
Administrative Region (SAR) of the PRC, has had great influence on politics,

constitutional governance, ideology, social policy and economy of the Mainland,

especially southern China. In regard to language, this project examines whether the

two discourses of RWG and PA influence each other.

Shi-xu (2005) claims that ‘non-Western discourse’ should not be simply put

in ’universal’ theory discourse studies. He attempts to critically analyse the

dominant ‘universal discourse theory’ in terms of its theoretical adequacy and

political consequences. Shi-xu proposes that the case of discourses of Hong Kong

and China was especially valuable in that it witnessed the influences and decline of

colonialism in Hong Kong. And apart from the declining influence of colonialism,

it is unsurprising that the Chinese mainland began to have a bigger impact on Hong

Kong. Wong (2005) examined the major strategies employed by the Chinese

mainland historians in narrating the history of Hong Kong over the period of the

handover in 1997. Wong pointed out the grand narratives these historians use with

clear political agendas. Sensitive issues were often avoided and twisted for suiting

the purposes of Chinese authorities. There are tensions over the complicated issues

of Hong Kong and China, therefore, it is essential to consider the issues are

discussed and interpreted. It may be reansonable to argue that the studies on these

issues should be performed with a holistic perspective. It seems to be difficult for

researchers to conduct studies with no bias at all, but much more balanced and

integrated methodological considerations should be taken (Baker, 2012). In the

later discussions of CDA and CL, I will talk more about political stances and

biases.

13
1.2.2 Policy Address and Report on the Work of the Government

Admittedly, the differences between the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong have

been studied extensively in the light of social and political sciences. But it is also

worthwhile to investigate the important issue in terms of differences in language,

which is an essential element that can, to a large extent, significantly influence

people and society.

Although there are various studies on the relations between China and Hong

Kong, it is surprising there is little research on Policy Address (施政報告) and

Report on the Work of the Government (政府工作報告), two important political

discourses produced and presented by the two governments each year. Similar to

the State of the Union addresses in the United States, they are delivered by the

heads of the governments in the legislative institution for reviewing the work of the

governments, and announcing their plans and policies.

As for China, the RWG is presented annually by Chinese Premier, the head of

the Chinese government. The first Report on the Work of the Government was

delivered by Premier Zhou Enlai in 1954. Generally, the basic structure and

purpose of RWG have been stable for the most of the time. The report each year

usually draws bulk of attention of the media from home and abroad. Because in

China, some major political and economic changes are announced in this report.

Two of the most important items in the report are GDP growth rates last year and

the expected rate next year, which may also influence the development of global

economy. But surprisingly despite considerable global attention drawn by the RWG,

there are few studies on it from the linguistic perspective. You et al. (2010) carried

out a research on the discursive construction of Chinese foreign policy in RWG

from 1993 to 2007 with the perspective of critical discourse analysis (CDA). While

14
foreign policy sections in RWG seem to be consistent, since they are ‘constructed

with similar topics and schemata’ as the result of obeying the general rules set by

Chinese authorities, they did change gradually with the rapid development and

transformation of China over time. The RWG of 1986 is regarded as ‘Orders of

Discourse’, a term put forward by Fairclough (1995). The report of that year

strongly influences the foreign section in reports of the following years. At the

same time, there are struggles and interactions between ‘Orders of Discourse’ and

new discourses as the result of the change of social reality. But the most radical

change in China over years may not be foreign policies, but economic policies. As

is aforementioned, economic development has been the top priority of the Chinese

government. It should be worthwhile to research on how economic development in

China is construed in the discourse of the Chinese government.

Policy Address, in fact, was originated from British Queen Address, and

initiated by the British Governor of Hong Kong during its colonial times. As the

first Chief Executive of HKSAR, Tung Chee Hua delivered Policy Address in

October, 1997. There is almost no linguistic research at all on Policy Address. The

addresses are often criticised for its avoidance of sensitive issues by pro-democracy

politicians, activists and commentators in Hong Kong, especially those by Tung

Chee Hua and CY Leung (Flowerdew and Leong, 2007; Wu, 2007). And although

PA was claimed by the Chief Executives to be the blueprint of the Hong Kong

government for the next year, there is a number of words for reviewing of the

policies and plans that were developed before.

15
Chapter 2 Literature Review

One notable discussion of metaphor can be traced back to Thomas Hobbes over

three hundred years ago (Musolff, 2004). Hobbes held that metaphor was

dangerous for human beings’ thoughts in that it could cause intellectual and

political confusions by mixing definitions of important terms, and that metaphor

should be avoided in the discussion of politics (Hobbes, 1996). And metaphor

tended to be regarded as one of figurative language forms, and only a way of

decorating language.

2.1 Conceptual Metaphor Theory

In recent years, however, metaphor has been of more and more relevance, and is

usually discussed in more positive terms, in the fields like philosophy, cognitive

psychology and cognitive linguistics. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) is

developed by cognitive linguists. It became publicly well known when Lakoff and

Johnson (1980) published their seminal work, Metaphors We Live by. And

afterwards, Lakoff and his colleagues (Lakoff and Turner, 1989; Lakoff, 1993)

developed and modified the theory of conceptual metaphor. The main propositions

of their theory are that linguistic metaphorical expressions are motivated by

underlying conceptual metaphors, and that our thoughts in everyday life are, if not

totally, very much metaphorically structured. And they argue that conceptual

metaphors essentially are cross-domain mappings for the transfer of meaning.

They use examples like ‘LOVE IS A JOURNEY’, ‘ARGUMENT IS CONFLICT’ and

‘HAPPY IS UP’ for illustrating their propositions. Those abstracts concepts like love,

argument and happiness, as vehicles, or source domains, are conceptualised as

16
basic and concrete concepts like journey, conflict and orientation, as target domains.

We make use of those concepts of target domains not only in linguistic level, but

also in cognitive level for operating concepts with the source domains. In this

regard, the scope of CMT initially was concerned more about language in general.

Lakoff and colleagues’ theory has important implications for metaphor research.

What followed were various branches of research on metaphor in many disciplines.

In the fieled of linguistics, one branch of metaphor research is studies of analysing

metaphors in different specific discourses, such as political discourse, business

discourse, and media discourse (e.g. Semino and Masci, 1996; Goatly, 2002;

Charteris-Black, 2004, 2006; Musolff, 2006; Koller and Davidson, 2008).

And some of Lakoff’s later studies extend to the research of metaphor in

politics. Lakoff (1996, 2004) explores how the employment of conceptual

metaphors influenced American politics. For example, Lakoff (2004) analysed how

the Republican Party used metaphors in American political campaigns for getting

political advantages, and offered ways for the Democratic Party to ‘take back the

public discourse’. He claims that tax ‘relief’ often used by Republicans was a

conceptual metaphor for addressing the issues of taxes. The strategy the Republican

Party employed was ‘framing’ within the field of cognitive linguistics. The

underlying conceptual metaphor is TAXES ARE AN AFFLICTION. Within the same

frame that Republicans deployed, Democrats were at a considerable disadvantage

to counterattack the policy of tax ‘relief’, as the consequence of the fact the debate

was under the presupposition that taxes were as negative as affliction for in

people’s mind. Therefore, in the cognitive level, Republicans who promoted the

policy of taxes relief were taken as heroes who helped people to alleviate their

affliction. Lakoff proposes that Democrats should reframe the issue of taxes as a

17
price people pay to live in America, for winning the debate.

2.2 Corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis

Lakoff’s theory and analyses have also been criticised from several perspectives.

One aspect is that some researchers pointes to the lack of systematic empirical

evidence in Lakoff’s studies, because the examples Lakoff often used in his early

works were often not directly from naturally-occurring discourse, but seemed to be

self-elicited. This kind of top-down approach may not accurately reflect how

people actually use metaphors in real world. Other linguists build upon CMT by

analysing metaphors in naturally-occurring discourse (Deignan, 2005, p. 27).

2.2.1 Corpus linguistics

As for empirical studies of naturally-occurring language, corpus linguistics (CL) is

a useful and effective approach for researchers. CL should not be regarded merely

as a single method, but it incorporates a collection of methods regarding the fact

that corpus is a collection of texts that can be operated by computer for the purpose

of researching language (Baker at al, 2008). With the application of computer

technology, it is possible to analyse a remarkably large number of texts with far

higher speed and accuracy than what human beings can possibly do. There are

different branches and methods in the field of CL that are used for exploring

language in different perspectives. From the perspective of the selection of texts,

generally there are two types of corpora for two strands of CL research. One strand

is the research that attempts to analyse general linguistic phenomena with a

large-scale and ‘balanced’ corpus, such as British National Corpus (BNC). The

collected texts should provide a representative overview of general trends of

18
language use in a period of time. Those corpora usually contain more than 50

million words, which are collected by corpus linguists from various sources,

including newspaper and magazine articles, books and radio transcripts among

others. With the rapid development of technology, the size of this kind of corpora

can become larger and more representative, and thus ideally more ‘balanced’. By

using ‘balanced’ corpora, or ‘monitor corpora’ which was proposed most notably

by Sinclair (1991), researchers can make some generalisations about certain

language phenomena (McEnery and Hardie, 2011). The other strand of CL research

focuses on and analyzes texts of a specific genre, such as a collection of certain

newspaper articles in relation to the same topic. This kind of corpora is named

specialised corpora, which are more often used in discourse analysis (Baker, 2006).

The research that make use of specialised corpora is concerned about what specific

language phenomena occur in a genre of texts, or a discourse, instead of attempting

to make generalisations of language use. By another standard, CL research can also

be generally divided into two types, corpus-based research and corpus-driven

research. In corpus-based research, corpus is taken as a source of examples and

evidence for checking and verifying researchers’ intuitions and hypothese of

language phenomena. Corpus-driven research, by contrast, usually is performed by

using the corpus analysis as a starting point without specific hypothese.

With the assistance of CL, metaphor research can make more use of empirical

evidence from naturally-occurring language. In the light of the difference in using

balanced corpora or specelised corpora, there are also two strands of metaphor

research that make use of CL. One of them is exploring how metaphors are used in

‘balanced’ corpora and aiming at make some generalisations of linguistic metaphor.

For example, Deignan (1999) analyzed plural noun shreds in ‘the Bank of English’,

19
a large-scaled ‘balanced’ corpus, and found that there were actually more

metaphorical uses of shreds than literal uses. The other strand is to analyse how

metaphors are used in specialised corpora for the purpose of making some

conclusions about the discourses of specialised corpora potentially. Semino (2001)

analyzed how the metaphors in relation to euro were used in a selection of

newspapers in Britain and Italy. She found that although the most frequent

metaphorical patterns related to euro were similar in the two countries’ newspapers,

there were significant differences in the way those metaphorical patterns were

realized by English and Italian languages.

2.2.2 Critical discourse analysis

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) can be simply regarded as a critical perspective

of doing discourse analysis. The following definition by Van Dijk may serve as a

concise and effective introduction to CDA.

‘Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research

that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality
are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political
context. With such dissident research, critical discourse analysts take explicit
position, and thus want to understand, expose, and ultimately resist social
inequality.’ (Van Dijk, 2001, p. 352).
Critical discourse analysis is more an academic movement as ‘a way of doing

discourse analysis from critical perspective’, rather than a fixed methodology or

certain methods (Baker et al, 2008; Baker, 2013). Fairclough conceives discourse

as a social practice, which produces its effects on society ‘through its reproduction

on society (Fairclough, 1995, p. 42). By its very nature, CDA adopts a

transdisciplinary and problem-oriented perspective of research. CDA is

transdisciplinary in that it makes use of various theories in linguistics and other

20
social sciences. CDA is often involved with social theoretical concepts like power,

ideology, representation, and domination, which are studied and revealed by close

examination of language in use, that is, discourse (Fairclough, 1995; Van Dijk,

1993, 2001). One important presupposition of CDA is that texts are not isolated,

but involved with people who produce it. Consequently, a key question of CDA is

who benefits from the discourse when interpreting it. CDA attempts to identify

certain language phenomena, such as word choice, employment of metaphors and

discourse strategy in discourse, in order to explore and analyse the possible the

abuse of power and the consequent inequality and other social problems.

Furthermore, CDA is also concerned with contexts of discourses. Contexts not only

refer to varied discourses that may influence one another, but also refers to social

and political conditions, as well as how people interpret and reproduce discourses.

With the consideration of various contexts, it may be more likely to identify and

explain why language phenomena occur and how they are related to inequality.

It also should be noted that the stance of CDA researchers is often dissident

according to Van Dijk’s (2001) definition. Although researchers’ objectives and

methods in different studies may be varied, they generally hold the conviction that

our society should be fairer and more transparent (Baker, 2013, p. 22.). And it is

unsurprising that this stance draws some criticism and it is taken as the evidence of

biased research methods of CDA. Widdowson (2004) claimed that CDA research is

influenced by ‘the desired result’, which is determined by the researcher’s political

stance. Baker (2013, pp. 23-24) argues that it is not possible for human beings to

avoid various biases that occur as a consequence of our human nature and the

environments that shape us, and that in their CDA research, they attempt to address

the issues of bias by emphasising researchers’ self-reflexivity in the process of data

21
collection analysis.

2.3 Studies on metaphors in political discourse

As is aforementioned, Hobbes believed that metaphor had a negative influence on

people’s perceptions of politics, and recently, metaphor is more positively

discussed and there are numerous studies on metaphor using CMT and other

cognoitive theories. In his book Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology,

Goatly (2007) attempts to ‘cross-fertilise cognitive linguistics and critical discourse

analysis’. He discusses a series of issues of generalisations of metaphor and

ideology by examining how metaphors evolved. He also traced the ideological

traditions of western philosophy, from Hobbes, Hume to Darwin. Research on

metaphor in political discourse is a remarkable area of metaphor studies. By

political discourse, I mean the genres that are directly related to politics and

government in society, including media articles, political speeches, and policy

documents among others. Mio (1997) thoroughly reviewed and summarised the

studies on metaphor and politics. It may be due to the fact that there are so many

abstract concepts and claims in political discourse, and political groups need the

public to listen to and believe their political claims. Communication with the

general public is of great importance for any political groups. Metaphor is often

considered an effective or even necessary of persuasion in communication. Besides,

Mio (1997) also argues that metaphors can be analyzed with the notions of

‘information-processing demands’. And according to the notions, people are not

able to pay attention and fully understand all aspects of political evidence that they

are exposed to. It is even truer nowadays, thanks to the overloading information as

the Internet prevails among the channels of information consumption. As a result,

22
metaphor seems to be quite fit for simplifying abstract and representing political

concepts and claims. And by simplifying, representing and potentially

misrepresenting those concepts, metaphors may play an important role in the

general public’s decisions in politics. However, Mio (1997) also pointed to the fact

that most studies of metaphor and politics just focused on what linguistic

metaphorical expressions were used and how they influenced the general public

and decision-makings in political discourse, with the assumption that metaphors

must be effective in the first place. These studies may neglect some language

phenomena other than the metaphors the researchers paid close attention to.

Semino and Masci (1996) examined how a set of recurring metaphors,

especially football metaphors, were used in the discourse of then Italian Prime

Minister Berlusconi, who had been a media tycoon previously. One of the most

notable reasons that Berlusconi took the advantage of football metaphors was that

football is massively popular in Italy and Italians of almost all political stances and

social classes are enthusiastic about it. Moreover, there are many existing football

metaphors, which are clichés already, but convenient for political narratives. These

two facts provided Berlusconi advantaged cultural and political context in his

discourse. Besides football, war and Bible metaphors are similar in these regards.

By employing efficient metaphors in right contexts, Berlusconi successfully

portrayed a positive public image for him and his political party, and won the

election eventually. Semino and Masci considered the effects of Berlusconi’s

employment of metaphors on his audiences and concludes that metaphors are

utilised as an important part of ‘populist and heterogeneous political discourse’ that

Berlusconi brought into Italian politics.

Having reviewed researches on CMT, CL and CDA, it can be conclude that

23
these three approaches can be integrated for better analysing political discourse by

means of examining how metaphors are used in discourse. Critical Metaphor

Analysis (and later Critical Metaphor Methodology), proposed and refined by

Charteris-Black (2004, 2011, 2013), is a research approach aimed at pinpointing the

concealed purposes and motivations in political discourses, financial reporting and

other genres. Researchers can do so by examining what metaphors are used, and

how and why they are used in these discourses. Combining insights of metaphor

studies with CL and CDA, Charteris-Black (2004, pp. 25-41; 2013, pp. 174-194)

has developed a series of steps when researching metaphors in various discourses.

He proposes 4 steps, ‘Contextual analysis’, ‘metaphor identification’, ‘metaphor

interpretation’ and ‘metaphor explanation’ for researching metaphor. With this

approach, he has analyzed a number of political discourses, such as New Labour’s

political language (Charteris-Black, 2004, pp. 26-63), British right-wing discourses

on the issue of immigration (Charteris-Black, 2005) and Obama’s campaign and

presidential speeches (Charteris-Black, 2013, pp. 182-184).

Metaphors of various source domains are analyzed and interpreted. It is no

surprising that a lot of ink has been spilt on the study of journey metaphors by

many researchers. LOVE IS A JOURNEY and LIFE IS A JOURNEY as

conceptualised metaphors were proposed and discussed by Lakoff and Johnson

(1980; 1989). The underlying implication is that journey as a concrete term for

people’s physical movement of space is used for conceptualising love, life, as

abstract concepts in people’s minds. And Lakoff (1993) further proposed

‘PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITY IS TRAVELLING ALONG A PATH TOWARDS A DESTINATION ’

for encapsulating conceptual metaphors in relation to journey. Following this

proposition, a number of abstract concepts of activities can be represented by the

24
activity of travelling. Based on the conceptual metaphor, politicians often use

‘journey’ to frame their political agendas and goals. Charteris-Black’s (2011, 2013)

examines the discourses of Western politicians such as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and

Barack Obama, all of whom frequently make use of metaphors in relation to

journeys. For example, ‘journey’ occurred there times in a paragraph of Bill

Clinton’s Second Inaugural Address in 1997.

Fellow citizens, we must not waste the precious gift of this time. For all of us are on
that same journey of our lives, and our journey, too, will come to an end. But the
journey of our America must go on. (Bill Clinton, Second Inaugural Address, 20
January 1997)
This example can clearly show how the two conceptual metaphors NATION IS A

PERSON and LIFE IS A JOURNEY and are used in the political discourse. Long-term

agendas and purposes that politicians propose for the nation are conceptualized in

these metaphors.

Koller and Davidson (2008) examined how metaphors in relation to ‘social

exclusion’ were used by Labour Party and how the uses could have impact on

British politics. They analyzed five different genres of texts in their corpora and

used both quantitative and qualitative methods for identifying and examining

metaphors related to lemmas ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’ with a critical cognitive of

political discourse. They found that the metaphors in relation to ‘social exclusion’

used by Labour Party did not realized the transformation of social inequality, but

rather reinforce and reproduce social inequality as a result of framing the political

discourse of social exclusion and orienting political thought (Koller and Davidson,

2008).

2.4 Political metaphor studies in the Chinese Context

Compared to metaphor research in Western political discourse, there are fairly

25
fewer metaphor studies in Chinese political context, especially in the Chinese

mainland context. Goatly (2002) identified and examined dominant metaphors in

‘Review of Education System Reform Proposals—Consultation Document’, which

was produced by the Hong Kong government. Policy and consultation documents

by a government are very much involved with and can be representative of political

discourse of the government. The research was based on qualitative approach, since

it also investigated only one text. It discovered six categories of metaphors and

analyzed how these different categories of metaphors could reinforce and

undermine the goals of leading students ‘to create their own knowledge and

all-round development.’ One example is that the implication of ‘FREEDOM IS SPACE

TO MOVE’, in fact, contradicts the implication of JOURNEY metaphors in the

consultation document text, because the former stresses the fact students should

have the freedom to learn, but the latter emphasises fixed objectives and directions

of learning. Another example is about CONSTRUCTION metaphors, in which there

are ambiguities concerning students’ own construction of knowledge and the

already-made building of knowledge according to the curriculum. On one hand, the

document claims that students should construct their own knowledge and lay

foundation for their future work and life. On the other hand, it is explicitly stated ‘it

is ... important not to compartmentalise students’ learning into an inflexible subject

framework’. Those self-contradictory metaphors identified in the text may

undermine and confuse teachers and students. Besides, taking education as a

commodity or a business also contradicts the reform’s ‘maxim that education is its

own reward and has no need of external motivations’. This study pointed to the

phenomenon that some seemingly common-sense uses of metaphors may ‘structure,

determine, or reinforce ideology and action’ (Goatly, 2002).

26
 In addition to policy and consultation documents, the discourse of media press

is also an essential part of political discourse. Lee (2005), in Shi-xu’s (2005)

volume, compared how discourses of Hong Kong and China differed over the

transfer of sovereignty, and demonstrated how metaphors could be used differently

when there are ideological motivations behind the discourses. And Flowerdew and

Leong (2007) examined how metaphors were utilised for the discursive

construction of patriotism in Hong Kong’s newspapers. By analysing two

newspapers with two distinct political stances, the researchers identified how they

used metaphors in relation to patriotism differently.

Apart from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong, the discourse of Taiwan

should also be considered in the review of metaphor research in Chinese political

context. Chiang and Duan (2007) examined and compared the strategies of naming

SARS in Chinese the employment of conceptual metaphors in relation to SARS in

two newspapers of Taiwan and a newspaper of the Chinese mainland. They

specifically analyses how metaphors of DIEASE IS WAR and DIEASE IS A NATURAL

DISASTER are used differently in Taiwan and China, by taking Charteris-Black’s

approach of Critical Metaphor Analysis. They found that political considerations

played a more important role than medical ones in these newspapers’ discursive

construction of SARS as an urgent social issue, as the result of complicated

political tensions of Taiwan and China. Lu and Ahrens (2008) investigated

metaphors in relation to BUILDING in presidential speeches of Taiwan. They

analyzed how the metaphors were used differently by presidents from two Taiwan

political parties. They argue that the history of Taiwan can account for different

ideologies of the two parties. And BUILDING metaphors were unusually productive

in the speeches Kuomintang’s presidents, in the view of the fact that Kuomintang

27
dominated Taiwan for more than sixty years and wanted to emphasise that it was

Kuomintang that laid the foundation of Taiwan. On the other hand, Chen Shui-bian,

the first president from the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan’s history,

distinctively used a much fewer metaphors in relation to BUILDING. And more

specifically, the contexts and collocates of BUILDING metaphors were also different.

The researchers conclude that these different framing strategies of employing

BUILDING metaphors can reflect the manipulation of metaphors for political

advantages (Lu and Ahrens, 2008).

These studies aforementioned usually focused on a single social issue and

examined how related metaphors are used, with different strategies and for different

purposes. This research project, however, attempts to paint a bigger picture of the

employment of metaphors, combined with other language phenomena, in the two

political discourses of Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland. I also attempt to

analyse the metaphors with the consideration of ideology and power in society.

2.5 Research questions

Although there are numerous and wide-range studies on metaphors in political

discourses, there are no research examine and analysing the two very important

discourses of Hong Kong and China. The two documents presented by the heads of

the two governments each year have enormous influence on Hong Kong and China.

With the introduction to the background to the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong,

this initial aim for comparing the uses of metaphors in the two discourses of the

reports and the addresses in this study, can be broken down into the following five

research questions:

28
RQ 1: What major metaphors are used in the two political discourses of

China and Hong Kong?

RQ 2: How different and similar metaphors are used in the two discourses?

RQ 3: By examining the metaphors in the discourses, are there any

political and ideological purposes and motivations that can be

revealed?

RQ 4: What differences and similarities do the two Chinese discourses and

Western political discourses have?

RQ 5: Is there any influence of the discourse of China’s government on

that of Hong Kong’s government in terms of metaphors? If there is,

to what extent and how the discourse is influenced? And what

ideological influences can be revealed?

29
Chapter 3: Methodology

3.1 Data collection

I compiled two corpora with fifteen Reports on the Work of Government for one,

and seventeen Policy Addresses for the other. The texts of RWG were collected

from the official websites of ‘the Central People’s Government’, and the texts of PA

from its official website2 (More detailed information about each report and address

is displayed in Appendix 1). Every Policy Address since 2003 has a title, that is, a

sort of slogan, which provides the foci of the address that year, while there is no

such title in RGW. All the texts in the two corpora were official translated English

versions. And for understanding the subtle details and contexts in the analysis, the

original Chinese texts were also retrieved as references if there was any ambiguity

in the English versions. For more convenient references in the following discussion,

the two corpora will be referred to as ‘the RWG corpus’ and ‘the PA corpus’, and

the two discourses of RWG and PA will be referred to as the discourse of Hong

Kong and the discourse of China. Table 3.1 shows the numbers of tokens in the two

corpora. As can be observed, the total numbers of tokens in the two corpora are

basically close, though there are certain Policy Addresses whose numbers of tokens

are fairly low. As it is aforementioned in the background of the reports and the

addresses, their main topics and general patterns in are similar and compatible,

including reviews and plans of various aspects of the social issues, therefore, it is

reasonable to compare and analyse them with the compiled corpora.

30
TABLE 3.1 Details of the two corpora of China and Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s Corpus China’s Corpus

Year Words Year Words
1997 15,377 1997 *
1998 18,230 1998 *
1999 19,004 1999 *
2000 14,051 2000 12,020
2001 12,937 2001 12,111
2002 ** 2002 11,801
2003 7,820 2003 17,440
2004 8,624 2004 12,977
2005 11,541 2005 13,834
2005-2006*** 13,141 2006 15,380
2006-2007 9,340 2007 15,913
2007-2008 14,924 2008 18,865
2008-2009 12,328 2009 14,873
2009-2010 12,609 2010 14,720
2010-2011 14,335 2011 14,859
2011-2012 17,226 2012 13,631
2013 19,344 2013 11,147
2014 16,722 2014 13,360
Total 237,553 212,931

* There is no official translated English version of Report on the Work of the Government
available before 2000.
** There is no Policy Address in 2000 as the then Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa
changed the original schedule of October into January the next year.
*** Donald Tsang changed the schedule back into October when he assumed the position
as acting Chief Executive in 2005. Policy Addresses delivered by him were named after
two years, such as 2005-2006. But for the convenience of comparing the addresses and
reports, the address of 2005-2006 will be referred to as that of 2006. So will be the rest of
addresses by Donald Tsang.

3.2 Metaphor identification and corpus analysis

I mainly adopted Charteris-Black’s (2004, 2013) procedures proposed in Critical

Metaphor Analysis (later Critical Metaphor Methodology) for metaphor

identification. Although this was basically a corpus-based study, I also employed

some methods of corpus-driven approach for identifying general linguistic

characteristics for facilitating the metaphor identification and the following analysis.

I chose each speaker’s first speech both in China and Hong Kong (6 speakers in

31
total) as sample texts, and read them closely for the purpose of identifying

metaphor candidates. During the reading process, I adopted a set of

well-established and explicit procedures, named ‘Metaphor Identification

Procedure’ (MIP) (Pragglejaz, 2007) in addition to intuition. MIP emphasises that

lexical unit should be examined in the text-discourse for determining if there is

more basic meaning of a lexical unit and whether the contextual meaning contrasts

the basic meaning. Under the procedures, metaphor identification process in this

study can be more concrete, and thus more reliable. For example, the following

sentence can be found in the sample reading of the Hong Kong Chief Executive,

CY Leung’s Policy Address in 2013: ‘The rapid growth of the Mainland and its

reform and opening up will continue to bring new opportunities’. It should be noted

that although ‘growth’ is a highly conventional metaphor as it is now often used

metaphorically, its basic meaning refers to the growing of plant. Therefore, ‘growth’

was counted as a metaphor candidate. Another example was the following sentence

from Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s RWG in 2004, ‘China took another substantial

step forward on the road of building a moderately prosperous society in all

respects.’ In this example, ‘step’, ‘road’ and ‘building’ all seemed to be

metaphorically used. By comparing their contextual meanings and basic meanings,

they were also regarded as metaphor candidates.

After metaphor identification in the sample reading texts, I could generally

recognise the main source domains and target domains of metaphors used in the

two corpora. And the identified metaphor candidates as source domains were

searched and examined in the two corpora with the help of corpus software tools,

AntConc 3.4 (Anthony, 2014) and ConcGram (Greaves, 2009), WordSmith tools

5.0 (Scott, 2008) and Wmatrix 3 (Rayson, 20). Besides the metaphor candidates

32
found in the sample readings, word lists and keyword lists were generated by

WordSmith. They were useful for capturing most frequent words and unique

frequent words that are compared to British National Corpus (BNC). In addition,

they were also compared to each other for identifying which words that were used

significantly differently from each other. Those keywords could be target domains

of certain metaphors. Therefore, collocates of these keywords in the corpora were

also examined for identifying metaphor candidates. However, one major problem

of keywords is that in the lists as aforementioned. Therefore, Wmatrix was also

used for generating word lists with certain semantic tags according to UCREL

Semantic Analysis System (USAD). For example, all the words with sematic tags

of ‘number and measuring’ could be generated, to find whether there was any

significant metaphorically used word in relation to metaphors of economic growth.

It was found that the frequency of ‘accelerate’ in the RWG corpus was much higher

than in the PA corpus. And ‘accelerate’ could be regarded as a metaphor candidate

in relation JOURNEY. In sum, there were four ways to identify metaphor candidates:

a) close sample texts reading;

b) examining the collocates of the keywords of the corpora(compared to
each other and BNC as reference corpus);
c) examining the potential keywords with important sematic tags (such as
‘government and public’, ‘numbers and measurement’) and their collates
in the corpora;
d) referencing identified metaphors in the studies of Western political
discourse (Charteris-Black, 2004, 2011, 2013)
Those identified metaphor candidates were then searched and examined

closely in the concordance results. It is also worthwhile to note that all inflected

forms of a word should be searched. For example, when searching metaphors in

relation to ‘build’, ‘build|builds|building|built’ was input for searching in AntConc.

33
As the concordance results were produced, they were put into Excel for manual

reading and confirming its metaphoricality. And it was found that there were 367

tokens of all the forms of ‘build’ in the corpus of Hong Kong. It appeared that the

only feasible way to determine whether these tokens were metaphorically used or

not, was to read them manually one by one, according to MIP like the identification

procedure in the sample texts reading. Major metaphor candidates were all

examined and confirmed in this way. Besides metaphor analysis, I also conducted

analyses of other general linguistic characteristics of the two corpora, using

frequency and keyword lists, as well as the Semantic Analysis System in Wmatrix.

3.3 Metaphor interpretation and explanation

After the preceding research process of metaphor identification and corpus analysis,

the identified metaphors in the contexts of concordance results, as well as the entire

texts were further examined and compared. They were classified according to their

source domains for a clear view and insight of how metaphors are used in the two

discourses. For example, in his report in 2013, Wen Jiabao remarked that ‘We have

achieved remarkable progress along the path of socialism with Chinese

characteristics in the past, and now we envision an ever-brighter future for our great

country’. ‘Path’ was identified as a metaphor, and it could be regarded as one in

relation to the conceptual JOURNEY metaphor. The underlying conceptual mappings

are NATION IS PERSON and LIFE IS JOURNEY.

With quantitative results of classified metaphors according to their source

domains, some general conclusions could be arrived at, including what kinds of

major metaphors were used and if there were any difference in the two discourses.

And it followed that I examined and classified the target domains of those

34
metaphors. Further critical analysis and interpretation of the employment of these

metaphors, with the consideration of their source and target domains, were

undertaken in larger social and political contexts from the perspective of CDA.

35
Chapter 4 Results and Discussions

4.1 Overview

There are a number of metaphors in both discourses by means of the close reading

of sample texts and investigating the two corpora. Table 4.1 provides examples of

major metaphors classified by their source domains, and Figure 4.1 gives a

quantitative overview of the metaphors. Although the two discourses share some

similar metaphors, it is obvious that there are significant differences in how the

metaphors are used in the RWG and the PA. Four major metaphors according to

their source domains occur most frequently in the two corpora: JOURNEY, PLANT,

BUILDING and CONFLICT. Compared to Western political discourses that have been

studied in the literature reviewed, it seems to be striking that the number of

metaphors in the RWG and PA identified in this study, are generally much larger

than that the Western political discourses studied by Charteris-Black, for example,

British parties’ manifestos (see Charteris-Black, 2004, pp. 65-84). But the types of

metaphors in the RWG and the PA are fewer than British parties’ manifestos, and

also fewer than the types of metaphors in the Chinese and Hong Kong media

discourses (Flowerdew and Leong, 2007). In addition, it is found that most

metaphors in the two discourses are conventional rather than novel. Especially in

the corpus of China’s reports, certain collections and patterns of metaphors are

repetitively used through several consecutive years. It is those conventional and

conceptualised metaphors in the discourses that may reveal and account for some

political and ideological motivations of Chinese political leaders. In the discourse

of the Policy Address, few distinctive collections or patterns of metaphors are

repetitively employed, but we can also identify the narrative of rapid economic

36
growth of Hong Kong as the foundation and legitimacy of the Hong Kong
government and political system.
TABLE 4.1. Metaphors of major source domains and examples
Source
keywords Examples in the PA corpus
domain
embark upon a new journey for
a golden decade; have travelled
a rough and winding road;
journey, road, proceed along this path of
path, step, development; each step we take
accelerate, today; accelerate economic
JOURNEY
move, ahead, restructuring; we move steadily
forward, back, forward; help the economy
leapfrog power ahead; put Hong Kong
back to the road to growth
propel economic growth;
students mainly from grassroots
families; help nurture the
growth of a stronger
growth, understanding; stimulate growth
PLANT grassroots, can only take root if grounded
nurture, root in a stable foundation
build on our strengths; lay a
solid foundation for the future
development; economic pillars;
build, rebuild a sense of pride; remove
foundation, barriers to these industries;
BUILDING pillar, rebuild, within the existing development
barrier, framework
framework
fighting against drugs and
smuggling; combating piracy
through law enforcement;
fight, combat, battling flood water
CONFLICT
battle, war
As it was put explicitly by CY Leung in his Policy Address in 2014, ‘Sustained
economic growth is a prerequisite for us to tackle housing, poverty, ageing
population, and environmental problems. Promoting economic development is
Examples in the RWG corpus
taking the socialist road with
Chinese characteristics; follow
a path of sustainable
development; new steps
were taken; accelerate reform
and opening-up; move
forward with the reform of
government; vigorously press
ahead with economic
restructuring; promote the
leapfrog of development
stimulate economic growth;
promote democracy at the
grass-roots level; train and
nurture a contingent of leading
cadres; national fitness
program has taken root
build a harmonious socialist
society; laying a solid
foundation for development; a
pillar of our economy; expand
the rebuilding of rundown urban
areas; speed up industrial
rebuilding and development;
remove market barriers; uphold
the one-China framework
fight corruption by addressing
its root cause; accomplish the
tasks of combating terrorism;
we fought a tenacious battle to
deepen the reform; declare war
against pollution
37
therefore the primary goal of the Government.’ And in both discourses, most

metaphors are used in positive terms except occasional metaphors in relation to the

CONFLICT. Besides, the absence of metaphors in relation to religion in the two

discourses also deserves our attention. In the Western political discourses, religious

metaphors play an important role in relating to their audience. By contrast,

religious metaphors may be sensitive in China. Although freedom of religion is

claimed in the reports, religion may go against the ideology of so-called ‘socialism

with Chinese characteristics’ promoted by the Chinese government.

FIGURE 4.1. Overview of metaphors according to source domains

30

25

20

15 the PA corpus
the RWG corpus
10

0
JOURNEY PLANT BUILDING CONFLICT

Taken all the above into consideration, one preliminary explanation for

those phenomena is that given the nature of the reports and the addresses, they are

delivered primarily for the governments to demonstrate their achievements in the

past, and thus justify and legitimise their future policy plans. What is more, the two

political leaders of the two governments, especially those of Chinese Communist

Party, may have no concern for general election votes, and public opposing

parties.3

38
 However, the general overview cannot stand alone for pinpointing the

insight of the employment of metaphors in the two discourses. Context of discourse

is essential for the research of CDA. What follows is the detailed analysis and

interpretation of how the metaphors are used in the two discourses. Firstly, I show

some general linguistic findings in the two corpora and explain how these findings

can facilitate the analysis of metaphors. And secondly, I will examine and compare

the four major metaphors, with the insight of ‘image schema’ for analyzing how

those metaphors can conceptualize and represent certain crucial political and social

concepts in RWG and PA as target domains. At the same time, political and social

contexts of China and Hong Kong will also be reflected on to interpret those

metaphors. Finally, the metaphors of different source domains will be examined in

the consideration of the bigger structured narratives of the two governments.

4.2 Linguistic findings in the two corpora

Along with the analysis of metaphor in the corpora, it is useful to examine and

compare the two corpora in a more comprehensive way aside from searching

metaphor candidates. Metaphors should not be isolated from the discourse in which

they occur. By integrating the methods and perspectives from CL and CDA, there

are quite a few notable findings in linguistic features of the two discourses, which

can contribute to the later analysis and discussion of metaphors.

The most common way to examine a specialised corpus may be to look at

its frequency list generated by corpus software. However, it is unsurprising that the

most frequent words in corpora are usually some pronouns and prepositions. And it

seems to be time-consuming to closely check every item of the frequency lists of

the corpora with more than 40,000 words, since there are often more than

39
thousands of items in a frequency list. Still, there is a notable finding in these two

corpora by merely examining the frequency lists. About 8700 items were generated

by the corpus software in the PA corpus, whereas only about 6600 ones were

generated in the RWG corpus. It can be concluded that the vocabulary of the RWG

is much larger than that of the PA. It also accords to the distinctly repetitive

patterns of the same metaphors in the reports of the Chinese government.

TABLE 4.2. Tokens of first-person pronouns in the two corpora

The PA corpus The RWG corpus

Pronoun Tokens Per 10,000 words Tokens Per 10,000 words
I 940 39.6 82 3.9
me 45 1.9 0 0.0
my 227 9.6 23 1.1
we 3477 146.4 5504 258.5
our 2579 108.6 938 44.1
us 155 6.5 58 2.7

Besides the token items, it is of great importance to note the fact that the

first-person pronouns are employed differently in the two discourses (see Table

4.2). In most cases, ‘we’ refers to the collections of Chinese people and Hong Kong

people if put in the concordance to examine, or the Chinese and Hong Kong

governments. On some occasions, Hong Kong Chief Executives use ‘I’ and ‘my’

when talking about the process of policy making and the government’s

achievement, as well as express their beliefs, and suggestions, experiences, on

behalf of themselves, or the Hong Kong government. For example, CY Leung used

‘I’ for recounting his experience of communicating with Hong Kong people for

showing his political communication. In contrast, there are very few occasions that

Chinese Premiers use ‘I’, ‘me’ or ‘my’ in the reports of 15 years. The choices of

first-person pronoun are involved with the employment of political metaphors in

40
the two discourses, especially in metaphors in relation to JOURNEY, BUILDING, and

CONFLICT.

In the consideration of the limitations of frequency lists, one effective way

to better identify if there is any significant or unique language phenomenon in a

corpus is to generate a keyword list by corpus software. The keyword list is based

on the proposition that a balanced monitor corpus, such as BNC, can be

representative of general trends of language uses. Therefore, when a specialised

corpus is compared to a balanced corpus with the assistance of computer software,

the words that are significantly more frequent than monitor corpus will be

highlighted with high keyness. There are also some interesting findings by

comparing the first forty keywords of the two corpora (Table 4.3 and Table 4.4). It

can be observed that the main topics in both corpora are economic development,

and that the heads of the two governments seem to discuss those topics in similar

ways, since there are a number of keywords that are shared by the two corpora

(Table 4.5). Baker (2006) suggests that the researcher should not assume the two

corpora are different in the first place when comparing them. Because if we only

hold the assumption that they are different, we may overlook the possibility that

they are similar in more aspects than they differ. In the view of ‘one country, two

systems’, and distinctive histories of Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland,

traditional wisdom may suggest that the two corpora should be quite different. But

the fact is that the keyword lists of the two corpora have something in common.

The shared focus on economy is obvious. Economy may be the most frequently

discussed topic by the heads of most governments in the world. So the large

number of tokens likes ‘economic’, ‘development’ ‘financial’ and ‘government’ is

unsurprising.

41
TABLE 4.3. Keyword List of the PA corpus (n=237,553)

Rank Keyword Hits Keyness Rank Keyword Hits Keyness

1 hong 2105 6907.791 21 promote 317 859.733
2 kong 2103 6901.122 22 economy 371 855.667
3 will 3811 5687.413 23 to 8798 853.25
4 our 2638 4454.802 24 elderly 284 848.569
5 we 3608 4395.112 25 people 863 847.05
6 government 1552 3267.964 26 quality 395 814.457
7 development 1282 2780.217 27 sector 273 812.779
8 services 803 1955.361 28 housing 330 793.882
9 mainland 541 1706.205 29 environment 301 765.464
10 community 714 1423.628 30 improve 283 725.08
11 economic 705 1366.292 31 industries 275 711.89
12 public 826 1273.758 32 market 386 699.209
13 education 636 1252.413 33 continue 343 698.134
14 financial 507 1240.622 34 care 389 692.985
15 support 568 1149.222 35 ensure 226 689.522
16 scheme 407 1140.655 36 centre 212 687.263
17 enhance 332 1060.531 37 policy 432 687.252
18 year 922 998.812 38 opportunities 284 685.343
19 provide 542 996.826 39 enterprises 208 597.069
20 measures 357 915.431 40 term 321 586.051
(The list is generated by WordSmith 5.0, compared to BNC as reference corpus.)

TABLE 4.4. Keyword List of The RWG corpus (n=212,931)

Rank Keyword Hits Keyness Rank Keyword Hits Keyness

1 we 5504 9663.271 21 social 723 1229.25
2 and 14969 7144.494 22 people 986 1223.04
3 will 3545 5541.858 23 investment 423 1212.378
4 development 1780 4522.226 24 develop 470 1191.4
5 improve 988 3146.715 25 need 672 1157.919
6 rural 958 2957.301 26 ensure 339 1115.299
7 reform 890 2866.968 27 work 888 1112.482
8 system 1168 2415.043 28 industries 369 1064.287
9 economic 1014 2395.441 29 central 468 963.345
10 government 1030 1981.923 30 projects 372 951.099
11 china 685 1948.69 31 market 448 932.861
12 enterprises 590 1940.531 32 support 450 892.193
13 areas 740 1604.192 33 education 475 888.913
14 strengthen 473 1523.318 34 billion 348 885.111
15 yuan 427 1496.876 35 economy 362 884.467
16 promote 489 1485.846 36 should 836 880.226
17 increase 631 1383.384 37 financial 364 869.71
18 urban 458 1328.55 38 accelerate 258 856.807

42
 19 continue 528 1315.71 39 technology 314 854.492
20 implement 372 1261.288 40 efforts 394 848.389
(The list is generated by WordSmith 5.0, compared to BNC as reference corpus)

TABLE 4.5. Shared keywords in the first 40 keywords of the two corpora

Keyword Rank in HK's corpus Rank in The RWG corpus

will 3 3
we 5 1
government 6 10
development 7 4
economic 11 9
education 13 33
financial 14 37
support 15 32
promote 21 16
economy 22 35
people 25 22
improve 30 5
industries 31 28
market 32 31
continue 33 19
enterprises 39 12

On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the differences of the two

corpora that are also significant. Asides from these words about economy,

‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ is used in every report of the Chinese

government. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine that ‘socialism/socialist’

would ever occur in Policy Address. The high keyness of ‘mainland’ in Hong

Kong’s corpus can, to a large extent, demonstrate the influence of the Chinese

mainland on Hong Kong. Besides, the high keyness of ‘service’ in the PA corpus

may suggest that service is an important focus of Hong Kong’s government. And in

China’s corpus, the prominet of words like ‘rural’, ‘urban’ ‘area may reflect the

imbalance of development in Chinese different areas, which is serious social

problem of China.

43
4.3 Analyses of major metaphors

4.3.1 Metaphors in relation to JOURNEY

I shall begin by discussing metaphors in relation to JOURNEY. Although words

related to the concept of journey is not prominent according to the generated

frequency and keyword lists, JOURNEY metaphors are frequently examined and

analyzed in studies of metaphors in political discourses in the review of the

literature (e.g. Lakoff, 1993; Charteris-Black, 2004, pp. 74-76; Musolff, 2006;

Semino, pp. 81-85). Charteris-Black (2004), for example, revealed ideological and

political motivations behind the British political parties, by examining the image

schemata of people’s spatial and time experience in JOURNEY metaphors. And

major conceptual cross-domain mappings for JOURNEY metaphors are ‘NATION IS

A PERSON’, and ‘PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITY IS TRAVELLING ALONG A PATH TOWARDS

A DESTINATION’ (Lakoff, 1993).

Table 4.6 demonstrates ten keywords in metaphors in relation to JOURNEY

and their frequencies in the two discourses. It should be pointed out that in China’s

corpus all the tokens of ‘path’ and about 41% (24 out of 58) tokens of ‘road’ are

metaphorically used. The proportion of ‘path’ and ‘road’ that are metaphorically

used is relatively low in the corpus of Hong Kong, as in most cases they refer to the

facilities in the city, rather than metaphors like ‘road of socialism’. One interesting

finding about JOURNEY metaphors is that the very word ‘journey’ does not appear

a single time in the China’s RWG corpora with over 200,000 words. ‘Journey’

occurs in western political discourses so frequently that it may have been regarded

a cliché.

While in Policy Addresses of Hong Kong, ‘journey’, ‘road’ and ‘path’ can

be identified, their frequencies are much less than those in the corpus of RWG.

44
What is more, having examined the clusters and collocates of those ‘road’ and

‘path’ in the RWG corpus, we can find that there are clear patterns of the JOURNEY

metaphors that consist of them. ‘Development’, ‘socialism’, and ‘industrialisation’

are the most frequently words that collate with ‘path’ (The result is shown in

Appendix 2).

TABLE 4.6. Metaphorical uses in relation to JOURNEY

The PA corpus The RWG corpus

Lemma No. Per 10,000 Tokens No. Per 10,000 Tokens
JOURNEY 5 0.2 0 0.0
ROAD 11 0.5 24 1.0
PATH 9 0.4 35 1.5
STEP 126 5.3 82 3.5
LEAPFROG 0 0 5 0.2
ACCELERATE 9 0.4 287 12.1
MOVE 46 1.9 45 1.9
AHEAD 61 2.6 51 2.1
FORWARD 65 2.7 86 3.6
BACK 5 0.2 0 0.0
*The frequency per 10,000 words are calculated with the total numbers of words in
the two corpora that can be observed in Table 1. The following tables take the same way of
calculating frequencies per 10,000 words.

And similar patterns of the collocates of ‘road’ can also be identified in the RWG

corpus. But ‘road’ and ‘path’ occur in all the fifteen RWG. These metaphors can be

conceptualised as CHINA IS A PERSON, and ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

IS MOTION, SOCIALISM IS A ROAD. In contrast, no such prominently noticeable

pattern of usage can be identified in the discourse of Policy Address. Another

notable finding is that the number of ‘accelerate’ for JOURNEY metaphors in the

RWG corpus is significantly lager than in the PA corpus. Occasional uses of

JOURNEY metaphors in the discourse of PA are more or less similar to those in the

Western political discourses studied by Charteris-Black and other analysts.

45
JOURNEY metaphors are employed for giving their audience the sense of reaching

the destination and achieving the goal. This can be accounted for by the premise of

‘image schema’. People’s structured knowledge of journey allow them to think of

political actions and governmental policies as a journey, in which people can reach

their destinations and achieving their goals. It seems that ‘journey’ tends to refer to

a more general action of travelling from on one place to another, whereas ‘path’

and ‘road’ tend to refer to a more concrete concept than ‘journey’. The image

schemata of ‘road’ and ‘path’ seem to be more involved with bodily interaction

than ‘journey’. In other words, ‘Journey’ seems to be more about personal feelings

of travelling, ‘road’ and ‘path’, by contrast, are more about the material objects for

traveling. Compared to Clinton’ use of ‘our lives as journeys’ and ‘American

journey’, ‘socialism road/path’ may depend less on the image schema of ‘travelling

on a journey’, but more on the image schema of material objects of the road and the

path.

What the discourses of RWG and PA have in common regarding the

employment of JOURNEY metaphors is that ‘move’ ‘ahead’ and ‘forward’ are used

in a similar way. These keywords provide the audience a sense of moving forward

on the JOURNEY of social and economic development. It is also worthwhile to

note a large number of uses of ‘accelerate’ in the discourse of RWG. ‘Move’ and

‘Accelerate’ are both associated with the conceptual mapping of DEVELOPMENT IS

MOTION. Since it seems to be difficult for people to recognize and measure the

economic and social development of a country or a city in a precise way. The

employment of the metaphors of motion provides the impression of NATION IS

PROGRESSING. And in the discourse of PA, ‘back’ is only used metaphorically on

few occasions. One example is ‘putting Hong Kong back on the road to growth and

46
prosperity’. This example can obviously imply that there should be a time when

Hong Kong is not on the road to growth and prosperity. In contrast, it is interesting

that ‘back’ is never used metaphorically in the discourse of RWG. In the following

are six typical examples extracted from RWG and PA for more clearly showing

how metaphors in relation are used in the contexts.

Text 1
We must free our minds, follow a realistic and pragmatic approach, keep
pace with the times, work hard with a pioneering and innovative spirit,
unswervingly take the road of Chinese socialism, adhere to the reform
and opening up policy, […] (Wen Jiabao, Report on the Work of the
Government, 2007)

Text 2
We have achieved remarkable progress along the path of socialism with
Chinese characteristics in the past, and now we envision an ever-brighter
future for our great country. (Wen Jiabao, Report on the Work of the
Government,2013)

Text 3
[…] maintain continuity and stability of our macroeconomic policies;
make macro-control more forward-oriented and targeted;
comprehensively deepen reform; constantly expand opening up; drive
development through innovation; keep to the new path of
industrialization, IT application, urbanization and agricultural
modernization with distinctive Chinese features; accelerate
transformation of the growth model, structural adjustments, and industrial
upgrading; […]
(Li Keqiang, Report on the Work of the Government, 2014)

Text (1), (2) and (3) include some typical JOURNEY metaphors in China’s corpus.

It can be said that it may be difficult for average Chinese people to clearly

comprehend what socialism specifically means in China, but there are seemingly

self-contradictory concepts like ‘socialism market economy with Chinese

characteristics’ and ‘democratic centralism’ which were put forward and written

into the Constitution of the People's Republic of China and often mentioned in the

RWG. It seems that the conceptualisation of social agendas and social policies with

the name of socialism as JOURNEY may be an important contributing factor that

47
influences Chinese people’s thoughts on Chinese economic social development. By

examining the employment of JOURNEY metaphors in the discourse of RWG, I find

CMT’s model of the cross-domain mappings as ‘image schema’ effective for

explaining the employment in the discourse of RWG. This is because target

domains in the political discourse, like ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’,

‘macro-control’, ‘industrialization, IT application, urbanization and agricultural

modernization with distinctive Chinese features’, are abstract and dynamic

concepts which politicians potentially have a large space to explain and elaborate.

The concrete definition of Chinese socialism seems to be seldom discussed in the

work reports. It seems that there must be some comprises and scarifies for certain

people when those policies are executed. But when associated with the image

schema of ‘moving forward on the path to the destination’, those political and

social policies seem to be more justified and legitimised to announce. Repetitive

occurrences of ‘Socialism path with Chinese characteristics’ seem to represent the

complex and controversial issues and policies. The conceptualisaion and thus the

representation can be seen as the ‘consent’ (Fairclough, 1995 pp. 33-37) of the

government to carry forward their policies. The employment of metaphors in

relation to JOURNEY is consistent with Chinese Premiers’ cautious use of single

first-person pronouns (see Table 4.2). Personal feelings are not the focus of RWG,

which adopts an unemotional, authoritative and economy-centric narrative of

describing China’s development. Besides the metaphors in relation to JOURNEY,

there will also be discussion about ‘socialism’ in the following section of

BUILDING metaphors.

Text 4
Economic restructuring is a difficult journey, but I am pleased to say that
we continue to make good and steady progress. (Tung Chee Hua, Policy
Address, 2003)

48
 Text 5
The constitutional reform package was passed last June. This marked the
beginning of the journey towards our common goal of universal suffrage.
We will complete the necessary legislative procedures and devise fair,
open and impartial election methods. (Donald Tsang, Policy Address,
2010-2011)

Text 6
In short, the advent of globalisation, the move towards a
knowledge-based economy and the rapid rise in the competitiveness of
our neighbours have posed obvious challenges to our traditional
advantages and position. (Tung Chee Hua, Policy Address, 2003)

As for the discourse of Hong Kong, ‘journey’, ‘road’ and ‘path’ usually collocate

with more variety of words. There are much fewer metaphors related to ‘path’ and

‘road’ in the PA corpus. And the uses of JOURNEY metaphors are also conventional

for persuasive purposes, which is similar to the Western political discourses.

Metaphors with ‘move’ are often involved with the economic development. For

example, metaphors in Text (4) and (6) can be conceptualised as ECONOMIC

DEVELOPMENT/RESTRUCTURING IS A JOURNEY. Similar to the analysis of

JOURNEY in the discourse of RWG, social and economic development contains

abstract concepts. It is difficult for politicians to explain some complex social and

economic issues. Therefore, journey metaphors are convenient for them to simplify

those comlicated. And in this process, some delicate issues can be misrepresented

intentionally or unintentionally. In Text (5), ‘journey’ can be effective in

connecting the relationship of the audience and politician, as well as Hong Kong

SAR. This is a similar strategy can be found Western politicians. For example, in

‘But the journey of America must go on’ of Clinton’s speech aforementioned, the

major purpose is to connect American people and America as a country. Compared

to the discourse of RWG, the JOURNEY metaphors in PA are used for creating a

fairly more personal narrative that connects the Chief Executives and Hong Kong

49
people. This also accords to the fact that the Chief Executives use much more ‘I’

and ‘my’ (see Table 4.2).

4.3.2 Metaphors in relation to BUILDING

Metaphors in relation to BUILDING are also prominent in the two discourses (see

Table 4.7). The conceptual mappings underlying the prevailing conceptual

metaphors in relation to BUILDING are NATION / SOCIETY / COMMUNITY/ ECONOMY

IS A BUILDING and RELATIONSHIPS ARE BUILDINGS. And it is worth noting that the

frequencies of these metaphors are basically close. What BUILDING and JOURNEY

metaphors in the two discourses have in common is that they all relate to positive

images of the governments by appealing to the sense of achieving goals and

establishment. BUILDING metaphors in RWG and PA are usually utilised for

conceptualising the progress and achievements of the government. The general

patterns of the employment of BUILDING metaphors in the two discourses of RWG

and PA are similar. Interestingly, both the actions of building and travelling on a

journey/path in political discourses are mostly in progress, making the audience

feel that the government is in middle of something and will be achieving

remarkable goals in the future. For instance, if ‘a solid foundation’ has been laid, a

more solid and grander building will be built.

TABLE 4.7. Metaphorical uses in relation to BUILDING

The PA corpus The RWG corpus

Lemma No. Per 10,000 words No. Per 10,000 words
BUILD 183 7.7 214 10.1
FOUNDATION 62 2.6 63 3.0
PILAR 35 1.5 5 0.2
REBUILD 7 0.3 8 0.4
BARRIER 9 0.4 14 0.7
FRAMEWORK 64 2.7 22 1.0

50
Almost all of them are conventional, as ‘foundation’ occurs in the phrases like ‘lay

a solid foundation for’. The following six extracts can provide some contexts of

how BUILDING metaphors are used.

Text 7
If we can consolidate our existing economic pillars and continue to build
on our strengths, we should be able to become world-class. (Tung Chee
Hua, Policy Address, 1999)

Text 8
Over the years, the industry has established a good foundation, based on
a robust accreditation system, high professional standards and an
excellent reputation. (CY Leung, Policy Address, 2013)

Text 9
This particular story shows us that with determination and tenacity, and
by capitalising on the opportunities at home and abroad, young people
can build a promising career in various markets and industries, new or
traditional. (CY Leung, Policy Address, 2014)

Text 10
Outstanding achievements were scored in the past five years in building
socialist democracy and a socialist spiritual civilization. (Zhu Rongji,
Report on the Work of the Government, 2003)

Text 11
All these improvements fully demonstrate that during the past five-year
period great strides were made in carrying out reform and opening up and
building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. (Wen Jiabao,
Report on the Work of the Government, 2008)”

Text 12
The people are the foundation of a nation, and a nation can enjoy peace
only when its foundation is strong. (Li Keqiang, Report on the Work of
the Government, 2014)

Metaphors like ‘pillars’, ‘build on’, and ‘foundation’ are conventional ones. It may

not be surprising that these metaphors are employed in similar ways in the two

discourses. The conceptualisation of concepts like nation, economy, and

development with BUILDING metaphors can make the policies, plans and the

performance the governments sound more positive, solid and accomplished, for

51
persuading the audience that the governments have done very well. In this regard,

metaphors in relation to BUILDING seem to be universal in Chinese and Western

political discourses (Charteris-Black, 2004, pp. 70-73; Lu and Ahrens, 2008). But

unlike what Lu and Ahrens (2008) identified in Taiwan presidential speeches, there

is few BUILDING metaphors employing source domains like RECONSTRUCTION and

DESTROYING, probably because of different histories and political conditions of

Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland.

What is more, there are also some differences of BUILDING metaphors in

terms of what should be built in Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, as well as

Western political discourse. Although there is no doubt that development of

economy, stability of society, democracy are usually what the governments claim

they have achieved, and also what people hope for, it should be worthwhile of

examining the specific discursive construction of what the government should build.

For better illustrating the differences, there is a comparison of what follows the

verb ‘build’ in the two corpora in Table 4.8.

As can be observed, ‘government’ and ‘society’ are frequently collocated

with ‘build’ in the two corpora. By means of looking concordance results, in

China’s corpus ‘government’ that collocates with ‘build’ often occur with clean and

honest. ‘Building a moderately prosperous society’ (建設小康社會) also occurs

constantly in China’s government reports in the 15 pieces of RWG. It is a key

slogan of the Chinese government, and a perfect example for the employment of

BUILDING metaphors for the discursive construction of what should be the goals of

Chinese society. What a country China should become is an enormously complex

question, and of course there is no easy answer. But the slogan ‘building a

moderately prosperous society’ attempts to answer this question, which is similar to

52
‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. There is no clear definition for those

ambiguous phrases. However, they seem to become more tangible and concrete,

when collocating with JOURNEY and BUILDING metaphors in the discourse.

According to the theory of CMT, with the image schema, or structured knowledge

of BUILDING, people would relate to the abstract target domains such as society,

economy, government and socialism in terms of building concrete things.

In the PA corpus, ‘build’ does not collocate with build within the span of

five words. And ‘career’ is a more frequent collocate with ‘build’ in the PA corpus

than the RWG corpus. In this regard, it may be concluded that besides the shared

uses of BUILDING metaphors for economy, Policy Address is more concerned about

individuals in society in terms of their jobs and careers regarding BUILDING

metaphors, whereas the RWG are mainly concerned about the government and

society as a whole by means of employing BUILDING metaphors.

4.3.3 Metaphors in relation to PLANT

‘Growth’ extends over the majority occurrences of metaphors in relation to PLANT

(see Table 4.8). One obvious reason is that ‘economic growth’ is a highly

conventional metaphorical expression that is salient in discourse relating economy,

and it is understandable that the number of metaphors with ‘growth’ is particularly

high compared to any keyword that constitutes metaphors. I also provide six

examples with metaphors related to PLANT.

Text 13
‘Support the Needy; Let Youth Flourish; Unleash Hong Kong’s Potential’
(CY Leung, the title of Policy Address, 2014)

Text 14
We need to better nurture the various talents or exceptional abilities of
students. (Tung Chee Hua, Policy Address, 2002)

53
TABLE 4.8. Metaphorical uses in relation to PLANT

The PA corpus The RWG corpus

Lemma No. Tokens per 10,000 words No. Tokens per 10,000 words
GROWTH 260 10.9 441 20.7
FLOURISH 11 0.5 14 0.7
NURTURE 51 2.1 3 0.1
GRASSROOTS 24 1.0 6 0.3
ROOT 9 0.4 9 0.4

Text 15
The policies and measures set out in this Policy Address reflect both our
determination and confidence in promoting economic growth. (CY Leung,
Policy Address, 2014)

Text 16
We implemented prudent monetary policies, adjusted interest rates and
adopted many other measures to support economic growth. (Zhu Rongji,
Report on the Work of the Government, 2001)

Text 17
We will promote the development of philosophy, the social sciences,
radio, television, film, the press, publishing, and archives; make literary
and artistic creation flourish; [...] (Wen Jibao, Report on the Work of the
Government, 2010)

Text 18
We will work harder to prevent serious and major accidents by
addressing their root causes. (Wen Jibao, Report on the Work of the
Government, 2008)

In general, metaphors in relation to ‘growth’, ‘flourish’ and ‘nurture’ are used in

quite similar ways in the discourses of PA and RWG. The underlying mappings of

these metaphors are ECONOMY /SOCIETY / TANLENT /YOUTH IS PLANT . Economy,

society and a group of people are conceptualised as growing plants. Similarly to

what has been discussed when examining JOURNEY and BUILDING metaphors,

abstract concepts are conceptualized as more tangible and concrete things. And it is

generally acknowledged that people like to see plants growing. So it may be at their

advantages for politicians to speak of growth and flourishing in political discourse.

54
 But ‘grassroots’ and ‘root’ are not compatible to the aforementioned

conceptual mappings. ‘Grassroots’ is used more often to refer to relatively poor

people as a euphemism in PA. On the other hand, ‘poor’ is usually directly used in

the corpus of RWG. That is probably consistent with the conclusion reached in the

previous sections that PA tend to attempt to connect its audience with the Chief

Executives, whereas RWG seems to adopt a more unemotional and authoritative

narrative. ‘Root’ is used as conventional metaphors in phrases like ‘tackle the root

problem’ and ‘addressing the root causes’, which may have less to do with the

conceptualisation and the representation like other metaphors that have been

examined.

4.3.4 Metaphors in relation to CONFLCIT

CONFLICT metaphors are generally ubiquitous in all political discourses, especially

for those countries with a particular history of war. Interestingly, the proportions of

uses of metaphors in relation to CONFLICT in the two discourses are lower than

other metaphors of other source domains. The Chief Executives of Hong Kong

SAR rarely talk about war. This is probably because Hong Kong has a unique

history through the colonial period and the handover, and consequently there has

been no army force of Hong Kong itself since the colonial period. There are more

CONFLICT metaphors in the discourse of China than Hong Kong (see Table 4.9).

But if examining the collocates of the lemmas ‘fight’ and ‘combat’ (see Appendix),

we can find that the basic patterns of the employment of CONFLICT metaphors are

similar. Since there are no universal suffrage in China and Hong Kong, the heads of

the governments may have no need for attacking other politicians and political

parties in public discourse, as some Western politicians often do.

55
TABLE 4.9. Metaphorical uses in relation to CONFLICT

The PA corpus The RWG corpus

No. per 10,000 words* No. per 10,000 words*
FIGHT 10 0.42 41 1.93
COMBAT 25 1.05 67 3.15
BATTLE 1 0.04 3 0.14
WAR 0 0 7 0.33

Text 19
Efforts to combat disasters and provide disaster relief were greatly
strengthened, with total expenditures from the central government budget
reaching 55.1 billion yuan for the five-year period. (Wen Jibao, Report
on the Work of the Government, 2008)

Text 20
The fight against smugglers and traffickers must continue. ((Tung Chee
Hua, Policy Address, 2002)

Text 21
The initial stage of work is to scrutinise the supervisory regimes adopted
by individual financial sectors to combat money laundering and terrorist
financing, with a view to drawing up legislative proposals. (Donald
Tsang, Policy Address, 2008-2009)

Text 22
Efforts to uphold integrity and fight corruption were strengthened and a
number of people violating the law or discipline were brought to
justice.(Li Keqiang, Report on the Work of the Government, 2008)

The examples above can show how metaphors are used in the context. The

main conceptualised enemies in regard to CONFLICT metaphors in the discourse of

RWG include ‘corruption’, ‘illegal affairs’, ‘terrorism’ and pornography’, whereas

‘corruption’, ‘money laundering’ and ‘climate change’ are mainly what the Hong

Kong government combats. The underlying mappings are obvious: CORRUPTION /

TERRORISM / PROBLEMIS ENEMY. It is interesting to find that ‘stability’ collocate

with ‘fight’ and ‘combat’ relatively frequently. By examining the specific

56
concordances, we can find that sentences for ‘combat terrorism’ is high identical in

four consecutive years in the corpus of RWG. It also should be note the repetitive

uses of almost identical phrases and sentences in several years of RWG (See Figure

4.2).

FIHURE 4.2. Example in concordance of ‘combat’

What has been reviewed in the literature about the issue of legitimacy in

China can show that battle against is another major narrative aside from economic

growth. There are complex and serious problems in regard to corruption in China.

By utilising CONFLICT metaphors for corruption, on one hand, the Chinese

government shows its determination to address the problems. On the other hand,

with little elaboration and clear plans of why there is so much corruption at the first

place, and how to eliminate corruption. Corruption, as a complex issue, is

simplified as the enemy, which appear to be just evil out of no reason. Again, the

process of conceptulisation by means of employing metaphors contributes to the

simplification of social conditions. And we also should put the metaphors of

fighting against corruption from a larger perspective.

As for Hong Kong, low rate of corruption is often regarded one of the

achievements of the Hong Kong government, but it is seldom mentioned in Policy

Addresses. This can also be identified in the discourse of Policy Address for its

focus on economy. Cheung (2012) holds that despite being 'confronted with rising

political challenges to governance', the government of Hong Kong gains its

57
legitimacy by the achievement of economy as part of the 'East Asia miracle', which

seems to accord with the situations of China in recent years. In sum, both

governments take the achievement of economic growth as their most important

ground for legitimacy, and the Chinese government also adopts the narrative of

battle against corruption.

4.4 Critical analysis of metaphors in the two discourses

Drawn upon the four major themes of metaphors according to their source domains,

we can further look into the bigger picture of the employment of metaphors in the

discourses of PA and RWG. As has been discussed above, economic growth is

supposed to be a key theme in both discourses, which is also in accordance with the

keyword lists. It is utterly unreasonable to blame a government for talking about

economy. However, it is worthwhile to examine how a government addresses the

issues of economy. Even there is no clear definition of ‘a moderately prosperous

society’ and ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, they are employed for

representing the goals of the Chinese government and Chinese people. And

metaphors serve an important role in persuading people to accept those agendas and

legitimising the governance of CCP. In contrast, there is no such clear political

agenda in the discourse of PA in Hong Kong. But the theories of Fairclough (1995)

and van Dijk (2001) are primarily aimed at the social structure and hegemony in

capitalism society. The overemphasis on economy may reveal the ideological

motivations. It is put in both discourses that economic growth is the foundation of

achieving other things. In the process of representation, metaphors also play an

important role. In the two discourses, social development is often conceptualised as

tangible and concrete source domains that people have bodily experience of and are

58
familiar with, such as journey, path, growth, and building. Although the

cross-domain mappings in the four themes of metaphors varied, their target

domains seem to be similar. The achievements, the announced policies concerning

economic, social and political issues are simplified and represented in the two

discourses.

Aside from economic growth, battle against corruption is another prominent

topic and introduces an important narrative for the Chinese government. As Hsu

(2001) argues, after intellectuals' heated discussions and condemnations of

corruption in the 1980s in China, Chinese political leaders, with the official media

'revised the story of corruption' for showing that the government and the CCP

fought against corruption on behalf of people's interests for the better development

of Chinese economy, people's living standards and 'social stability'. And in these

narratives adopted by Chinese authorities, unlike the time of Mao era, 'the role of

the state was no longer that of ideological or moral leadership, but of economic

management'. And to an extent, the CCP managed to control the legitimacy crisis

caused by corruption. And in comparison with Western political discourse,

religious metaphors are absent, probably because religion is a sensitive topic and

may not have mixed effects on their governance due to the social and historical

conditions of China and Hong Kong.

In addition, unlike the discourse of PA in Hong Kong and Western political

discourse, it can be concluded that the discourse of PA does not attempt to build a

personal connection with its audience. On the contrary, it adopts an unemotional

and authoritative narrative, considering its lack use of single first-person pronouns

and metaphors with the word ‘journey’. Chinese Premiers seem to represent the

Chinese government with a serious and authoritative attitude. Moreover, by

59
examining the two discourses, it seems that there is no obvious influence of the

RWG on the PA, or vice versa in term of the employment of metaphors.

60
Chapter 5 Conclusion

5.1 Summary

In regarding to the five research questions, I have examined and compared how

metaphors are used in the discourses of the Policy Address in Hong Kong and the

Report on the Work of the Government from 1997 to 2014. The current social and

political conditions of the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong are reviewed for

facilitating the interpretation and explanation of metaphors in the discourses. I have

analyzed the two corpora compiled with the RWG and the PA, for identifying

metaphors and examining the linguistic characteristics in relation to the usage of

metaphors. Modelled on Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2014), I have

identified four major themes of metaphors according to their source domains:

JOURNEY, PLANT, BUILDING, and CONFLICT. I have also examined these

metaphors in their contexts, and analyzed their frequent collocates. I have

explained those metaphors and their effects on the audience with ‘image schemata’

from CMT. I have attempted to demonstrate that some metaphors conceptualise

abstract and complex social and political concepts and policies, that is, taget

domains, as concrete, tangible and simplified source domains like journey, road and

building. The process of conceptualisation is also the process of representation, or

even misrepresentation of social reality. The majority of these metaphors are

conventional for the descriptions of economic and social development. Although

they are generally used in similar ways in the two discourses, there are significant

differences, especially in the uses of metaphors in relation to JOURNEY and

CONFLICT, because of the different systems of society in Hong Kong and the

Chinese mainland. ‘Socialism’ and ‘moderately prosperous society’ often occur

with metaphors in relation to JOURNEY and BUILDING in the Report on the Work of

61
the Government, whereas there is no such collocate with metaphors in the Policy

Address. CONFLICT metaphors are more frequently used, and often collocate with

corruption in the RWG, which should be interpreted with the consideration of

histories and current social conditions of China and Hong Kong. Battle against

corruption is an important narrative of the Chinese Communist Party for its

legitimacy of governance. In contrast, the achievement of economic growth is the

main legitimacy for the Hong Kong government. Besides, in the discourse of the

RWG, metaphors are not utilised for creating personal connections between the

political speakers and their audience. The RWG is generally in an unemotional and

authoritative narrative, considering its ways of employing JOURNEY and CONFLICT

metaphors, as well as cautious use of first-person pronouns. which is similar to

Western political discourse. In comparison with Western political discourse,

religious metaphors are absent, probably because religion is a sensitive topic and

may not have mixed effects on their governance due to the social and historical

conditions of China and Hong Kong. In addition, in terms of the employment of

metaphors in this research project, there seem to be no obvious influence of the

RWG of China over the PA of Hong Kong, or vice versa.

5.2 Limitations and future research

One of the limitations in this study is that the project only examines a single genre

of political discourse. In future research, it is interesting to examine and compare

other speeches by the heads of the governments, and the media press that reported

and commented on the governmental reports and political speeches. Those texts can

allow researchers to explore the reproduction of discourse and its effects on social

62
structure. And if mature Chinese corpus software can be used in the future, the

study of Chinese political discourse will be more revealing.

63
Notes

1. Three Premieres of the PRC who delivered annual Report on the Work of the
Government are Li Peng (1997, 1998), Zhu Rongji (1999-2003), and Wen
Jiabao (2004-2013). There Chief Executives of Hong Kong who delivered
Policy Addresses are Tung Chee-Hwa (1998-2005) (no Policy Addresses in
2002, as Mr. Tung postponed it into January 2003), Donald Tsang Yam-Kuen
(2005-2012) (Donald Tsang delivered Policy Address 2005, and Leung
Chun-ying (2013). The reports and addresses usually consists of the review of
last year and plan of this year.
2. The Reports on the Work of the Government of English versions were
retrieved from http://english.gov.cn/official/workreports.htm, and the Chinese
versions from http://www.gov.cn/test/2006-02/16/content_200719.htm. All the
Policy Addresses of both English and Chinese versions were retrieved from
http://www.policyaddress.gov.hk/2014/eng/archives.html.
3. Although the Chinese government claims that China is a democratic country
with Chinese characteristics. It is generally held by scholars that neither China
nor Hong Kong is a democracy (Wu, 2007; Cheung, 2012)

64
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Appendix 1. Detailed Information about Policy Address and Report on the Work of
Government

Year PA Speakers PA Tittles* RWG** Speakers

1997 Tung Chee Hwa Li Peng
1998 Tung Chee Hwa Zhu Rongji
1999 Tung Chee Hwa Zhu Rongji
2000 Tung Chee Hwa Zhu Rongji
2001 Tung Chee Hwa Zhu Rongji
2002 Tung Chee Hwa Zhu Rongji
Capitalising on Our Advantages,
Revitalising Our Economy
2003 Tung Chee Hwa Wen Jiabao
善用香港優勢 共同真行經濟

Seizing Opportunities for Development,

2004 Tung Chee Hwa Promoting People-based Governance Wen Jiabao
把握發展機遇 推動民本施政
Working Together for Economic,
2005 Tung Chee Hwa Development and Social Harmony Wen Jiabao
合力發展經濟 共建和諧社會
Strong Governance For the People
2005-2006 Donald Tsang Wen Jiabao
強政勵治 褔為民開
Proactive, Pragmatic, Always People First
2006-2007 Donald Tsang 移民為本 務實進取 Wen Jiabao
A New Direction for Hong Kong
2007-2008 Donald Tsang 香港新方向 Wen Jiabao
Embracing New Challenges
2008-2009 Donald Tsang 迎接新挑戰 Wen Jiabao
Breaking New Ground Together
2009-2010 Donald Tsang 羣策創新天 Wen Jiabao
Sharing Prosperity for a Caring Society
2010-2011 Donald Tsang 民心我心 同舟共濟 繁榮共享 Wen Jiabao

From Strength to Strength

2011-2012 Donald Tsang 繼往開來 Wen Jiabao
Seek Change, Maintain Stability, Serve
2013 CY Leung the People with Pragmatism Wen Jiabao
穩中求變 務實為民

Support the Needy, Let Youth Flourish,

Unleash Hong Kong’s Potential
讓有需要的 得到支援
2014 CY Leung Li Keqiang
讓年青的 各展所長
讓香港 得以發揮

* There were no official titles of ‘Policy Address’ until 2003.

** There are no official title on ‘Report on the Work of Government’ each year.

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Appendix 2. Concordance of ‘path’ in the corpus of China

1 of their advantages, and find a new path for development in response to the shock 2009.txt
2 . We are definitely capable of taking a path of civilized development which ensures that p 2012.txt
3 . We will continue to follow a new path of industrialization, concentrating on upgrad 2007.txt
4 development through innovation; keep to the new path of industrialization, IT application, urbaniz 2014.txt
5 structure. We will keep to the new path of industrialization with Chinese characteris 2008.txt
6 restructuring. We will adhere to the new path of industrialization with Chinese characteris 2011.txt
7 risen substantially. We adhered to the new path of industrialization with distinctive Chinese 2013.txt
8 development and cooperation, firmly adhere to the path of peaceful development, steadfastly pursue a 2007.txt
9 independent foreign policy of peace and a path of peaceful development, and adhere to the 2008.txt
10 peace, development and cooperation, adhere to the path of peaceful development and an independent fo 2009.txt
11 independent foreign policy of peace and the path of peaceful development; pursue an open strat 2010.txt
12 independent foreign policy of peace and the path of peaceful development; pursue an open strat 2011.txt
13 and equitable. We will adhere to the path of peaceful development, continue to pursue a 2012.txt
14 ation and mutual benefit; unswervingly follow the path of peaceful development; and unwaveringly imp 2014.txt
15 ethnic groups to forge ahead on the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics. A 2006.txt
16 taken new and solid steps along the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Th 2009.txt
17 to continue to forge ahead on the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics. O 2010.txt
18 and profound significance for keeping to the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics, im 2010.txt
19 , We have achieved remarkable progress along the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics in 2013.txt
20 We should continue to follow a path of sustainable development. We should further 2000.txt
21 development.Continuing to take the path of sustainable development and promoting a co 2003.txt
22 urban development and embark on a new path of urbanization. This new type of urbanizatio 2014.txt
23 new countryside. We will keep to the path of urbanization with Chinese characteristics. 2010.txt
24 with urbanization. We will adhere to the path of urbanization with Chinese characteristics, 2011.txt

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