Keywords in Chinese Political Language

The fundamental assumption in this book is that ‘Constitution’, ‘Party’ and ‘Talent’ are complex, culturally defining words, functioning as a record of historical facts or ideas and as resources around which discussions and political actions revolved since the late XIX century in China. Discursive resources exploited by Chinese public institutions in order to build a strategic representation of the political system and its values. On the basis of these premises, by tracing the incidence of the three keywords in Chinese political language in a diachronic perspective, the book aims at showing how they are currently used, polysemous, categorical, actively contested and part of a cluster. This work is based on qualitative analysis of selected primary sources in Chinese language. Legal, political and newspaper texts were identified in this book as realizations of the genre repertoire of contemporary Chinese politics. Hence, the sources were considered connected to one another in a sequential chain of action, concurring to the discursive strategy to strengthen the political institutions and to disseminate their ideology by actively fostering consensus on the selected keywords.