Mapping signs and making them stick: discursive power and the semiotic construction of a ‘world’s leader’

ABSTRACT

As multivalent concepts, projects and formations such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative continue to cleave through new spaces, it is increasingly important to attend to the construction, framing, maintenance and dissemination of the sign systems that enable them. Whether or not these systems constitute forms of cultural imperialism, move across ‘-scapes,’ create ‘frictions,’ or expand geo-political power; the discourses that globally extended actors mobilize will increasingly play the pivotal and contentious role of mapping and stabilizing meaning. This article explores this problematic by considering one actor, the Belt and Road Studies Network (BRSN); one space, its website, brsn.net; and the sign system these construct. The language and technological affordances of brsn.net are analyzed with respect to a selection of salient contextual aspects: the monumental revival of a new ‘Silk Road’, the propaganda work of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the United Front Work Department (UFWD), and the expansion of think tanks in response to the continuous uncertainties of geo-political ecologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Belt and Road Initiative
• critical discourse analysis
• soft power
• mediatization
• think tanks

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hall (1977) uses this concept to differentiate between polysemy and pluralism, arguing that events must be mapped onto discursive domains before they ‘make sense.’ Often, preferred connections and classifications between areas of social life and discursive domains constitute a dominant, but not uncontested, cultural order (p. 513).

2 In light of the polysemous quality of signifiers, especially iconic or transmigrating messages, anchorage refers to certain techniques ‘intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs’ (Barthes, 1977, p. 39). Though always partial, anchorage frequently succeeds to stabilize possibilities of interpretation.