Multimodal construction of ‘rule of law’ in Chinese anti-corruption public service advertisements: a social semiotic approach

China has embarked upon a long-term endeavor to build a system of rule of law in the country. Under this legal reform, concrete initiatives have been unveiled, among which cultivating a belief of rule of law in the minds of both officials and citizens has been a vital issue. Since the digital era makes cyber space a major domain for publicity, online resources are exploited to promote the legal ideology of rule of law. Various forms of publicity such as cartoons, animations, micro-films and advertisements issued on websites and social media are recruited to meet this end, among which Anti-corruption Public Service Advertisements (APSAs) have become a conversational tool used by governments and anti-corruption institutions. In the present study, APSAs are in the form of video which lasts one to two minutes. Each video relates a story concerning corruption or a series of events regarding corruption and thus appeals for actions in accordance with incorruption. The characters involved in the story vary from animated figures to real actors. With public education as its purpose, APSA is sponsored by the governments. The present research seeks to investigate the process of how the legal ideology of rule of law is represented and transmitted in APSAs through language and other meaning-making systems using a social semiotic approach (Halliday, 1978). To accomplish the research objective, an analytical framework was constructed to describe, analyze and explain the multimodal construction of rule of law, on the basis of systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) (O’Halloran, 2008). In the framework we have constructed, the ideology of rule of law is considered as the system of coding orientations that shapes the form of discourse at all levels. Therefore, genre analysis (Martin & Rose, 2008) on the context level, and multimodal interpersonal analysis (Painter, Martin & Unsworth, 2013), particularly multimodal appraisal analysis (Economou, 2009; Unsworth, 2015) on the semantic level have been conducted. Methodologically, a qualitative analysis is adopted. The data used in the present research are APSAs issued on the official website of Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of Chinese Communist Party, local Prosecutors offices, and the National Public Legal Education Office because they effectively transmit the value of rule of law and are aesthetically pleasing in terms of composition. 50 of them were chosen from the year 2012 to 2017. In the present study, legal ideology is conceived as part of the cultural system (Merry, 1985), which shapes social members’ understanding of the interaction between the legal system and social practice (Ji, 2015). A country under rule of law requires good laws and good governance. Moreover, the ideology of rule of law emphasizes not only the establishment of a sound legal system but also the supremacy and independence of the law (Zheng, 1999). In APSA, the ideology of rule of law is embodied in the construal of stories and the evaluation toward events concerning (in)corruption. Data analysis shows that as a goal-oriented, staged social process, APSA achieves its goal of promoting rule of law through three stages: Record of Event, Evaluation, and Generalization, each of which achieves a minor goal. The producer first depicts an event, or a series of activities related to (in)corruption, then evaluates the event, the behavior of the participants, the concepts clarified in the text, and finally generalizes the evaluation to the viewers with the expectation of changing their attitude and behaviors. The stage of evaluation distinguishes three basic sub-genres of APSAs: anecdote, exemplum and observation. Anecdote represents corruption as a family issue which tends to share the emotional reaction of the corrupt officials and their family members triggered by the consequences of corruption. Exemplum depicts corruption as a legal issue, which involves corrupt officials and their behavior judged by interpretations of regulations and laws. Different from anecdote and exemplum, observation focuses on the activities and notions concerning incorruptibility, and shares with the viewer mainly the positive appreciation towards incorruption and the anticorruption campaign. Data analysis also reveals that the attitudinal meanings of affect, judgement and appreciation integrate with one another to construe an axiology of anti-corruption discourse regarding the notion of rule of law. The judgement of illegality and judicial verdict on corruption manifest the fundamental principles of the ‘generality’ and ‘supremacy’ of law. The negative affect, particularly the one triggered by impending consequences of corruption, such as fear sensed by the corrupt officials, displays the predictability and inescapability of sanctions. Positive appreciations targeting the virtue of incorruptibility provide a moral basis for rule of law. Consequently, the multimodal text advances a consistent negative evaluation of corruption. The present study further probes the way in which the attitudinal meaning is realized through multiple visual semiotic systems. It is found that symbolic visual elements, emblems and facial expression are utilized to inscribe the evaluative meaning of judgement and affect, whereas visual metaphor implicitly provokes judgement and appreciation. Besides, attitudinal associations are likely to be flagged through cultural connotation. It is found that APSAs adopt the visual systems of graduation, engagement and focalization to negotiate stance and establish an alignment with the viewers. Graduation is utilized to reinforce the negative affect and judgement toward corruption, and thus encourages an empathic viewing. As far as engagement is concerned, the monogloss is employed in the stage of Generalization, in which anti-corruption is uttered as an indisputable fact. Heterogloss incorporates external voices into the text to establish a contractive dialogic backdrop in compressing the dialogic space of corruption in the text. In addition, external voices are delicately deployed into the text to facilitate the viewers to accept the text-consistent attitude in an unconscious manner. Focalization is adopted at the key moment of the narration, to invite the viewers into the narrating world and share the character’s experience and emotion, the function of which is to lead the viewers to identify with the focalized character, and finally agree with the genre consistent stance. The findings lead to the conclusion that in Chinese Anti-corruption public service advertisements, the legal ideology of rule of law is realized through visual semiotic expressed attitudinal meanings towards events, behaviors and the concepts related to (in)corruption, which are distributed into the stages of varied sub-genres and modulated via discursive strategies such as engagement in light of viewer alignment. The major contribution of this research lies in addressing the issue of promoting the legal ideology of rule of law using the social semiotic approach. The theoretical contribution is the proposed analytical framework which considers register as the analytical unit for genre, and genre as the minimum analytical unit for culture. Furthermore, the system of focalization is incorporated into the investigation of author/viewer alignment. 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