Winds and tigers: metaphor choice in China’s anti-corruption discourse

This article examines metaphor choice in China’s official anti-corruption discourse. Drawing on corpus data, we analyze the metaphors used by the Chinese Communist Party and its flagship newspaper, the People’s Daily, to frame the anti-corruption campaign and influence public perception. It is found that both embodied experience and cultural models are recruited as the metaphoric vehicles or source domains for the strategic profiling of different aspects of corruption and anti-corruption actions as the target domain. Additionally, metaphor choice is systematically different in the Chinese and the English versions of the party newspaper, reflecting that metaphor use is sensitive to sociocultural context, especially to the knowledge base within an epistemic community.