Description
This study investigates how Chinese state media discursively construct terrorism through the systematic deployment of metaphors related to war, crime, and de-religionisation. Drawing on a substantial corpus of 7,292 English-language reports from Xinhua News Agency (2014–2019), the study combines Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis to explore how these linguistic strategies reshape the representation of the ‘Islamic State’ and fundamentally align the discourse with China’s Holistic View of National Security (HVNS).
The analysis identifies a core dual-frame model, “Terrorism is War” and “Terrorism is Crime”, which performs distinct yet complementary ideological functions. The war metaphor militarises terrorism, constructing a moral battlefield of "us vs them" that legitimises sovereign self-defence and state coordination within global counter-terrorism. Conversely, the crime metaphor juridifies the threat as unlawful conduct, shifting attention toward judicial accountability and normalized governance. Together, this dual-core reflects the strategic transition from emergency mobilisation to long-term state-centred governance.
A third unique strategy, de-religionisation, reveals how Xinhua linguistically decouples Islam from terrorism. Through mechanisms of discursive disarticulation and causal recontextualisation, religion is actively re-coded as a social sphere subject to state protection rather than repression. This rhetorical move not only resists Orientalist framings of "Islamic terrorism" but also firmly embeds counter-terrorism within a secular, developmental, and governance-oriented logic, a hallmark of China's security approach.
The findings demonstrate that Xinhua’s discourse is not a passive imitation of the Western “War on Terror” narrative but an ideologically managed communication strategy. By fusing militarisation, juridification, and de-religionisation, this model reconfigures counter-terrorism as a practice of governance rather than confrontation. This study thus provides new and essential insights into non-Western approaches to security communication and ideological legitimation, contributing critically to the field of international security studies.
