National Image Construction in Chinese State Leaders’ Diplomatic Speeches from the Perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis

Foreign Languages College, Chinese Language College, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang, Hebei, 050000, China

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Abstract

This review systematically organizes the research achievements, theoretical perspectives, analytical methods and existing gaps of national image construction in Chinese state leaders’ diplomatic speeches from the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) perspective, focusing on the two key images of “peaceful development” and “responsible major power”. It combs relevant literature published during 2004–2024, covering speech texts from major international events like the UN General Assembly and the Belt and Road International Cooperation Summit. Core findings show that existing studies are theoretically grounded in systemic functional linguistics, social cognitive theory and multimodal discourse analysis, with qualitative methods (textual analysis, case studies) as the mainstay and corpus-assisted quantitative methods as supplement. The research involves the linguistic realization of the two core images, the dual impacts of cultural context and international political dynamics, and international communication effect analysis. However, it has obvious shortcomings: superficial interdisciplinary integration, over-reliance on text-centered perspectives, and lack of long-term dynamic tracking.