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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 14:2 (2015) ► pp.285–308

The shifting representation of common people in China’s news media

| Peking University |
This paper examines the meanings associated with the high-frequency social address term baixing (‘common people’) in China’s contemporary news media, through the analysis of a sizable corpus of data from China’s online news portals, together with the results of qualitative research derived from participation in an online discussion forum. The findings of this project indicate that the term baixing is closely associated with discourses of insignificance, obedience, and powerlessness. This study sets out to make a contribution to current research on Chinese address terms through the use of a corpus-based methodology, by expanding the site of investigation beyond face-to-face encounters to a wider media public, and thereby to provide insights into the discourses of citizen identity in contemporary China.
Keywords: address terms, China’s news media, citizen identity, collocations, connotations, corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Baixing as a Cultural and Social Keyword in China
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Findings and Discussion
    • 4.1The collocations of baixing in the Chinese Web News Corpus (CWNC)
      • Adjectival collocates
      • Verbal collocates
    • 4.2The netizens’ associations of baixing
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 August 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.14.2.05zha
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