Abstract
China’s expanding role in the world economy and as a geopolitical actor calls for a better understanding of contemporary elite politics in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In this thesis, I analyse Chinese political language, and more specifically, I analyse formulations found in the CCP National Party Congress Reports from 1997 to 2017. My approach is to examine and link linguistic characteristics, political context, and language practices in order to contribute new perspectives on contemporary Chinese politics.My research combines linguistic analysis, a one-year fieldwork including interviews and gathering relevant information in China, and a broader methodological and theoretical discussion establishing linguistic-contextual analysis of contemporary CCP narratives as a promising approach for interpreting policy signals from the CCP. A significant finding with regard to the overall approach of the thesis, is that a linguisticcontextual study of Chinese politics contributes a separate perspective that gives different results compared to other perspectives, such the widely-used approach of focusing on the CCP’s degree of institutionalisation.
I examine how CCP political language is a separate register of Chinese language with a number of typical characteristics. These include, among others: fixed phrases, numbered slogans, numerous repetitions, and a tone of urgency. The language of National Party Congress Reports changes at a slow and gradual pace, and reports remain similar over changing leadership generations. Language changes in the Congress Reports over the last 20 years have mainly happened on a conceptual level, whereas the master narrative of the CCP’s role in Chinese politics is dominated by continuity rather than change.
In this thesis, an investigation into the ‘large’ context, i.e. domestic and international political influences on Chinese politics, contributes to explaining conceptual changes in the Reports. But analysis of the ‘close’ context, i.e. how the reports are written and who writes them, contributes to explaining the master narrative continuity. This contextual approach also complicates the question of agency in CCP Congress Reports. Are these documents the words of the CCP leader or of the ‘collective leadership’? I argue that the National Party Congress reports have a consultative process behind them that make them collective texts, but within a hierarchical system of decision-making.
The thesis is structured in the following way: Chapter 1 introduces the topic, the research questions, primary sources, and situates these sources in the Chinese political landscape. Chapter 2 explains the theoretical framework and gives an overview of methods and fieldwork results. Chapter 3 gives a literature review of research analysing Mao era political language, and draws lines to contemporary language. In this chapter, I suggest a new perspective on the possible origins of typical CCP language characteristics by applying Walter Ong’s work on oral and literate cultures and its effect on language. Chapter 4 focuses on changes over time with two specific case studies in the 2000s: 1) the use of ‘leadership generations’, and 2) the influence of the domestic and international political context on Hu Jintao era political language. Chapter 5 presents an in-depth analysis of a narrative device contributing strongly to continuity in the National Party Congress Reports: long-lasting metaphors. Chapter 6 examines the CCP practices of report drafting and how this process influences language use. Finally, in Chapter 7, I ask the ‘so what’ question and gather all the results of the previous chapters to give a new perspective on an on-going debate in Chinese politics: Does Xi Jinping’s new ‘strongman’ identity represent a break with the past? My main conclusion is that Xi Jinping’s leadership does not, as of yet, represent a break with the past from a perspective that takes into account the high status of documents in the CCP system and Xi’s continued use of linguistic norms inherited from earlier generations.
| Date of Award | 1 Dec 2019 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Benjamin Barratt (Supervisor), Kerry Brown (Supervisor) & Jennifer Altehenger (Supervisor) |