Volume 8,Issue 9
Semiotic Rhetoric in Chinese and U.S. Environmental Public Service Advertising under the SDG Framework: A Comparative Study
Using the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as an analytical framework and Saussurean semiotics as its theoretical basis, this study compares selected Chinese and U.S. environmental public service advertisements (PSAs). Official CCTV/China Media Group advertisements and Conservation International’s Nature Is Speaking campaign are examined through four dimensions: linguistic, color, image, and auditory signs. The analysis shows that both sets of advertisements use multimodal coordination and objective visual representation to translate abstract sustainability goals into concrete environmental meanings. Chinese advertisements tend to use affirmative, everyday, and collectivist rhetoric, with brighter and warmer visual strategies and action-oriented narration. The U.S. cases more often adopt personification, warning-oriented language, lower-lightness imagery, and reflective narration to stress human dependence on nature. These differences are interpreted in relation to broader cultural and communication-context tendencies rather than as fixed national traits. The study highlights how SDG-related environmental communication can be adapted to different cultural contexts while maintaining a shared sustainability agenda.
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