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.

Documentary has played an important role in nation building in China. Nowadays, however, the role of documentary is changing, as are its practitioners and investors. While retaining its role as a vehicle of state propaganda, documentary makers are embracing new formats and seeking out audiences in keeping with the challenges of ‘cultural system reform’ (wenhua tizhi gaige) on the one hand, and ‘going out’ (zou chuqu) on the other. As a cultural industry sector that has largely underachieved in comparison with international counterparts, the challenge now is for documentary makers to seize the moment. If we accept John Grierson’s definition of documentary as ‘creative treatment of actuality’ (Izod and Kilborn 1998: 427), China is one of the biggest documentary producers worldwide, generating between 7,000 and 10,000 hours annually for television alone (He et al. 2014: 6). These figures include traditional documentary formats as well as reality shows and travel documentaries. Television remains the most prolific producer of documentary. At the same time there is a noticeable decrease in film formats and an increase across digital media platforms.

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...