This volume was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Language and Politics (9(4), 2010), and it is brought to a wider readership now as vol. 42 in the “Benjamins current topics” series. Paul Chilton, Hailong Tian, & Ruth Wodak offer reflections on discourse and critique in China and the West, and other Chinese and western contributors analyze the relationship between discourse and sociopolitical transformations in contemporary China and China's relationship to the world political system.

From the perspective of Natural History of Discourse and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Qing Zhang analyzes the entextualization of Chinese government discourses—especially the speeches of the former top leaders of the Communist Party of China, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao—on social stratification, which is subject to ongoing transformations. Yi Li records the interactions between officials and citizens at two Chinese government service offices and does a conversation analysis of the data to reveal how institutional power is reinforced through fixed procedures of questioning and speech acts of interrupting and blaming. It is pointed out that the institutional language and the underlying ideologies need to be transformed (39). Ngai-Ling Sum adopts the approach of Cultural Political Economy to analyze transnational knowledge branding (Harvard-Porter's “competitive advantage” and MIT-Berger-Lester's “industrial performance” models) and the production of hegemony so as to reveal how managerial methods are brought into the field of education policy and the conduct of its implementation in the Pearl River Delta.

Hailong Tian offers a case study of the promotional genre in university self-assessment discourse and the recontextualization of these promotional statements in the teaching quality assessment (TQA) reports by the assessing group. He studies the struggle of institutional power between the two parties and finds out that the TQA reports are greatly affected by the self-assessment of the university (85). Zeshun You, Jianping Chen, & Zhong-Hong adopt Teun A. van Dijk's cognitive version of CDA in a diachronic analysis of the Chinese Government's Annual Work Reports to the National People's Congress from 1993 to 2007. They focus on the change in Chinese foreign policy and the discursive construction of China's role in the world. Using Michel Foucault's theory, CDA, and narrative theory, Qing Cao makes a case study of the CCTV documentary series of The Rise of the Great Powers to reveal China's projection of its self-image and its position in the world and the official Chinese reinterpretation of western powers.

In this volume, along with some use of the Chinese tradition, new interpretative approaches are put forward that might contribute to the development of CDA. It is a very enlightening reference for researchers and graduate students who are interested in discourse analysis, communication studies, politics, and international relations, especially for those who do research on the social and political life and new discourses in contemporary China.