And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Bei Wang, whose focus is on China’s Global South narratives in government policies, via critical discourse analysis. China has continued to emphasise itself as both a developing country and a peer of the Global South, and a global leader in its own right; these do not go together well.
How has China’s governmental discourse managed to construct these positions at the same time? It has legitimised its leadership while maintaining the appearance of solidarity with the Global South. This employs cooperative rhetoric at the surface, while emphasising its hierarchical positioning in an underlying layer – the words speak of horizontal partnerships, but the structure is vertical.
This enables China to have two voices, as a developing country that remains a project in progress, and as a norm-setting global leader that makes moral and epistemic authority claims. Over time, this vocabulary has shifted, from material and pragmatic rhetoric before 2021 to normative and universal appeals after that time. This has lifted China from the world of concrete deals to the world of moral authority.
Communication practice builds legitimacy; role claiming asserts identity; and epistemic asymmetry emphasises the knowledge of ‘Chinese wisdom’ – all three play a key role in Chinese government discourse. This patterns can be extracted from Chinese government statements via critical discourse analysis, which was applied here to six major policy documents between 2015 and 2025.
This shows that the Global South is not a fixed place on the map, but a shifting and dynamic discursive arena, and it surfaces China’s self-positioning through a rhetoric of ‘hierarchical solidarity’. How this message actually lands with its targets in the Global South requires further study, though.
