This book presents a social semiotic analysis of Chinese universities’ identity construction on Weibo within the framework of register typology, which differentiates seven primary types of socio-semiotic processes. The dataset comprises 1,035 Weibo posts collected from nine influential official university accounts in the past few years. The book makes both theoretical and practical contributions to multimodal discourse analysis and communication studies. Theoretically, it provides a systematic social semiotic study of the under-explored institutional identity on social media, thereby expanding the scope of multimodal discourse studies. In practice, it helps universities understand what identities they have constructed, enabling them to better deal with fierce competition amid globalization and marketization. More importantly, it offers an insightful perspective on university branding on social media in the Chinese context.

Enyao Li is Associate Professor at the School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, China. He holds a doctoral degree from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests include multimodal discourse analysis and communication studies. His work has been published in journals such as Social Semiotics, Discourse Studies, English for Specific Purposes, and Critical Arts.