{"title":"News and Views: Definitions and Characteristics of Genres in Chinese Journalism","authors":"E. Lupano","doi":"10.7358/LCM-2018-002-LUPA","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7358/LCM-2018-002-LUPA","url":null,"abstract":"Journalistic genres in China have acquired distinctive characteristics and have shaped original sub-genres that are unique to the local journalistic tradition. While many studies analyzing their characteristics have been written in Chinese, works on the subject in other languages are still scarce. This contribution aims to fill this void by presenting the two main genres in which written journalistic production can be understood, i.e., “news” and “views”, as well as their sub-genres, and showing how they are interpreted in Chinese media studies. The analysis is based on a corpus of recent academic publications that represent the current Chinese scholarly interpretations of local genres of journalism. In doing so, the paper also offers insights on recent theoretical reflections about the functions of journalistic writing in the People’s Republic of China.","PeriodicalId":37089,"journal":{"name":"Languages Cultures Mediation","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88045426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Online Chinese Nationalism and the Discursive Construction of a Nationalist Hero: The Case of Jin Jing","authors":"Yiben Ma","doi":"10.7358/LCM-2018-002-MAYI","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7358/LCM-2018-002-MAYI","url":null,"abstract":"The rise of popular online Chinese nationalism has been interpreted by many researchers largely as a response to the alleged hostility and threat from foreign enemies. While the perceived enemies play a key role in shaping the dynamics of contemporary Chinese nationalism, little has been discussed so far as to the importance of a nationalist hero in the creation and mobilisation of online Chinese nationalism. This research attempts to address this gap by analysing the online discussion about the case of Jin Jing. Jin Jing, a disabled torchbearer and Paralympic fencer, was praised by Chinese netizens as a national hero after protecting the torch during the Paris leg of the 2008 Beijing Olympic torch relay. By using a critical discourse analysis of online posts relating to Jin Jing and the incident, this paper aims to discuss the processes and interactions in the making of a national hero in a popular media discourse, and how the online discursive practices of creating, worshipping and defending a hero can contribute to the building of the nation.","PeriodicalId":37089,"journal":{"name":"Languages Cultures Mediation","volume":"61 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90503251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comparing Chinese and EU Soft Power: The Credibility Factor","authors":"Olivier Arifon","doi":"10.7358/LCM-2018-002-ARIF","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7358/LCM-2018-002-ARIF","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents arguments to evaluate soft power as perceived by the European Union (EU) and by China. Since the presentation of Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power, it has become apparent that notions of audience and message reception are important. We will further argue for the relevance of the psychological idea of dissonance. We will compare and contrast soft power discourses for their alignment with reality, and assess them for discrepancy. Ultimately, we will conclude that such contradictions exist and create a “dissonance” or disjunction, which we will explore in relation to the concept of credibility. In the second section, an analysis of China’s soft power serves to highlight the effects of the implementation by a “hard” state, in a centralized and controlled manner, of a soft power policy. We will examine tables in an effort to extend our comparison beyond the discourses perpetuated and promoted by both China and the EU. We will challenge these discourses using indices, including the World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders, the Corruption Perception Index by Transparency International, as well as The Good Country Index, The Soft Power 30, and the World Justice Index, each representing a component of soft power as proposed by Nye, i.e., culture, political values and foreign policy. Additionally, we will closely examine social questions to better develop our understanding of soft power policy. Results indicate that while credibility appears more important to China than to the EU, it is, nonetheless, a central tenet for both parties. The third section takes a comparative approach to its discussion of the normative power of European and Chinese soft power. It reveals contradictions within the policies of both political bodies, and simultaneously draws two conclusions. First, that a “cultural fool” does not exist, i.e., individuals are able to decipher and understand messages. Secondly, that individuals attribute credibility or unreliability to policy messages framed by a state, an organization, or the media.","PeriodicalId":37089,"journal":{"name":"Languages Cultures Mediation","volume":"70 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86284663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From “Propaganda” to “Guided Communication”. Animating Political Communication in Digital China","authors":"Lei Qin","doi":"10.7358/LCM-2018-002-QINL","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7358/LCM-2018-002-QINL","url":null,"abstract":"This essay investigates the recent boom in the use of animated cartoons for political communication in China which began in late 2013. A series of political cartoons are examined against the background of a comprehensive media revolution designed by top-following the Chinese Communist Party’s (hereafter CCP) new understanding of the role of media and public opinion. I argue, by looking closely at the creative use of political cartoons, that the CCP has adjusted its views on the role of media in the digital age – from propaganda mouthpiece, to guiding opinion unifier for popularizing the Party’s rule. Their efforts and success in stimulating a significant number of responses through the use of animated cartoons has given rise to a new communication model of mixing top-down and bottom-up flow of message. Behind the new model was the CCP’s changing understanding of the public: from “target audience of propaganda” to guided audience, and then to central players in popularizing the Party. The major media reform since Xi took office in early 2013 has laid institutional, managerial and editorial foundations to sustain this conceptual change in practice. The boom in political cartoons is the most conspicuous result of that.","PeriodicalId":37089,"journal":{"name":"Languages Cultures Mediation","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78075207","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Study of a Journalism Which Is almost 99% Fake","authors":"Jing Su, Xiguang Li, Lianfeng Wang","doi":"10.7358/LCM-2018-002-LIXI","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7358/LCM-2018-002-LIXI","url":null,"abstract":"With the rapid development of the media industry in China, fake news has become a severe problem. This paper identifies four types of fake news, with examples which include totally fake news, distorted fake news, fast news, and sensational journalism. The second part of the paper attempts to analyse the causes of fake news. The acceleration of the trend of media marketization, the loss of professional ethics by media practitioners, the influence of stakeholders, and the marketization of news value in university education, have all given rise to the emergence of fake news. The third part investigates the influence of fake news on society. Fake news can result in inappropriate policy making by the government. With the prevalence of fake news, public media literacy declines and social ethos becomes fickle. Finally, the paper attempts to explore possibly effective countermeasures, which involve establishing a fact-checking mechanism, calling for slow news instead of fast news, improving the public’s media literacy, and reforming the news paradigm, in order to resist fake news in future.","PeriodicalId":37089,"journal":{"name":"Languages Cultures Mediation","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86157471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Chinese Press and the Constitution","authors":"B. Mottura","doi":"10.7358/LCM-2018-002-MOTT","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7358/LCM-2018-002-MOTT","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":37089,"journal":{"name":"Languages Cultures Mediation","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79248025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dual Identity and Multiple Tasks: Contemporary Chinese Party Media’s Involvement in Political Communication","authors":"Jing Xu, Dengfeng Wang","doi":"10.7358/LCM-2018-002-XUWA","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7358/LCM-2018-002-XUWA","url":null,"abstract":"Alongside the reform and opening-up policies in China since 1978, there has been a transformation of China’s governmental functions and of its media system. While adapting to the complex political process towards democratization, the Chinese Communist Party media have further expanded their dual identity as both organizational communicator and mass communicator, and are involved in Chinese political communication in a variety of ways. To improve the role of internal organizational communication, the Party media have extended their sphere of activity from traditional Internal Reference (xinwen neican 新闻内参) to Online Public Opinion Monitoring (yuqing jiance 舆情监测) and Media Think Tank Consultation (meiti zhiku 媒体智库). As leaders in China’s market-oriented media reform and tech-driven media integration, the Chinese Party media have remained dominant and privileged agents in China’s mass media system, and active participants in social political communication in a number of ways, from traditional policy publicity, to media supervision and timely external opinion guiding.","PeriodicalId":37089,"journal":{"name":"Languages Cultures Mediation","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80858595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Emerging Chinese Theory and Practice of Media","authors":"H. D. Burgh, E. Lupano, B. Mottura","doi":"10.7358/LCM-2018-002-DEBU","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7358/LCM-2018-002-DEBU","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37089,"journal":{"name":"Languages Cultures Mediation","volume":"50 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88509031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Research Themes in Bioethically-relevant Discourse: An Overview","authors":"K. Grego, Priscilla C. Heynderickx","doi":"10.7358/LCM-2018-001-GREG1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7358/LCM-2018-001-GREG1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37089,"journal":{"name":"Languages Cultures Mediation","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82094126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sergio Pizziconi, Walter Giordano, Laura Di Ferrante
{"title":"Genetic Bragging as a Speech Act: From Fictional to Non-fictional Discourse","authors":"Sergio Pizziconi, Walter Giordano, Laura Di Ferrante","doi":"10.7358/LCM-2018-001-PIZZ","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7358/LCM-2018-001-PIZZ","url":null,"abstract":"The fast and consistent progress in DNA research has lead us to vent the possibility that bragging about one’s own genetic endowment is bound to become a linguistic practice with economic and social entailments. The family resemblance approach (Kleiber 1999) was used to shape what we dubbed here “genetic bragging” in a prototypical perspective to the definition of speech acts. Our assumption is that the “genealogical bragging” in the pre-DNA-testing era is to be considered the closest resembling linguistic practice to draw upon to realize DNA-based bragging. We have collected an ad hoc corpus of fictional and non-fictional texts with instances of bragging about alleged inherent differences between human beings. The texts include 18th and 19th century natural science investigations, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and science-fiction movie Gattaca to identify major strategies of bragging. We have finally supported our hypothesis by looking at two communicative fields. On the one hand, we accounted for the way governments are regulating the use DNA-testing in the insurance industry; on the other hand, we reported a few instances of recent political discourse in which genetic bragging has been used.","PeriodicalId":37089,"journal":{"name":"Languages Cultures Mediation","volume":"90 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79689202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}