The COVID-19 and war: an analysis of conceptual metaphors of the pandemic in the Chinese press

The military metaphors frequently used to talk about public health and sanitation issues generate controversies among professionals and academics. The debates around the COVID-19 pandemic constitute a new episode of this phenomenon. This paper aims to analyze the conceptual metaphors, whose source domain is war or the military, used by the Chinese press to represent the pandemic caused by COVID-19. Based on a corpus of 679 news texts and opinion articles corresponding to a period of 18 months, some key factors of conceptualization have been identified: wAR, solDiER, ENEMy, pioNEER, AccoMplicE and wEApoN. The samples extracted show that the use of metaphorical expressions related to the source domain of wAR is associated with the specific political, cultural and socioeconomic environments of China. Since those expressions have been widely accepted in Chinese newspapers about the current pandemic, a better understanding of this topic will shed light on how China influences public opinion and shapes the public agenda both domestically and globally.