From a war of defense to conventional wars

Abstract The present longitudinal study investigates how the entailments of war metaphors evolve in different stages of COVID-19 containment in China using data from three documentaries made by Xinhua News Agency. A social semiotic model of multimodal metaphor analysis is adopted to analyze the military metaphors systematically in terms of semantic choice, multimodal realization, and context. The war framing is found as the pivotal rhetoric to conceptualize China’s response toward COVID-19 but distinctive features are attributed over time with a focus shifting from the “inevitability” in the initial stage to societal reactions in the later stage. In addition, socio-cultural factors embodied in multimodality not only efficiently guide the public to reason about the situation but also socialize the population to self-disciplining for the sake of everyone’s interest.