Emotional Branding of China’s State-Owned Enterprises on Sina Weibo

Abstract

In order to provide the interpersonal, rhetoric and semiotic insights for studying corporate emotional branding discourse on social media, this study attempts to target China’s state-owned enterprises which represent the pillars of national economy with Chinese characteristics and shed light on the discourse realizations of their emotional branding strategies from the textual and interpersonal perspectives. Specifically, the present study focuses on the two kinds of textual and interpersonal representations on China-based Sina Weibo: 1) the use of stylistic features; 2) the use of attitudinal appeals. A corpus of forty-day updates of the three giant Chinese state-owned enterprises on Sina Weibo is retrieved and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The results suggest the prevalence of involving stylistic features, the proliferation of affect and judgment appeals and the hybridization of appreciation and affect/judgment, which posits interdiscursivity and intertextuality in communicative functions. China’s state-owned enterprises communicate to forge emotional bonding with the public other than promote their products. This pragmatic shift towards solidarity facework is indicative of a transcultural phenomenon elicited by digital globalization and the neoliberalist trend in China’s national economy.