Abstract:
This dissertation aims to identify conceptual metaphor concerning corruption in Xi Jinping’s rhetorical discourse related with the anti-corruption campaign started in 2012. As every culture’s feature, corruption is part of the Chinese genetic code, but became a significant problem due to economic opportunities and low regulations during the late ‘70s. After the 1978-79 opening reforms promoted by Deng Xiaoping, the phenomenon of corruption, reinvigorated by the new economic momentum, reappeared stronger than ever. A chain of superficial anti-corruption campaigns, that occurred periodically every new term of office, only scratched this societal desease, letting it spread allarmingly. Its strengthening process lasted until the 2012 when Xi Jinping launched the anti-corruption campaign aimed to eradicate any seed of moral depravation in the ruling party.
After translating in the first part the document that includes several Xi Jinping’s speeches about anti-corruption hold between 2012 and 2014, in the second part I will extract the most significant figures of speech and conduct a comparative analysis between the rhetorical discourse of the president of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese philosophical and medical inheritance. In reason to explain the origin of conceptual metaphor, the philosophical and medical dissertation helps to achieve a complete understanding of the modern rhetorical discourse about corruption. The guidance of the books written by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Perry Link is compulsory to fully explain the cultural relation between subjects that still remarkably connected, despite the fact that are so far apart within Chinese history.
