China's Contemporary Image and Rhetoric Practice presents an overview of Chinese diplomatic rhetoric, exploring how the image of China is depicted through a Western lens and introducing a profound shift in domestic perspectives of this image. This reader reveals new sites for Chinese rhetoric to deepen scholarship in the relevant studies of Chinese literature, Chinese discourse analysis, Chinese sociology, Chinese politics and so on. These chapters have been cherry-picked for their contributions to the field, and may facilitate the expanding development of Chinese studies. This book is a valuable reference for scholars, researchers and graduate or postgraduate students in Chinese linguistic and social studies.

Using political discourse analysis, this book examines the extent to which the salient approaches of previous leadership generations have translated into present day policies shepherded in by Xi Jinping. On the strategic political level, the book includes comparisons of China's recent leadership periods with a focus on Xi Jinping's era, and contains examples of whether and how specific topics and tactics reoccur across generations. The state development strategy section then goes on to include chapters on shaping China’s strategic narratives, neoliberal discourse within state developmentalism, and keyword evolution. The practical policies part looks at the issues of re-education, health, class, and ethnicity, analysing how the leaders talk about China’s poor, frame the representations of megaprojects on social media, and discursively display diplomatic strength. As a study of the rule of Xi Jinping and the rhetoric of the contemporary Chinese political system, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Chinese politics and political science more broadly.

This book challenges the existing misconception that there was no rhetoric in ancient China. Instead, this book provides ample evidence from public speeches in the Xia dynasty and oracle bone inscriptions in the Shang dynasty to public debates about government policies in the Han dynasty to show that persuasive discourse and rudimentary rhetorical techniques already existed in ancient China. Using literary analysis and discourse analysis methods, this book explains how the Mandate of Heaven was inscribed at the core of Chinese rhetoric and has guided Chinese thoughts and expressions for centuries. This book also demonstrates Chinese rhetorical wisdom by extracting many concepts and terms related to language expression, persuasive speech, morality and virtue, life and philosophy, and so on from great Chinese literary works. Well-known names, such as Confucius, Laozi, Sima Qian, Liu Xie, Mozi, Hanfeizi, Guibuzi and so on, are all touched upon with their famous theory and sayings related to and explicated from the rhetorical perspective. Many surprising facts are found by the author and revealed in the book. For example, a thousand years ago, the Chinese author Liu Xie already found that all words have preferred lexical neighbors and structural environment. This is later on ‘discovered’ by corpus linguistics and illustrated, for example, by the concepts of collocation and pattern grammar. This book targets postgraduate students, teachers, researchers and scholars interested in advanced Chinese language and Chinese literature, history, and culture.

This book explores China’s currency wars with its trading partners in four Western newsmagazines: Time, The Economist, L’Express, and Der Spiegel. Based on both quantitative and qualitative approaches, the interdisciplinary approach adopted in the research draws on two analytical frameworks from the realm of critical discourse analysis – van Leeuwen’s socio-semantic inventory of social-actor representation, and van Dijk’s concepts of macro-rules – as the overarching approaches to understand the changing dynamics of international relations and the global economy through Western media. The sample in this study consists of 160 texts, half of which are focused on China and the other half on Japan, across a period of 12 months in 2010 (China) and in 1987 (Japan). Through the comparison of Western representation between China and Japan, the similarities and differences in their coverage have been revealed as even more striking with regards to global politics and the international economy. The findings obtained from the empirical research have revealed that China was not only reported more unfavourably than Japan in terms of depth, but also across a broader range of areas spanning economics, politics, and military affairs. It has also emerged that all the four Western newsmagazines tended to centre their coverage on the US and China in 2010, and the US and Japan in 1987, although they did not speak in one collective voice with regard to their coverage of China and Japan.

The Language of Nation-State Building in Late Qing China investigates the linguistic and intellectual roots of China’s modern transformation by presenting a systematic study of the interplay between language innovation and socio-political upheavals in the final decade of the Qing Dynasty. This book examines the formations, internal tensions, and promotion of such macroconcepts as ‘nation people’ (guomin 国民), nation (minzu 民族), society (qun 群), state (guojia 国家) and revolution (gemin 革命) as novel ideas borrowed from Europe but mediated through Meiji Japan. Using corpus-based discourse analysis of the full-text corpus (4.2 million words) of the two most influential periodicals, Xinmin Congbao (新民丛报) and Minbao (民报), this book scrutinises the multi-faceted formulations of these concepts and their impact. It underscores the adaptation and appropriation of European post-enlightenment values to the socio-political conditions of late Qing society. The analysis centres on the epic debate (1905-7) between these two periodicals that offered two distinctive visions of future China. Comparable to the great eighteenth-century debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine on the French Revolution, the Chinese debate has hitherto attracted little scholarly attention outside China. Yet it not only turned the tidal wave of public opinion against the Manchu monarchy and contributed to its downfall in 1911; it has also given rise to a radical undercurrent of intellectual thinking whose ramifications have been keenly felt throughout twentieth-century China. This book represents the first study in English on this press debate that contributes significantly to the intellectual foundation of modern China. This book will be useful and relevant to academics, postgraduate students and final year undergraduate students in the field of Chinese studies, and anyone interested in the role of language in shaping modern intellectual history.

As a country in transition, Chinese news discourse has quite distinctive characteristics, and more so given the power of state media in society. With China’s engagement in world affairs and its massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) now in place, Western media coverage of China has dramatically increased. Against this backdrop, news dissemination and discourse demonstrate a need for academia to give perspectives with interdisciplinary approaches. Chinese News Discourse presents original research from academics in China and the West, showing theoretical, methodological and practical dimensions between news media and discourse. The book focuses on Chinese news discourse by examining what new modern features it demonstrates in contrast and comparison to news discourses in other countries in the coverage of such hot topics as the BRI or the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China, just to name a few. This book is a useful resource for scholars and students of discourse, language, media and communication studies, as well as translation studies.

Language and Gesture in Chinese Conversation is a study of the semantic and temporal relationships between the speech and the gesture in the context of discourse interaction in Mandarin Chinese spoken in Taiwan. The cross-modal representation of ideas in natural discourse reveals the nature of BĬSHŎU-SHUŌHUÀ in the communication of meaning. The study addresses two central issues: • How do language and gesture represent the semantic information of various types of ideas? • How do the linguistic representation and gestural depiction pattern temporally in the communication of cross-modal information? The intended audience of this book are scholars in many academic fields, including linguistics, language and gesture, human communication, cognition, cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, sociology, linguistic anthropology, speech pathology, and speech therapy.