Yingchi Chu

The paper offers a discourse analysis of the visuality of COVID-19 cartoons published in three media outlets in China: Satire and Humour, circulated in the domestic market, China Daily, targeting an international anglophone readership, and an alternative, critical voice in the social media. Methodologically, the paper employs three theoretical notions, two triadic approaches to visual discourse, Peirce’s concept of hypoiconicity and O’Toole’s adaptation of Hallidayan linguistics to visual discourse, as well as Foucault’s concept of institutional, enunciative modality. Domestically, official Chinese cartooning is shown to celebrate full government control over the epidemic. Internationally, the emphasis is on the geopolitical tension between China and the USA. Owing to its ideologically committed aesthetics, in Chinese COVID-19, political concerns are found to override the issue of public health. In its findings, the paper exemplifies the tension that typically exists in political cartooning between humorous presentation and its serious political intent.

This article investigates single-panel cartoons portraying official corruption in China’s longest- running state-owned cartoon newspaper Cartoon Weekly (Fengci yu youmo). A total of 433 cartoons are identified as relating to corrupt officialdom between 2012 and 2019 in the wake of Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption signature policy. In contrast with the individualizing critique of political cartooning in liberal democracies, the corpus of corruption cartoons investigated in this article is argued as a didactic form of visual schematization in a pseudo-self-critical discourse typically buttressed by verbal reading instructions. To support this claim, the article addresses its politics of visual discourse by employing Peircean hypoiconicity, consisting of direct resemblance, diagrammatic schematization and metaphoric displacement. Accordingly, the article identifies three major features of corruption cartoons as anonymization of direct resemblance, visual schematization of policy and metaphoric displacement of conventional symbols.

The core claim of this paper is that mainstream political cartoons uniquely combine three features of iconicity, direct resemblance, diagrammatic schematization, and metaphoric displacement, summed up by Charles S. Peirce under the concept of hypoiconicity. Accordingly, cartoon readers cannot but reconstruct direct resemblance relations with actual, historical persons and situations from their metaphoric distortion provided in the cartoon and retrace the cartoonist’s schematized, diagrammatic reasoning in order to arrive at the cartoon’s satirical message. The main source of the humorous effect of cartooning is shown to be the incongruity between the cartoon and the viewer’s reconstruction of the cartoonist’s satirical target. The paper rehearses the semiotic relations involved in Peirce’s notion of hypoiconicity, before reviewing the cartoon literature from the angles of genre, reader response, and multimodal discourse, via a social semiotic approach. The paper concludes with a reading of a single-frame, political cartoon from the perspective of hypoiconicity, followed by a brief generic description.

In this paper, I discuss the architecture of the Chinese city of Suzhou from the perspective of hypoiconicity, Charles S. Peirce's subdivision of iconicity into direct resemblance, diagrammatic resemblance and metaphoric resemblance relations. Accordingly, the paper distinguishes our iconic recognition of traditional, architectural motifs in old Suzhou from their diagrammatical representations, and their metaphoric displacement in the modern parts of the city. At the same time, the paper provides a minimal sketch of the city's cultural background as a frame of reference for my argument, as well as photographic evidence, without however addressing photographic iconicity itself. Instead, the focus is on how we recognize traditional architectural motifs in terms of their quality, their internal structure, their repetition in the cityscape and emplacement, and how their modern modifications revive, and yet differ from, their traditional function. As such, architectural motifs are viewed as a significant feature of human dwelling within the broader domain of social semiotics.

In her Preface, Weiyu Zhang attunes her readers to four themes: the question of why, after twenty years of exposure of the Chinese public to Internet technologies, democratisation is still beyond reach; her rejection of “the myth of Chinese exceptionalism”; the concept of “fandom publics”; and her reliance on her 15-year empirical data collection. The strength of the book lies above all in its informative collection of hard data...

The paper addresses an ingenious way by which Chinese netizens manage to reach their intended audiences under the radar of censors surveying the Internet in China. One specifically Chinese social use of language in this respect is the option to express criticism by using inoffensive characters that share the same or similar pronunciation with politically sensitive phrasing. We identify this type of expression as homophone phrase substitution (HPS). The device has been part of Chinese since ancient times under the name political metaphor. We address the main constraints at work in HPS, especially the role of voice (prosodic contour) that guides the construction of two divergent kinds of aboutness. Leaving aside its critical function in contemporary society, by contrasting HPS with verbal irony, metaphor, and Australian rhyming slang, and by drawing on semiologie and semiotics, indirect speech acts and implicit deixis, we suggest that this linguistic option throws new light on the semantic/pragmatic distinction.

The value of this thoroughly researched book lies in the identification of the historical documentary in China as a genre in its own right since the 1990s, the analysis of three TV series and their role in the creation of a new historical consciousness, and the rich detail concerning the work of the research teams, the historiographical techniques employed and the politics involved in the making of the series...

This paper addresses a widely accepted typology of the genre of documentary cinema, proposed by Bill Nichols in the 1980s. Although a number of improvements have been suggested in the literature since then, in principle his historically derived and structurally argued types, distributed as they are on a spectrum from expository to performative modes of presentation, are still useful and readily acknowledged to this day. However, this paper argues that the typology contains a major lacuna in that its most authoritatively controlled type, the expository mode, is not well suited to cover a much more radically supervised kind of documentary, the dogmatic documentary which, I contend, is characterized by a specific formula of production and mode of presentation. I develop my argument with a focus on the documentary film production during the period of Mao Zedong's China, a focus that has the advantage of dealing with a clearly identifiable historical epoch and political system. Beyond my observations about China, the argument is intended as a contribution to genre studies in general and, specifically, the genre of cinematic documentary. By way of conclusion, the paper makes a number of concessions, as for example with reference to other modifications of the typology associated with Nichols, the generalizability of the dogmatic documentary to other dictatorial regimes, and the special character and exclusion from the typology of the parodic variety of the mock-documentary, or mockumentary, as a meta-fictional type of cinema.