A Two-Tiered Analysis of Chinese Political Discourse: The Case of Xi Jinping’s Commemorative Speech for the Centennial of the CCP

This paper proposes a discourse analysis of the speech delivered by President Xi Jinping during the ceremony celebrating the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at Tian’anmen Square in Beijing on 1 July 2021. The goal is to shed light on the rhetorical devices and lexical resources employed in this seminal speech. A two-tiered analysis has been conducted, which intersects the disambiguation of the modal expressions on necessity and possibility with the identification and scrutiny of the most frequent lexical items, aimed at identifying their specific usages, semantic features and regularities in terms of collocates and collocations. Attention has been paid to the interaction between modals and other operators, particularly evaluative adverbs marking the speaker’s stance. In order to quantify the occurrences of the vocabulary employed by the speaker, we used the corpus query tool in Sketch Engine and created a corpus consisting of 3606 Chinese words out of the total 7275 Chinese characters comprised in the speech. The small dimension of the corpus justified the type of analysis we have carried out, which is predominantly qualitative. The data show the predominance of the procedural subdivision (in terms of length and modal density) over the hortatory one. Hence the abundance of modals of practical necessity (anankastic) and the scarcity of modals resorting to moral necessity as a form of persuasion. The scarcity of deontic modals (and, notably, the absence of the prototypical deontic marker yīnggāi 应该 ‘should’) does not imply the lack of a system of values. As highlighted in the numerous references to modern Chinese history and in the repeated motto about learning from history (yǐ shǐ wéi jiàn), the value system is the one already outlined from the liberation of 1949 up to the present time. The speech itself is structured as a roadmap to attaining the national goal. Thus, the prevalence of goal-oriented items, as bìxū, in the “nine must” (anankastic). The full significance of the procedural argumentation is better understood by analyzing the evaluative adverbs occurring in the speech. In this speech, not many occurrences of evaluative adverbs have been found. Among them are found those typically used to express necessity and certainty but also multifunctional adverbs conveying degree (zuì, gèng, gèngwéi) as well as scope (dōu), and linking adverbs (jiù). They contribute to underlying the notion of ‘only possibility’ (related to the Party’s role) and strengthen the sense of urgency in implementing the programme outlined in the speech. Research results show how epistemic adverbs (expressing certainty and likelihood) are more frequent than the others and that the distribution of the different adverbs across the genres also reveals variety. The theme of inevitability is also articulated in two ways. Firstly, as ‘only possibility’ (anankastic), implying that the collective task can only be accomplished under the guidance of the CCP. Secondly, the notion of inevitability is conveyed as epistemic certainty (bìjiāng, yídìng), suggesting the historical inevitability of the realization of the Chinese dream.