A corpus-based discourse analysis of ten government work reports: Chapter 3. A decade of change in China

Qian, Yufang; Tian, Hailong

doi:10.1075/dapsac.54.04qia

In:Discourse, Politics and Media in Contemporary China
Edited by Qing Cao, Hailong Tian and Paul Chilton
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 54] 2014
► pp. 77–96

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Chapter 3. A decade of change in China

A corpus-based discourse analysis of ten government work reports

Yufang Qian | University of Media and Communications

Hailong Tian | Tianjin Foreign Studies University

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 23 April 2014

https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.54.04qia

The Government Work Reports (GWRs) of China are important documents conveying the government’s voice and publicising the tasks they set for the country, and they attract much attention from diverse sectors of the community. Merging corpus methodology and critical discourse analysis, this study* focuses on 10 years of GWRs to observe the dialectical relationship between discourse and social change. It shows that the discourses represented in the GWRs result in new concerns, which in turn affect the recipients of the discourse and their actions and create new discourses. Keywords: Social change; government work report; corpus-based discourse analysis

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