"Human Rights" in the People's Daily: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is one of a few countries (including North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Myanmar) in the world that are subjected to the most ‘intense external criticism’ of their human rights records (Chan 2006; Weatherley 1999: 1; 2014). However, domestically, human rights does not seem a concept that people frequently encounter. The news media are the main source of definition for the public in mainland China to apprehend rights and human rights. This thesis investigates the construction of human rights discourse in Chinese news media, i.e., the People’s Daily (PD), including the representation of the discourse in the six years selected from the period from 1979 to 2020 since the Policy of Reform and Opening-up as a whole in general and the specific development in each of the six years in almost ten-year intervals. The theoretical concepts of discourse, ideology, and power from the perspective of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) and related paradigms, as well as news values, propaganda, and nationalism were adopted to approach and analyse the topic of human rights in Chinese news media. In addition, corpus tools and techniques were employed to build the corpus and process the data, to generate the dominant collocates and patterns of language use, as well as identify keywords in the data that represent national identity in the human rights discourse. From my data, I built the Corpus of Human Rights in the People’s Daily (CHRPD), which consists of articles mentioning “人权” (human rights) in the publication in years in relation to diplomatic and political events (1979, 1989, 1998, 2008, 2019, and 2020), and which form the six sub-corpora. This thesis seeks to address four research questions specifically: 1) How are human rights discussed in Chinese news media in general over a period of four decades since the Policy of Reform and Opening-up started in 1979? 2) How has the human rights discourse changed in each of the six sub-corpora from 1979 to 2020? 3) How is human rights represented in the news media during the COVID-19 pandemic in particular? 4) What part does the discourse of human rights in the news media play in the construction of the Chinese national identity and nationalism? The findings show that Chinese human rights discourse remained relatively consistent since 1989 in the recent decades, in the sense of taking the rights to subsistence and development as priorities, and championing its “significant” and “historic” achievements in its own record, despite the harsh criticism against China’s human rights from the West, particularly the US. Even tragic and negative events are constructed discursively positive as news, including the Sichuan earthquake and COVID-19 pandemic. The tragic and negative events concerning Chinese human rights are also constructed in a negative discourse diverted to the US. The US was constructed as a hypocrite in terms of human rights – criticising other countries for violating human rights while violating human rights itself domestically and internationally. The contrast between China’s path of human rights protection with “great achievements” and the US’s human rights with “disasters” and “crises” was more explicit especially during the pandemic. The framing strategy us versus them in association with the discourse of human rights in the PD appeared in 1989 and has been consistent in the past three decades, which has tended to contribute to the enhancement of Chinese nationalism. The findings contribute to the fields of Chinese human rights studies, discourse analysis, and through discourse analysis a better understanding of the tension between China and the West, particularly the US, concerning the issue of human rights