Search

This article explores Alicia Little’s presentation of foot-bound women in her travelogues and periodical essays. Her exploration of the anti-footbinding movement saw the dissemination of Western feminist ideas in China. However, as the article demonstrates, this cross-cultural exchange was a dominantly Western feminist movement compromised by an enlightenment project based on the notion of modern womanhood or colonial modernity. To understand the background, the article gives an overview of the history of footbinding, followed by the representation of foot-bound women in Little’s travelogues to unpack the idea of modern womanhood. Her presentation of Christianity offers important clues to understanding her writings on the anti-footbinding movement. This article also explores how Little presents her feminist and Christian ideas of modern womanhood, that are at odds with the traditional Chinese womanhood. In contextualizing Little’s role in the anti-footbinding movement, this paper reveals the complicated dynamics between Western feminism, the patriarchal Chinese society, and foot-bound women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that significant differences between China and the USA manifest in the models of discourse interaction utilised in news reporting. Focusing on Google's departure, the paper compares the processes of interaction found in The New York Times and China Daily in reporting on the event. The approach of critical discourse analysis is adopted for the analysis, in which layers of both textual and contextual analysis are performed. It is found that the two newspapers utilise distinct discourse strategies which employ quite different models of discourse interaction, and that these different interaction models may bring about further conflicts and misunderstanding between China and the rest of the world. The paper concludes by advocating a multiculturalist approach in building better dialogue and interaction models for future communication between different cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the interrelationship between the implementation of language policies and the development of cultural soft power in contemporary China by examining the Party-State's utterances concerning these two policy areas. China's official discourse on soft power enhancement shows that the Chinese leadership is targeting the domestic audience with the promotion of a higher level of faith in Chinese culture. In recent years, China's language policy has featured among cultural policies promoted by the government with the aim of enhancing the role of culture as part of the country's soft power. Ties between language planning and the concept of cultural soft power in this discourse are drawn out by sketching the regulatory framework of the former, the characteristics of the latter, and their relationships with China's language practices. Aiming to contribute to the discussion regarding China's language policy from the perspective of cultural soft power, this paper reflects on the Party-State's vision of the dissemination of Putonghua and the harmonisation of China's language life as cultural capital resources and explores the motives for the adoption of this dominant narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nanjing Imperial Examination Museum of China is founded upon the historical remnants of Jiangnan Gongyuan (Jiangnan Imperial Examination Hall) and the enduring heritage of the Chinese Imperial Examination System. This system, prevalent for over a millennium, interwove state interests with individual aspirations through Confucian education. Within this context, Jiangnan Gongyuan served as a state agency that projected dreams of order and authority. The dreams continued in the contemporary Chinese Dream discourse of national rejuvenation, seamlessly integrated into the logistical narrative structure of the Nanjing Imperial Examination Museum of China. This article draws on primary sources from archival materials, interviews, visitors' reviews, and fieldwork data to illustrate the ongoing logistical manifestation, complemented by current curation and spatial strategies of the museum. Beyond the logistical framework, this paper proposes an alternative approach to viewing the intricate roles of museum curators within Chinese national/provincial museums. These roles include three-dimensional functionalities: logistical agents displaying diffusive state authority, cultural institutions balancing ideological propaganda with commercial profits, and public spaces encouraging widespread engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a critical review of Nye's conceptualization of soft power, this paper extends the literature by examining how Chinese diplomatic actors deploy cultural soft-power discursive practices when publishing opinion pieces in the British press to construct the attractiveness of China. It conducts a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. Findings show that they strategically deploy charm offensive, defensive denial and Othering offensive to construct a distinctively positive Chinese Self and a positive Us as inclusive as possible under the influence of ideological square. The identified major topoi are characterized by imbuing China's foreign policies and its world vision with Chinese traditional cultural and moral values, hopefully to justify China's extensive use of the economic prowess to gain soft power, and justify its ability and incentive to play a more important role in global governance. It sheds some light on understanding Chinese diplomatic actors' distinctive cultural soft-power mediated discursive practices in the general context of a non-Western government communicating and engaging with Western audiences. It also contributes to the understanding of China's strategic thinking and its world vision in the Xi Jinping era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper used the corpus-based critical discourse analysis to explore China's image represented in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) mainstream English newspapers between 2010 and 2020. Findings show that China is usually reported in a very positive light. Cooperation is the main tone of diplomatic relations between China and the GCC. They have signed a series of strategic cooperation agreements and memorandums of understanding to strengthen a comprehensive and long-term bilateral strategic partnership. Moreover, China is depicted as the GCC's important trading partner, which is very strong in the economic power and plays an important role in the world economic system. A strong economic complementarity and the historical friendly relations between the two sides are the main contributing factors for the positive representations of China in their mainstream English newspapers. However, the stereotyped "China as a Demon" image in the Western media is occasionally constructed in the GCC English newspapers because of the Western news agencies' domination of the flow of international news through the Arab media and private ownership of the daily newspapers in the GCC states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts a corpus-based critical discourse study of the representations of the National Congresses of the Communist Party of China (NCCPC) in China Daily (CD) and The New York Times (NYT) in the past two decades. It is found that the shared keywords in the CD corpus and NYT corpus tend to suggest different discursive constructions of the same event in different social-political contexts. The different representations of the NCCPC can be revealed in the three types of discourse-historical discursive strategies (referential or nomination strategies, predicational strategies, and perspectivation strategies). CD prefers to construct the NCCPC as important political events and brand China's political system, China's contribution to world stability and prosperity in reporting the events. By contrast, NYT tends to construct them as events of power transfer and point towards criticisms of China's political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tensions between artistic production and state policy have attracted scholarly attention for more than half a century, especially in the subcultural field. In 2017, a hip-hop talent show—The Rap of China brought Chinese hip-hop music and rappers to the spotlight. Hip-hop was a marginal subcultural form in China where the right form of culture should positively influence the society. However, direct censorship towards hip-hop music is not ideal and even ends up with an opposite effect. The hip-hop talent show is a touchstone for an alternative cultural policy from the central government. When media and the market call for more personalities, hip-hop music finally gains power and becomes mainstream. Nonetheless, its legitimate position is not secured and confronts continuous struggles from the state policy and accusations of not "keeping real". Syncretizing arguments on power, empowerment, and censorship of media and politics in China, this article examines the dynamic and nuanced position of hip-hop music and rappers around 2017. This paper argues that conditioned incorporation and commercialization are alternative forms of censorship for hip-hop music in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By offering his interpretation of local movies set in Taipei, Fredric Jameson sought to enrich his postmodern culture theory by further examples. Specifically, Jameson thought there is a major discrepancy between the narrative reflected in the movie Terrorizers filmed in 1986 and the original indigenous narrative about Taiwan, which led to the failure of interpreting the movie based on the indigenous narrative and introduced the postmodern context about the narratives of Taipei. However, his conclusions are not quite convincing, and his choice of interpretive parameters, i.e. mainland movies and western literature, are quite distant from the Taipei experience. To truly understand Taipei's modernity, three discussions are put forward in this paper. First, the author follows Jameson's logic of arguments and discovers that his conclusions were based on the texts of the west and mainland China. Second, the author remaps Taipei in the dual contexts of the globalization trend and the historical experiences of Taiwan itself. Third, after re-examining Jameson's unique but incomplete and biased views of remapping Taipei, the author indicates that the movie Terrorizers is not merely a postmodern narrative about Taipei, but a special narrative based on a mixed context of Chineseness, indigenization, modernity, and postmodernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of papers in the current issue about modern Chinese identities with topics including radicalism in the late Qing Chinese press debate, media representations of China, and Chinese identities in films.

Utilising critical discourse analysis with corpus-assisted methods of analysis, this study examines the representation of China by English-language newspapers in China versus media in the UK. The study focuses on the linguistic realisation of attitudinal meanings in news reports about the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) Initiative. A sample of news reports by China Daily and Financial Times, dated between March 2015 and March 2016, was collected. Assisted by the corpora and corpus software AntConc and ConcGram, the study first investigated themes from the headlines and key paragraphs in the corpora of China Daily and Financial Times and then compared the classification scheme of the lexis using the concordance lines of key concepts in the Belt and Road Initiative in the two corpora. It was found that China Daily, like other Chinese mainstream media, has attempted to emphasise the initiative's positive attributes and construct positive images of China as a peace-loving nation, an international cooperator, and an emerging global economic and responsible power. Images of China as represented in Financial Times are mixed and conflicting: on Utilising critical discourse analysis with corpus-assisted methods of analysis, this study examines the representation of China by English-language newspapers in China versus media in the UK. The study focuses on the linguistic realisation of attitudinal meanings in news reports about the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) Initiative. A sample of news reports by China Daily and Financial Times, dated between March 2015 and March 2016, was collected. Assisted by the corpora and corpus software AntConc and ConcGram, the study first investigated themes from the headlines and key paragraphs in the corpora of China Daily and Financial Times and then compared the classification scheme of the lexis using the concordance lines of key concepts in the Belt and Road Initiative in the two corpora. It was found that China Daily, like other Chinese mainstream media, has attempted to emphasise the initiative's positive attributes and construct positive images of China as a peace-loving nation, an international cooperator, and an emerging global economic and responsible power. Images of China as represented in Financial Times are mixed and conflicting: on the one hand, China is portrayed as having a significant impact on the global economy; on the other hand, images of China as an authoritarian state, a militant and obstructive force, and a geopolitical threat prevail. The paper concludes with a recommendation that China continues to develop a locally grounded and globally minded media practice, in parallel with its renewed efforts to underline the power of Chinese culture in national development and international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the current discursive and cultural governance of China by examining President Xi Jinping's political discourse. It examines three key topics in Xi's discourse of governance: comprehensively deepening reform, the anti-corruption drive, and the new normal economy. The analysis shows how cultural and discursive resources are integrated to facilitate the governance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The integration of these two types of resources constitutes a distinctive type, or "brand", of the CCP's governance in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jin Yong was a successful martial arts fiction writer in China who had 15 prestigious works published. He created a fantasy world of wuxia for numerous Sinophone and non-Sinophone readers. Despite cultural and linguistic differences, four of Jin Yong's works were translated into English. In the translation and international circulation of Jin Yong's work, the contributions of the author, translators, and publishers—the three major cultural active agents in the transnational literary field—should be noted. By referencing Bourdieu's concept of capital, this study utilizes descriptive and explanatory methods to identify the author–translator–publisher relationship and observe how these agents interact by leveraging their capital, so as to improve the international recognition of Jin Yong's works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the rise of China in the international sphere, Chinese discourse has received more and more attention from scholars of various disciplines. A bibliometric analysis maps the landscape of Chinese discourse studies (1994–2021) from the Web of Science, mainly concerning its research productivity, research focus and research impact, to investigate contemporary and future trends through co-authorship, co-occurrence, co-citation and citation analysis respectively. Studies on Chinese discourse were found to expand continuously. Discourse analysts are increasingly interested in media discourse, political discourse, regional discourse (especially Hong Kong and Taiwan) by adopting corpus approach with various analytical frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study has conducted a diachronic analysis of law and order metaphors in a self-compiled corpus of China's Government Work Reports (CGWR) over a span of 22 years (2000–2021). By mapping target domains with source domains, we categorized four major types of legal metaphors, including building, physical object, journey, and living being, among which physical object was overwhelmingly predominant. Our analysis suggests metaphorical expressions that highlight physicality more than specificity will constantly remain in use because the stability and universality of such metaphors are conducive to the dissemination and reinforcement of legal thoughts. Additionally, there is a direct correlation between legal metaphors and the government's economic, political, and social concerns, as evidenced by increasing attention paid to various security issues and new challenges in China. Given that the rule of law with Chinese characteristics becomes more institutionally recognized and systematically theorized, legal metaphors are implemented in a top-down manner to justify the exercise of power in CGWRs, making Chinese people identified with the governing philosophy and further contributing to the ideological construction of discourse. This study is thus conducive to a general but insightful understanding of how political stances are embodied and reinforced persuasively in discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As China's narratology studies begin to draw attention from international scholarship, this article aspires to map the current development of narratology in China with the main focus on renowned Chinese narratologists such as Dan Shen, Biwu Shang, Xiuyan Fu, and Weisheng Tang. In particular, this article seeks to comb the Chinese narrative research underpinned by and further contributing to the tenets of Western narratology, as well as to scrutinize the thriving schools of Chinese narratology that take Chinese narrative as its main concern. Based on a review of the situations of narratology in China, especially during this decade, this article concludes with tentative suggestions for the future evolution of narratology in China, and looks forward to the future when narratology with unique Chinese nationality can be widely recognized by the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies theSouth China Morning Post (SCMP)in British colonial Hong Kong. To be viable and profitable in the Hong Kong media market,SCMPhad to meet the various needs of its Chinese and British readership, and in so doing, formed a combined reporting strategy. For example, British readers were serious sports fans so theSCMPendeavoured to be the preeminent newspaper to target a wealthy readership obsessed with lawn bowls. Chinese readers were generally merchants who were concerned about their businesses in China and Hong Kong. Although the Hong Kong government applied strict censorship against the Chinese press,SCMPwas uniquely free, consequently, it could publish sensitive and important events that Chinese subscribers desired to read about and comment upon. The Chinese could express their concerns and attempt to mould the opinions of others. While the Chinese had limited influence on the British colonial government,SCMPplayed an important role in improving Chinese readers’ freedom of expression and their social position in the course of consensus building in Hong Kong. In this manner,SCMPhad an economic, political and social function in the making of Hong Kong in the first half of the 20thcentury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power transition creates distinct social discourses, forming new identities in the process. This article takes the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) as an epoch-making historical event and features the transformation of practices and power plays within the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra (SSO), the oldest symphony orchestra in Asia, before and after the PRC (from the 1920s to the early 1950s). This article aims to understand the transition of political power and subsequent identity negotiation within music and the broader context in Shanghai and China. The SSO was initially established by and catered for Western settlers in Shanghai. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took over Mainland China in 1949, it first purified the SSO's ethnicity. Due to Sino-Soviet relations, the SSO was used as cultural diplomacy to reaffirm China's position in the socialist bloc. Materials for this research are mainly collected from the SSO Archive and Shanghai Municipal Archive, generally overlooked by existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast with the vital role China has played in global climate governance in recent years, it is rare to see the research on its foreign-language media representation of this issue. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, this study examines how China's flagship English-language newspaper China Daily communicates climate change (2010–2019) to international audiences and how it represents China and the US as well as China–US relations regarding climate issues. Results show that through the use of specific modalities and other collocates of China and the US, the newspaper constructs China as a responsible major country and the US as a capricious and self-centered nation while emphasizing the importance of their cooperation on climate actions. The ways it represents this issue can be interpreted with regard to pragmatism and the China Dream of national rejuvenation endorsed by the Chinese government. To have a stable environment for sustainable development of China and the whole world, China is willing to avoid confrontation and work together with the US and other countries in combating climate change though competition may remain in such related fields as green energy, as indicated by China Daily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the role of personal pronouns we and they in building a community with a shared future in President Xi Jinping's 61 diplomatic texts from 2013 to 2018. Adopting systemic functional linguistics and positive discourse analysis, the complementarity instead of opposition of the two personal pronouns are discussed under a holistic view with diverse category relations generated through ambiguous use (i.e. inclusion and exclusion) to explain how the community is discursively construed. The "Self/Other" dichotomy is replaced by a cline with we and they intertwined. The wandering use within and across each personal pronoun in the discourse contributes to the construction of the community with a shared future on four different levels, i.e. that for Chinese nation, for two countries, for a region and for mankind, with contextual consideration examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an important part of soft power, a good national image will help promote international exchanges and cooperation, exert international influence, and realize self-development interests. Based on this foundation, this article aims to sort out the relevant literature on Chinese media image construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of Chinese questions in Western literary theories in the twentieth century gets under way with the problem awareness to overcome the anxiety of the Westernization of Chinese questions, and then further uncovers the complex relationships between Western literary theories and Chinese questions. To this end, it is a must to comprehensively update the research methods of dialogism in Chinese and Western literary theories: transcend the "The western impact, China's response" mode, adopt the "China's demand, China's option" mode; transcend the unidirectional "The western influence, China's reception" mode, adopt the bidirectional "detour-access East–West" mode; and transcend the "comparison-opposition East–West" mode, adopt the "dialogue-consensus East–West" mode. Based upon the understanding of "vision dislocation" and "unequal dialogic relationship", I intend to help carry out joint discussions between Chinese and Western literary theories on the platform of Chinese questions, and establish a dialogue mechanism between Chinese and Western literary theories by "make the (research) objects voice themselves". "Studying China via the world" is the whole point of Chinese questions in Western literary theories in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western scholars of Chinese narrative concern themselves with many areas of traditional Chinese narrative and fiction criticism. Yet studies of the basic concepts of Chinese narrative categorized in both Chinese context and Western contexts attest their different points of departure. Chinese narrative is, to some degree, heterogeneous when compared to most of Western narrative theories. Western scholars' evaluation of Chinese narrative leaves no doubt that Western narrative theories can partly fit in with modern Chinese narrative, but less with the studies of traditional Chinese narrative. In this sense, a fairly coherent interpretation of Chinese narrative can be made based on Chinese narrative tradition rather than Western theoretical assumptions. Through a brief review of Western scholars' viewpoints on traditional Chinese narrative, fiction criticism and the relationship between Buddhism and Chinese narrative tradition, the author examines the differentiation of the speciality of Chinese narrative from that of Western narrative theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores city branding and the contested domains of cosmopolitanism in Shanghai in the early 21st century. It argues that the state-led refashioning of Shanghai as China's global gateway city has been a process less concerned with articulating an ethical stance of hospitality than with re-affirming the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and attracting inward foreign investment. Shanghai cosmopolitanism becomes associated with a certain style-fashionable, civilised, and international-and anything seen as contrary to this may be repudiated as an affront to the city's cosmopolitan image. An analysis of Kevin Kai Huang's 2008 film Park Shanghai explores the experience of the cosmopolitan subject within the modern city, suggesting that the promotion of Shanghai as a touristic playground may engender feelings of rootlessness and defamiliarisation. The 2013 protests surrounding the development of the Yongkang Lu bar strip are examined as a contestation of such defamiliarisation. As a performative call to renegotiate the terms of hospitality offered by the cosmopolitan city, the protests appropriated the symbolic language of the hegemonic cosmopolitan brand. Such sites of contestation reveal the everyday lived strategies, and vernacular responses to the dominant branding of the city, that may constitute a new Shanghai cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting a social constructivist approach to discourse, this study investigates multiple images of the Mutianyu Great Wall as constructed by three key stakeholders, namely domestic tourists, the business operator, and the government regulator. The data consist of 7, 466 online travel reviews from two Chinese travel websites, www.lvmama.com and www.ctrip.com, an interview with an administrator of the business operator of the Mutianyu Great Wall and the government document Regulations on the Protection of the Great Wall. The data analysis is based mainly on quantitative (word frequency count) and qualitative discourse semantics. The research has found that domestic tourists visiting the Great Wall are far more impressed by the modern facilities and services than by its history and culture, with a small number of travel reviews expressing high admiration of this world wonder. The business operator primarily uses the site as a tourist attraction and raised several practical problems concerning protection of the Great Wall. In contrast, the government regulator places great emphasis on aspects of heritage preservation. The study considers the complex interrelationship between the three stakeholders and accounts for their conflicting objectives. The study contributes to the field of cultural heritage tourism studies by developing a crossdisciplinary discourse framework and also suggests research implications for studying cultural heritage tourism and China's image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hollywood's classic white saviour narrative used to tell the tale of a white man's chivalrous rescue of a Chinese woman during his adventure in the exotic East. Prescribed by the West's Orientalist discourse about China, the cinematic tale establishes the cultural, hierarchical and gendered relationship of the East–West encounter, and the often-submissive Chinese woman character satisfies popular Western imagination of a primitive China. The classic paradigm is reinvented inPavilion of Women(2001) andThe Flowers of War(2011), two controversial Chinese films made around and after China's entry into World Trade Organisation in 2001. Embedded within a network of capitalist exchange, transnational flows of talents and aesthetic appropriations, both films utilise Hollywood's white saviour formula in respective ways to bring Chinese stories to global audiences. Nonetheless, the conventional storyline of the white hero's rescue of Chinese women is constantly intertwined with, or interrupted by, the description of charismatic Chinese women characters amidst warfare and revolution, purporting to a feminist-nationalist potentiality that might counter the Hollywood construction. Conscientious Chinese efforts to intervene in Western cinematic discourses have led to narrative ambiguities and obscure the distinction between the local and the global, the individual and the collective, interracial romance and national allegory. By situatingPavilion of WomenandThe Flowers of Warwithin the framework of constructing a 'new' image of China for global audiences, this article argues that the ambivalent reinvention of Hollywood's white saviour tale in contemporary Chinese cinema is emblematic of a cultural anxiety to assimilate China's nationalist discourses into an all-embracing global consumerism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents findings of a narrative analysis of the lateral use of models by Chinese public opinion generators to shape the behaviours of the people. It begins with lexical, sociological and narratological explanations of the meaning of a Chinese model, before presenting a general introduction of Chinese models as a phenomenon, including the hype usually involved in their making and propagating. It then proceeds to a narrative analysis of the singular good-sounding story usually told by Chinese models. The focus of the article, though, is a narrative case study based on a prolonged search for a model named Cadeer, an ethnic Uyghur from Xinjiang Autonomous Region and on his deferred final discovery. From this, the author presents several arguments. First, Cadeer does not tell a typical good-sounding story. Second, not retelling the good-sounding story deferred his final discovery. Third, his deferred but eventual rise to modeldom is an indication of the continued obsession with the use of models for mass persuasion in China, a sign of changing times and of the changing media environment in the country, as well as a reflection of its ever-intensifying interethnic tension. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to examine the discursive structure of 'soft power' in China, its cultural, historical and political backgrounds and the role the mass media play in mediating its meanings. Conceptualised within critical discourse analysis, this study assesses soft power discourse as a form of articulating traditional values on the part of China's political and intellectual elites, as well as views about China's future directions. Specifically, it focuses on three levels of analysis: 1) a description of the language of 'soft power'; 2) an interpretation of soft power as an institutional practice; and 3) an explanation of the broad socio-political dynamics that shape the discourse of soft power. The article concludes with an initial evaluation of the significance and implications of the soft power discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]