National Image Construction by Multimodal Metaphor in Editorial Cartoons on “Belt and Road Initiative” in Publicity English Websites

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-988-9_45How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); editorial cartoon; conceptual metaphor; multimodal metaphor; national image

Abstract

Under the guidance of conceptual metaphor and multi-modal metaphor theory, this paper takes 34 editorial cartoons on BRI in China’s publicity English websites as research data and analyzes the multimodal metaphors in the data with high frequency in order to explain how China’s national image is constructed by multimodal metaphor. It is shown that multimodal metaphors like “BRI is a journey/vehicle/stage” in the editorial cartoons construct a responsible image of China that is committed to peaceful development, common development and regional and world peace. The metaphorical discourse in cartoons carries a good national image of China and is an effective use of the global output of Chinese image.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Qunfang Zhang
AU  - Jiabao Wang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/02/15
TI  - National Image Construction by Multimodal Metaphor in Editorial Cartoons on “Belt and Road Initiative” in Publicity English Websites
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 5th International Conference on Education, Language and Art (ICELA 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 407
EP  - 420
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-988-9_45
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-988-9_45
ID  - Zhang2026
ER  -