Xinhua News agency and the multilingual representation of Chinese politics

In the last decades, Xinhua News Agency position in the context of the Chinese media production is characterized by a centralized political control and market-oriented strategies. The hypothesis under discussion is that Xinhua News Agency press release production on Chinese politics is influenced both by the agency’s multifaceted organizational identity, which can be described as both ideologically driven and consumer oriented, and by the targeted public culture and language. The contribution draws on Xinhua News Agency’s press releases on the 2015 session of the Chinese National People's Congress (in Chinese, English and French), and it aims to shed light on the basic characteristics of Chinese official media multilingual discourse on Chinese politics. In order to better describe the discourse's peculiarities, the textual findings are interpreted through the lens of keywords concerning the relation between the media and the political system in China (i.e. strengthening legitimacy, the foreign propaganda system and discourse power).