Reporting on Chinese Politics: A Genre-based Analysis of Xinhua News Agency Dispatches

Chapter Four, by Bettina Mottura, contains a genre-based analysis of Xinhua news agency dispatches on Chinese politics. Mottura argues that Xinhua news agency news production of Chinese internal politics in different languages is influenced by the agency’s multifaceted organizational identity, which can be described as both ideologically driven and consumer oriented, as well as by the targeted audiences’ culture and language. Her contribution draws on a corpus of Xinhua news agency press releases (in Chinese, English and French) regarding the 2015 Premier report on the work of government to the Chinese National People’s Congress, shedding light on the basic characteristics of the Chinese official media’s multilingual news production on Chinese politics. In order to better discuss the peculiarities of the news agency’s discourse, the textual findings are interpreted through the lens of keywords concerning the relations between the media and the political system in China, with a focus on the leading role of Xinhua news agency in representing the country to world audiences.