Speaker
Description
Since his inauguration as the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, Chinese politician Xi Jinping has been in the spotlight of international politics as the leader of one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. His appointment put him at the helm of a unitary one-party socialist republic, which has increased its international presence exponentially in the last couple of decades.
At the beginning of his governance, Xi Jinping was an enigma to the international community and the hope was that he would be the Chinese leader who would open up and reform the state’s political system after the leadership stagnation under his predecessor Hu Jintao. However, this Western expectation was replaced by surprise – the new Chinese president seemed to be becoming a “modern emperor”. Many scholars have written about how Xi Jinping has been increasingly consolidating power all the while personalising the state’s leadership. However, all of these conclusions can be drawn only in retrospect, which begs the question of whether there were any signs of his personalisation in his speeches throughout the years.
This research project wants to examine whether there is a traceable evolution towards personalist authoritarianism in Xi Jinping’s speeches in front of the National People’s Congress in 2013, 2018 and 2023. The three speeches will be analysed through Ken Hyland’s methodology on metadiscourse, using his interpersonal model in particular. Since the focus of the study is President Xi himself, the methodology was further refined based on Hongyu Mai’s classification of Hyland’s different model resources through the lens of Aristotle’s three persuasion modes – logos, pathos and ethos. The focus of the current paper is on the four ethotic resources, namely evidentials, hedges, boosters, and self-mentions, and whether their presence and use indicate a personalist evolution. The aim of this paper is also to provide interpretivist interpretations of the data and to analyse whether the given methodology can detect such a political shift in Xi’s discourse.
Key words: Xi Jinping, personalism, personalist, authoritarianism, metadiscourse, political discourse, ethos
| Title | Xi Jinping's Evolution Towards Personalism: A Study in Metadiscourse |
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