Abstract
China is committed to the environmental protection since Xi Jinping’s come-into- power. “Beautiful China” is an initiative proposed in 2012 by the Communist Party of China, which was integrated into China’s five-year development goal by president Xi Jinping. And in 2017, Xi stressed the importance of constructing beautiful China. Conceptual metaphor is a vital tool to convey people’s thought and attitude, which have aroused substantial interest from modern language studies and research. This study addresses the gap in understanding how conceptual metaphors shape ecological discourse in Chinese media, particularly around the theme of “beautiful China.” Despite the growing prominence of ecological concerns in China, there has been limited research on the types and functions of metaphors that influence public perception and policy framing in ecological narratives. By employing a critical metaphor analysis approach, this study investigates ecological discourses in Chinese news articles. The results reveal five dominant conceptual metaphors—Journey, Building, Money, Body, and Kin—that are identified through a corpus-assisted approach and the application of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) and Steen’s method. These findings emphasize the strategic role of metaphors in shaping ecological discourse, offering insights into the conceptual metaphors’ functions used in Chinese media. The government’s environmental ideology is reflected in the way metaphors persuade the public to support environmental protection, highlighting China’s commitment to building an ecologically balanced nation.

Keywords: Conceptual metaphor, Critical discourse analysis, Ecological news discourses, Beautiful China initiative.