EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 19 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 211 recently taken on importance not only from the language point of view but also from that of sociolinguistics. At the same time Chinese language purists are making a determined effort to preserve the cultural identity of the Chinese language, which is perceived as being threatened by a contamination with Internet English. Cao Qing (Durham University) A Modernist Dream: Developmentalism as a New Ideology in Contemporary China Key words: Chinese Dream, developmentalism, industrial modernity The post-1949 China is marked by two distinctive eras — orthodox Marxist socialism (1949–1978) and market socialism (1979-present). Socialism can be understood in diverse ways, but the common core consists both of a ‘commitment to the creation of an egalitarian society’(Newman, 2005:2) and a collective control of ‘the means of production, distribution and exchange’(Thompson, 1995:1319). China’s first socialist phase achieved much of these aims though with profound human costs. Market socialism, as a remedy for efficiency problems and excessive coercion, introduced market mechanisms that have facilitated a rapid economic growth over the last three and half decades. Though various terms exist to describe China’s reform era, — ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, ‘Chinese neoliberalism’ (Harvey, 2007) or ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ (Huang, 2008)— the reform can best be understood as guided by a pragmatic rationale of ‘developmentalism’. This paper discusses the new ideology of developmentalism in relation to the discourse of ‘Chinese Dream’ proposed by President Xi Jinping. It situates the dream discourse in a centuries-old aspiration to catch up with the West through modernisation drives and industrialist modernity. Using a range of case studies, including the CCP’s party congress reports and television programmes, the paper illustrates how developmentalism as a pragmatic and intermediary ideology has permeated discursive spaces and popular discourses. In particular, it examines the way in which core issues of society are framed as development questions, and how development is portrayed as government policy issues, affording the government a potent agency. It looks at how, through developmentising issues of society, industrial modernity is prioritised over ‘ideational’aspects of liberal humanist modernity; and play down the intricate socialism theme at the moment. Cheng Jing (The University of Nottingham) A Discursive Construction of National Humiliation Online — Commemorating the Nanjing Massacre Key words: Chinese Cyber Nationalism, Collective Memories, Nanjing Massacre, Critical Discourse Analysis, Chinese Discourse Studies The significance of never-forget-national-humiliation (wuwang guochi) discourse has beenwidely recognized in shaping contemporary Chinese nationalism. However, most of the scholarly focus draws upon the dominance of the official discourse and the CCP’s instrumentalization of nationalism in legitimizing its rule, while the content and the interactions between the official and popular nationalism remains under-studied. Meanwhile, since the early 1990s, the proliferation of the Internet among the netizens has largely catalyzed the emergence of cyber nationalism and contributed to shifting the state-society power relations. Against this background, this study focuses on the interaction between the official discourse and the popular discourse in (re)constructing the mythscape of Chinese national humiliation in cyberspaces and attempts to reveal the way how power is built and/or resisted among the competing discourses about the national past. Taking the communicative event com- memorating the NanjingMassacre as a case study, this paper uses the data collected from the online official news reports, netizens’ comments and online discussion forums and adopts a tailored approach to Critical Discourse Analysis to probe into the linguistic means, cultural codes and discursive strategies used in remembering and forgetting the Chinese national humiliation. Meanwhile, it addresses the methodological issues concerning the application of CDA to the Chinese discourse studies. I argue that rather than a static and collective concept, Chinese nationalism is constructed and reconstructed in changing state-society relationship, and online collec- tive memories of the past are a contested area which is constitutive of power and resistance in the digital age.