Lexico-Semantic and Syntactic Features of the Implementation of Defamation Tactics in the Digital Diplomacy of the People's Republic of China

The objective of this study is to analyze the lexical-semantic and syntactic features of the implementation of defamation tactics in the digital diplomacy of the People’s Republic of China within a specialized corpus of media texts derived from press conferences of the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2024–2025. To achieve the objective the authors set themselves a number of tasks: to review existing definitions of digital diplomacy in Russian-language academic literature; to examine classifications of communicative strategies in digital diplomacy; to compile a specialized corpus based on officially published transcripts of PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conferences, focusing on instances of the keyword 美国 ‘USA’; and to identify lexical-semantic and syntactic features of defamation tactics within the corpus in the context of mentions of the keyword 美国 ‘USA’. The results of the study confirm that defamation in the digital diplomacy of the PRC is not a random element, but a systematic strategy implemented through carefully selected vocabulary and linguapragmatic devices.

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