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The term “ wanghong women” has been in a state of flux in China’s public discourse since its inception in 2015. In particular, the COVID-19, while causing major economic setbacks across the world, has, to some extent, boosted the growth of the wanghong industry and altered public attitude towards wanghong women in China. Against this background, this study aims to investigate how wanghong women are linguistically represented in the six leading official English language newspapers in China. A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of 156 English news articles (i.e., 140,931 words), covering the years between 2015 and 2022, was conducted. The study revealed a significant attitudinal shift in the editorial stance on China’s wanghong women phenomenon since the COVID-19 epidemic: the semantic prosodies of the word “ wanghong ” has shifted from women who are stereotypically young, fashionable, and attract online attention by using pretty face and sexualized body shape to women who can boost the national digital economy, contribute to the state’s agenda of rural regeneration, and help spread timely instructions regarding the pandemic. The findings shed new light on the evolving Chinese gender politics which is shaped by the entangled forces of traditional patriarchy, commercialization, and the government’s crisis management strategies during the pandemic.

This paper investigates the representation of social values and their ontogenetic development in English as a foreign language textbooks in Hong Kong. Adopting a social semiotic approach, it considers social values in textbooks as semantic categories which are constructed by complex semiotic discursive resources, and develops an explicit framework to model what values are selected and how the values are constructed. Analysis of 19 textbooks from Primary 1 to Secondary 4-6 shows that the social values change from the personal domain (e.g. good hygiene and healthy lifestyle), through the interpersonal domain (e.g. politeness and respect), to the altruistic concern for all mankind. The result also suggests that the textbooks are more concerned with the didactic education of good citizens than with cultivating children's critical thinking. The analytical framework and the findings can be used for the explicit instruction and critical analysis of social values in English language teaching.

This paper investigates the representation of social values and their ontogenetic development in English as a foreign language textbooks in Hong Kong. Adopting a social semiotic approach, it considers social values in textbooks as semantic categories which are constructed by complex semiotic discursive resources, and develops an explicit framework to model what values are selected and how the values are constructed. Analysis of 19 textbooks from Primary 1 to Secondary 4–6 shows that the social values change from the personal domain (e.g. good hygiene and healthy lifestyle), through the interpersonal domain (e.g. politeness and respect), to the altruistic concern for all mankind. The result also suggests that the textbooks are more concerned with the didactic education of good citizens than with cultivating children's critical thinking. The analytical framework and the findings can be used for the explicit instruction and critical analysis of social values in English language teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]