Framing the Dragon: Performative Disalignment and the Paradox of Labour’s China “Reset”

This article analyzes a comprehensive corpus of public pronouncements by Prime Ministers Sunak and Starmer concerning China. The dataset encompasses parliamentary speeches, policy documents, social media posts, press conferences, and mediated statements. The study employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) within a poststructuralist framework, drawing in particular on the Essex School’s theorisation of nodal points. Nodal points were identified inductively through iterative close reading, which revealed recurring lexical clusters and thematic anchors. These nodal points emerged as central signifiers by virtue of their frequency and discursive function.