From ‘blood transfusion’ to ‘blood generation’: metaphor, practice, and agency in Chinese reporting on provincial medical aid to Benin (2015–2025)

This study examines diachronic metaphor use in Chinese reporting on Ningxia’s medical assistance to Benin from 2015 to 2025, relating it to reported practices and participant roles. The corpus contains 35 Chinese-language texts: 24 public-media reports, 9 official-institution reports, and 2 medical-team social-media posts. Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) identified 71 tokens in five categories: Journey and Movement, War, Architecture and Bridge, Biological and Medical, and Identity. A Cultural Discourse Studies (CDS)-informed contextual analysis examined practices and local conditions, Chinese and Beninese participant positioning, and the representation of Beninese voice and agency. Across the three periods, new metaphorical frames emerge without displacing earlier ones. War metaphors did not increase during the pandemic, but their function shifted toward danger, defense, and collective mobilization. Later reports gave greater prominence to training, localization, and capacity building through biological expressions, including the movement from ‘blood transfusion’ to ‘blood generation,’ while narratives of Chinese commitment and expertise remained. Beninese professionals and officials appeared as collaborators or agenda-setting participants, but their voices and agency were uneven and often mediated through Chinese reporting. The findings show source variation and uneven representations of cooperation but cannot establish discursive polyphony or corresponding changes in institutional relations.