Thesis title: Per un’analisi critica del discorso politico cinese: la "multipolarizzazione" nel dibattito accademico e istituzionale della RPC agli inizi degli anni Duemila
This study examines the discourse articulated, within both political and academic contexts, by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in relation to the concept of “multipolarisation” (duojihua 多极化), reconstructing its principal lines of theoretical articulation and identifying its fundamental structural features. The analysis, which spans the early 2000s to 2012, identifies this period as a phase of particular intellectual intensity and elaborative density, during which the category of “multipolarisation” was progressively systematised, acquiring greater conceptual coherence and a more pronounced strategic projection. Against the backdrop of a Western scholarly literature predominantly focused on formulations developed under the leadership of Xi Jinping, this research instead foregrounds the preceding period, advancing the hypothesis that many of the current trajectories of Chinese foreign policy constitute re-elaborations and sedimentations of conceptual cores that had already emerged during the Hu Jintao–Wen Jiabao era (2002–2012), as is notably the case with “multipolarisation”. In order to investigate this concept, the study draws upon a corpus of original Chinese-language sources originating from both academic and institutional settings, with the aim of capturing the intersections and reciprocal influences between theoretical production and official political discourse. The methodological framework combines the quantitative approach of Corpus Linguistics (CL) with the qualitative Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), situated within Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), thereby enabling an analysis of the ways in which “multipolarisation” is constructed, legitimised, and progressively stabilised as an interpretative category of the international order. The study ultimately seeks to provide a systematic reconstruction of the constitutive elements of “multipolarisation” as elaborated in Beijing, their diachronic evolution, and the symbolic and strategic implications associated with the PRC’s international projection in the context of the early 2000s.