Using political discourse analysis, this book examines the extent to which the salient approaches of previous leadership generations have translated into present day policies shepherded in by Xi Jinping. On the strategic political level, the book includes comparisons of China's recent leadership periods with a focus on Xi Jinping's era, and contains examples of whether and how specific topics and tactics reoccur across generations. The state development strategy section then goes on to include chapters on shaping China’s strategic narratives, neoliberal discourse within state developmentalism, and keyword evolution. The practical policies part looks at the issues of re-education, health, class, and ethnicity, analysing how the leaders talk about China’s poor, frame the representations of megaprojects on social media, and discursively display diplomatic strength. As a study of the rule of Xi Jinping and the rhetoric of the contemporary Chinese political system, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Chinese politics and political science more broadly.
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This chapter argues that critical discourse analysis (CDA) provides a fruitful methodology for CES. This is due both to its eclectic, abductive research methodology that engages in a dialogue between, theory(ies), methodology(ies), data and the socio-historical context (Reisigl and Wodak 2009). Secondly, CDA, like other critical approaches, adopts a layered approach to research methodology, focusing from the global to meso and micro aspects of an event, or from social structures, to social institutions and social events, always considering the discursive as being both constituted by and constitutive of social structures. It will illustrate this through a brief description of the discourse-historical dimension in CDA which assumes a distinction between content analysis, the analysis of discursive and argumentative strategies and, finally, the analysis of linguistic features (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001). Those basic assumptions will be illustrated through the description of a theoretical-methodological framework recently employed for the study of the Occupy movement in Spain (Montesano Montessori & Morales Lopez, forthcoming). It shows how a framework was assembled that brought social constructivism, narrative analysis, rhetoric and finally the discourse theoretical concept of ‘rearticulation’ together in order to analyse how the Occupy movement helped Spanish citizens to gain agency and voice. In: R Lamond I., Platt L. (eds). Critical Event Studies. Leisure Studies in a Global Era. Palgrave Macmillan, London
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This article provides a description of the emergence of the Spanish ‘Occupy’ movement, Democracia real ya. The aim is to analyse the innovative discursive features of this movement and to connect this analysis to what we consider the innovative potential of the critical sciences. The movement is the result of a spontaneous uprising that appeared on the main squares of Madrid and Barcelona on 15 May 2011 and then spread to other Spanish cities. This date gave it its name: 15M. While the struggle for democracy in Spain is certainly not new, the 15M group shows a series of innovative features. These include the emphasis on peaceful struggle and the imaginary of a new democracy or worldview, transmitted through innovative placards and slogans designed by Spanish citizens. We consider these innovative not only due to their creativity, but also because of their use as a form of civil action. Our argument is that these placards both functioned as a sign of protest and, in combination with the demonstrations and the general dynamics of 15M, helped to reframe the population’s understanding of the crisis and rearticulate the identity of the citizens from victims to agents. In order to analyse the multimodal character of this struggle, we developed an interdisciplinary methodology, which combines socio-cognitive approaches that consider ideological proposals as socio-cognitive constructs (i.e. the notion of narrative or cognitive frame), and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in the analysis of discourses related to processes of social imagination and transformation. The socio-constructivist perspective is used to consider these discourses in relation to their actors, particular contexts and actions. The use of CDA, which included a careful rhetoric analysis, helped to analyse the process of deconstruction, transformation and reconstruction that 15M uses to maintain its struggle. The narrative analysis and the discursive theoretical concept of articulation helped to methodologically show aspects of the process of change alluded to above. This change was both in terms of cognition and in the modification of identity that turned a large part of the Spanish population from victims to indignados and to the neologism indignadanos, which is a composition of indignado and ciudadano (citizen).
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