The Chinese Press and the Constitution

Abstract

In March 2018, a qualified majority of members of the National People’s Congress of China voted for the adoption of the fifth amendment to the current constitutional text. In the five years prior to the vote on the amendment, President Xi Jinping delivered a constellation of public speeches, and the CCP and state organs published a series of documents in order to reaffirm the centrality of the Constitution in the country’s political life, thus building the discursive framework in which the new text was discussed and adopted. The Constitution hence became one of the keywords of the political discourse and the discursive framework stemming from the central leadership documents echoed in the news production of national and international media. This paper will map how the political discourse on the Constitution permeated Chinese press texts from 2012 to 2018. The aim of the contribution is both to illustrate the influence that political language exerts on the press in China through a specific case study, and to verify to what extent the importance accorded to the constitutional text by the leadership was conveyed by the press to public opinion before and after the adoption of the 2018 amendment.