Chinese Language and Discourse - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2022

The paper examines how Chinese celebrities build rapport with their followers on social media, with a comparison between the Chinese mainland (on Weibo) and Hong Kong (on Facebook) celebrities. Rapport building is conceptualized as language use in promoting social bonding and emotional involvement and as achieved via at least two aspects: use of relational acts and choice of interactional features. Twelve months of postings by twelve most-followed Weibo and Facebook celebrities from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong in 2017 have been retrieved and analyzed. It is found that the prevalent relational acts commonly used by both Weibo and Facebook celebrities to build rapport with their followers include sharing information, retweeting information and directives, among others; and the commonly prevalent interactive features include the use of colloquialism, emoji & emoticons, and hashtags or @, and the like. Nonetheless, significant differences also exist in that while Weibo celebrities tend to use more acts of showing stance, Facebook celebrities use more acts of showing appreciation; Weibo celebrities tend to use more colloquialism, emoji & emoticons, and internet slang, Facebook celebrities tend to use more English codemixing and vernacular expressions. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion and explanation of the commonalities and differences between Weibo and Facebook celebrities.

This article examines trans-scripting in transnational, multilingual fandom on Sina Weibo, the largest Chinese microblogging site. Taking one of the most popular Korean pop music (K-pop) bands named BTS as a case study, 741 instances of trans-scripting were manually selected from a total of 18,243 comments under the official Weibo account of the largest BTS fan club in China. Combining online observation and corpus-based analysis, our study draws on the notions of engaged audience and affinity space to reveal how multiple patterns of trans-scripting are heavily mobilized by K-pop fans in translingual idol naming, the transcultural maintenance of fan-idol kinship, and the intertextual confirmation of shared media consumption experiences. We argue that trans-scripting is an under-explored linguistic strategy used by transnational pop-culture fans, providing an analytical lens for research on fan identity and fan-communal membership. Theoretically, trans-scripting can serve as a useful lens to analyze networked multilingual fandom.

‘Suiran danshi (‘although but’)’ used on Chinese social media is a novel variant of ‘suiran (‘although’)…danshi (‘but’)’, a typical pairing of adversative connectives in Mandarin Chinese. This article hypothesizes that ‘suiran danshi’ is a memetic expression resulting from pragmatic ellipsis and repeated use for special functions in the context of online communication. To verify this hypothesis, the authors collected data from Weibo and WeChat, two most widely used social media platforms in China, and analyzed the use of ‘suiran danshi’ in context. It is argued that as an elliptical form, ‘suiran danshi’ complies with the requirements of the Economy Principle and the Politeness Principle. As a meme, the emergence and popularity of the variant are ascribable to its special functions of teasing and facilitating social bonding, as well as to the vagueness of language use and the richness and complexity of cyber-context afforded by the Internet.

This study gives a corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS) of stancetaking in the public speeches of three former Chief Executives. Three large corpora have been built by collecting all the public speeches of the three former Chief Executives. It combines automatic semantic tagging with the tripartite analysis of stancetaking in terms of evaluation, positioning and (dis)alignment. The findings not only reveal their preferential ways of stancetaking but also the changing socio-political contexts behind their particular ways of stancetaking. It is argued that a combination of the methods and theories in critical discourse analysis, stancetaking, and corpus linguistics can generate more illuminating findings concerning stancetaking in political discourse.

This study explores the issue of multiculturalism in China’s journalism practice through the analysis of news coverage on the Sino-US trade war in China Daily (CD) and the South China Morning Post (SCMP). Following a corpus-based critical discourse analysis approach, the study compares thematic dimensions as well as recurring semantic patterns associated with them that denote two newspapers’ evaluative positioning. The findings reveal that CD’s reporting seems to be nationalistic-centric with overly positive representation of China’s practices and policies, while SCMP’s representation is multiculturalism-oriented with the representation of multiple discourses and articulation of competing and diversified viewpoints towards the evaluation of China’s market access and economic reform. The study concludes by recommending China’s official media practice continues to explore a multiculturalism approach to build dialogues with the international community in tandem with efforts made in promoting political, economic and cultural power.

Focusing on Liang Qichao’s campaign of national moral character reform, this article examines the discourse of xinmin (新民 new people) as a social engineering project that sought to remold the mindset and behaviors of the people a means of nation-building in the 1900s. Drawing on Koselleck’s idea of conceptual history, it analyses how the idea of qun (群) was deployed as a discursive building block of xinmin to cultivate a sense of membership in the political community of Chinese nation. It argues that the xinmin discourse facilitated a fundamental restructuring of the mental-cognitive framing of society in changing China from a Confucian cultural entity to a national political identity.

This paper investigates intellectual discourse in China during the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis through two discourse analyses, aiming to see the role of intellectuals in leading public discussion and perception on government decisions in times of crisis. Digital ethnography and digital discourse analysis are implemented to do a micro and in-depth analysis of texts and the media engagement of the Chinese intellectuals. In the context in which the presence and reception of public intellectuals in China has been transformed from pro-West gongzhi (公知) to intellectuals in the system (体制内), this study reviews the moral values and norms that promoted governmental policies and social coherence embedded in a new intellectual discourse. It contributes to the analysis of the dynamics and flexibility of China’s public communication in times of crisis within the social context in which online activities and offline realities are closely bonded in modern China.