How to build a “Dream” in political speech? A critical discourse analysis of the discursive construction of the Chinese Dream speech

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how Chinese politician tactically builds a dream narrative in political speech, namely, the Chinese Dream. By combining the discourse-historical approach, corpus-assisted methods and framing analysis, the study forms a complementary framework to examine the discursive construction of the Chinese Dream in President Xi Jinping’s representative speeches between 2012 and 2022. It identifies four key thematic representations, i.e. NATIONAL REJUVENATION, CPC’S LEGITIMACY, CHINESE PEOPLE’S INTERESTS and WORLD’S INTERESTS and also finds that the strategies of nomination, predication, argumentation and perspectivization are skillfully used and reveals the Chinese-centric narrative frame. Beyond that, it further discusses Chineseness in the dream narrative. The paper argues that the Chinese Dream is an artificially discursive construct in a grand narrative used to build an ultimate national consensus and to serve the ideological legitimacy of the ruling class.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese dream
• Chineseness
• corpus
• discourse-historical approach
• framing analysis
• political discourse

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Correction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2023.2270317

Notes

1 Zhōngguó Mèng (i.e. the Chinese Dream) has many English translations, like “Chinese Dream”, “China Dream”, or “China’s Dream”. Here, the “Chinese Dream” is used as a formal English translation, because it has been widely used in China’s official documents and accepted by Anglo-American media (Hu and Zhang 2019).

2 There are linguistic differences between the English translated version and its Chinese original. Since the English version is translated by Chinese official institutions for global English readers, it is as important as its Chinese original and thus is used as a major research object.