A Study on the Rhetorical Structure of Xi Jinping's Important Speeches for the New Era

Based on the Rhetorical Structure Theory(hereinafter referred to as RST), the study selected and analyzed the Englishversions of ten important speeches made by President Xi for the new era and drew up rhetorical trees.Through a thorough investiga-tion of rhetorical structures of Xi’s speeches on the basis of RST, the study found that: 1) Elaboration, Background and Evidence re-lations are the dominant relations in President Xi’s speeches; 2) The preference of forward arrow direction is an unexpected find-ing; 3) There are two patterns of macrostructure of rhetorical relations in Xi’s speeches.