Comparative Analysis of War Metaphors of Pak-China Print Media

Abstract

This study is a comparative critical discourse analysis of the “COVID-19 IS WAR” metaphor in the print media of Pakistan and China by employing Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT).The study recognized the war metaphor’s power in framing public understanding and mobilizing behavior during crises and investigated its deployment in two distinct sociopolitical contexts. A corpus was constructed from COVID-19-related news stories published in Pakistan's Dawn and China's Global Times throughout 2020. Using the Pragglejaz Group’s (2007) Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) and assisted by AntConc software for corpus analysis to identify and quantify war-related lexical items. The findings reveal a significant difference in usage frequency: the metaphor was positioned 544 times in the Global Times corpus, compared to 246 times in the Dawn corpus. The qualitative cross-cultural analysis interprets this disparity as curtailing from differing governmental communication strategies and media ideologies. In the Chinese context, the metaphor was employed pervasively as a uniting and mobilizing tool, aligning with a state narrative of collective struggle, national strength, and top-down mobilization against the pandemic. On the other hand, in the Pakistani English-language press, the metaphor was used more selectively, often serving a primarily cautionary function within a more pluralistic discourse. This study concludes that while the "war" metaphor was a universal rhetorical feature of pandemic communication, its frequency and strategic purpose were fundamentally shaped by the specific political and media cultures of each nation. The research underscores the necessity of contextual, cross-cultural analysis in understanding the discursive construction of global crises.