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In:Contemporary Chinese Discourse and Social Practice in China
Edited by Linda Tsung and Wei Wang
[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse 4] 2015
► pp. 59–80

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Nation-State Building in a Rising China

PRC Discourses on the Chinese Language since the Turn of the 21st Century

Published online: 9 October 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scld.4.05zho
This chapter studies how nation-state is built through discourse evolution in contemporary China. I consider discourse as an ensemble of concepts of an ideology bespoken by a collection of defining terms, words and expressions, in relevant texts. Adopting both constructive and deconstructive approaches to discourse, I will focus on the analysis of the occurrence and use of two new terms, the national common language (guojia tongyong yuyan) and global promotion of Chinese (hanyu guoji tuiguang), in China since 2000. I will argue, since these key terms play a core role as indicators of power relations in the production of a new ideology (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; van Dijk 1997, 17–34), that these changes in Chinese official and public discourses redefine China as a new nation-state and prepare a rising China for the battle for its linguistic and cultural hegemony both domestically and globally (see Stambach 2015).
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