Public discourse as the mirror of ideological change: a keyword study of editorials in People’s Daily

1. Overview China, in its 50 years of communist rule since liberation, has experienced cultural and ideological change on a massive scale. The editorials from the People’s Daily, the typical public discourse representing the Communist ideology of China, encoded these ideological changes in its formulations. This study will present the meaning changes of some political-social keywords in editorials over the years and try to interpret the changing content of ideology by virtue of these semantic findings. While many communication studies have investigated the change reflected in news and media, noting its functions in Communist party-state (Liu, 1971, 1981; Bishop, 1989; He and Chen, 1998; Chang, Wang, and Chen, 1994; Lee, 2000; Zhao, 1998; He, 2000), or have concentrated on the politics of information flow from the party-state center to the mass media (Wu, 1994), few have devoted themselves to the semantic study of typical public discourse regarding China’ s cultural and ideological transformation over its history. This study will examine editorials from the People’ s Daily (“PD” hereafter) since 1949 – the year the Chinese nation was officially “stood up” by the Communist Party, to 1995, the year in which the Party celebrated its 46 years of leadership over the state. Taking the notion that discourse is language in use (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997), the current study will apply and develop the social theories concerning discourse and social change. Analysis will be conducted at two levels. At the lexical level, it will draw on contextual meaning theory to examine the meanings of keywords by observing the collocations occurring in 9-word span. At the textual level, a text analysis will be introduced to describe the meaning of keywords under particular practical discursive environment. At both levels, meaning analysis will be processed regarding the words immediate context (particular editorial text in which particular keyword occurs) and the far-reaching context (the changing social process viewed from an ideological perspective). This keywords study will put emphasis on the semantic field of ideology study. The ideological implications of the keywords concerned have undergone great transformation in Chinese official media discourse along the years. Focusing on the ideological significance that discourse and the lexicon encoded, this analysis aims to be a bridge linking our understanding of particular words and the ideological changes that China has experienced along its social development. This study will argue that, for the aim of critical discourse analysis, instead of merely taking social ideological change for granted, detailed analysis on keywords is helpful in understanding the content of the changing ideology.