Rhetorical Strategies in Political Texts of "Indo-pacific Strategy" of the Abe Government

Abstract

Since the second ruling of Abe, the "Indo-Pacific Strategy" has gradually came into being and being regarded as a key strategy to instruct Japan’s acts on maritime security. In that this strategy is of vital importance to the freedom of China’s oceanic movements, the study on this subject is significant to the Sino-Japan relationship. Drawing on ideological rhetorical criticism and corpus-assisted methods with software of SPSS, by combining "ideographs" and "policy triggers", this paper aims to explore the ideology under the discourse construction of Japan's "Indo-Pacific Strategy" from 2012 to 2018. Moreover, by analyzing the rhetorical strategies based on Burke’s identification theory, we have tried to examine how the audiences’ ideology are being manipulated. The study shows that Abe's government has constructed an ideological rhetorical system to curb the China's rise, build a new maritime order, and concealed the ideological undercurrent of nationalism by terministic screens. At the same time, the Abe government indoctrinated and manipulated the audiences' ideologies by rhetorical strategies of "identification by sympathy" and "identification by antithesis".