Exploring Generic Features in China-Africa Corporate Advertising: A Critical Genre Analysis

Abstract China-Africa corporate advertising is emerging as an example of the corporate advertising genre in response to the specific rhetorical context of China-Africa win-win cooperation. Drawing on Bhatia’s Critical Genre Analysis (2017), this study explores the text-internal and text-external generic features of China-Africa corporate advertising by analyzing 50 collected samples. The analysis of text-internal prominence shows that China-Africa corporate advertising is unique in its frequent use of win-win-oriented and sector-dependent technical lexicons to indicate the promotional intent. It is also found that move structures vary across different sub-types of China-Africa corporate advertising. Text-externally, the findings reveal a mixture of different discourses within the discursive space of China-Africa corporate advertising. In addition, the results suggest that Chinese companies invest more rhetorical efforts in enhancing the China-Africa community than African counterparts who tend to perceive China-Africa cooperation as the main avenue to attract worldwide partnerships. The findings have some practical implications for discourse construction in the Belt and Road Initiative context and shed light on the evolving nature of advertising discourse, particularly in the China-Africa win-win business context.