Only business, no politics: a triangulated discursive analysis of business newsletters of China’s Belt and Road on domestic social media

Business newsletters disseminated via Chinese social media serve as a strategic instrument for the Chinese government to communicate domestically about the accomplishments of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (B&R). While prior studies have explored the international portrayal of the B&R and the traditional functions of business newsletters, a significant gap remains in understanding how these newsletters operate within China’s internal social media landscape. This study thus has explored the discursive mechanisms utilized by such newsletters, demystifying their genre-specific characteristics and communicative strategies of legitimization in practice. It integrated text mining techniques and critical discourse analysis within the digital humanities paradigm, adopting a triangulated mixed-methods approach to analyze 96 (bi)weekly reports on overseas projects undertaken by Chinese enterprises between 2021 and 2022. First, the corpus-based text analysis identified the central topic and subtopics in enterprise project operations. Second, the genre-based move analysis further revealed a consistent structural pattern with three obligatory moves, one conventional move, and one optional move. Business newsletters with simpler move structures were found to engage audiences more effectively. Last, the ideology-based discursive strategy analysis identified centralization, intersubjectification, and rationalization as key strategies used to legitimize China’s global initiatives. To sum up, this study highlights how the professionalization of political communication through business newsletters effectively conveys strategic messages in a seemingly neutral manner as “only business and no politics”. It also provides practical insights into the broader application of such strategies in other potential areas, such as green and health communication.