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Entrepreneur or capitalist?

Discursive constructions of a deceased business leader in Chinese digital mourning discourse

ORCiD logo with link | The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
ORCiD logo with link | The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
ORCiD logo with link | The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

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

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Published online: 1 April 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.24243.liu
Abstract
This study examines the public mourning discourse surrounding the death of Zong Qinghou, founder of Wahaha Group, on Chinese social media. By incorporating text mining into critical discourse studies, this research provides a corpus-assisted discourse study of competing ways of constructing Zong’s identity as an entrepreneur or a capitalist. The analysis offers insights into how Chinese society negotiates its relationship with private enterprise and wealth creation while maintaining cultural continuity. It contributes to understanding how public mourning discourse serves as a lens for examining social transformation in rapidly changing societies, particularly in the context of China’s unique political and economic environment.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies on public mourning discourse
  • 3.Theoretical underpinning
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Data collection and corpus building
    • 4.2Analytic methods and procedure
  • 5.Findings
    • 5.1Co-occurrence networks of 企业家 (entrepreneur) and 资本家 (capitalist)
    • 5.2Top 50 strong co-occurring words of 企业家 (entrepreneur) and 资本家 (capitalist)
      • 5.2.1Nomination
      • 5.2.2Predication
      • 5.2.3Argumentation
      • 5.2.4Perspectivization
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • References
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