This book studies how changes in public discourse mirror the sociopolitical changes that have transformed everyday life in China over the past three-and-a-half decades of economic reform. The four chapters in Part 1, ‘Political discourse’, explore how such changes have been mediated to a remarkable degree through the controlled use of language in public discourse by China's authoritarian political elites. The four chapters in Part 2, ‘Media discourse’, follow an empirical approach to critical discourse analysis to examine how this political language is communicated, negotiated, and contested by the country's mass media.

Chapter 1 compares the discourse used by Mao Zedong to that of Jiang Zemin, who reaffirmed the rehabilitation of China's intelligentsia during the rapid modernization of 1990s by employing distinctive discursive tropes of evolution and innovation. Chapter 2 uses a discourse-historical methodology to examine the framework of political language used by the country's elites to legitimize policies and bolster social stability in the post-Tiananmen era. Chapter 3 studies the Chinese government's annual reports to the National People's Congress over a ten-year period (1998–2008), which focus on the evolutionary and transformative nature of major policy shifts, and which also serve to redefine and reinforce people's acceptance of the Party as the country's sole ruling party. Chapter 4 examines how the language projected by the mass media during the 2010 Shanghai World Exposition was designed to support the popular re-imagination of China's identity and to elevate China's reputation.

Chapter 5 traces the decline of Party journalism from the 1980s through the 2000s by identifying three alternative yet legitimate trends in political discourse. The chapter concludes by observing that while journalists tend to rely on their official status as part of the state apparatus in order to defend their authority and discursive power, they also struggle to establish a journalistic presence that is both public-centered and independent. Chapter 6 observes how the media response to the 1998 Yangtze River floods and the 2008 earthquake in Wenchuan served to frame contemporary historiography through forms of discourse that projected the image of a strong, unified, and centralized authority. Chapter 7 identifies a trend in media discourse toward ‘soft power’ messaging, which generates consensus, increases solidarity, and emphasizes common purpose as indicative of a gradual shift in the perceived role of media from the mouthpiece of the Party to that of the people. Chapter 8 explores how discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis are employed as social tools in China to recontextualize public discourse on key social and political issues into ‘foreign’ or ‘domestic’.

In summary, this book encompasses a wide range of perspectives from an international team of leading scholars on the subject of public discourse in modern China. It is a valuable resource for academics and students of Chinese culture, language, politics, and media.