Description
This work examines the standardization of terminology in Beijing in relation to Taiwan as a political communication strategy to build international discourse power. Although a lot of scholarly work has been done on the topic of soft and hard power in the context of China, little has been done to examine the linguistic processes involved in the expectation by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to impose ideological cohesion and in order to maximize sovereignty using controlled language. Through a qualitative discourse analysis framework with quantitative trend measures of Google trend and Baidu index, the study involves official directives of terminologies (2002, 2016), state media language, and the content of the scholarly publications in CNKI and other types of data to reveal the political and communicative reason of Chinese linguistic governance. The results indicate that the standardization of terms in Beijing has been a powerful mechanism of internal ideology and legitimization of the country and supporting the discourse of One China in the domestic one. Nevertheless, it is not showing much resonance on the international level since the standardized terms forwarded by the PRC are mostly disapproved by the audiences, institutions, and media around the world, and the structural and cultural hindrances that limit the discourse power of China in the global sphere are identified. The paper helps bridge the domain of linguistics, international communication, and political science by demonstrating language policy as a means of confirmation of a hard approach of power, and not as a kind of persuasive soft power, but rather as a continuation of hard power enforcement in China in the domain of hegemony over the discourse.
