The Study On The Discourse Strategy Of The Chinese Party Newspaper In Emergency

With the reform deepening in China and the social process steadfastly moving forward, public crisis evens occur frequently which harm the lives and personal property and seriously affect the social ability. The status of the Communist Party organ plays a decisive role because of China's special national conditions and media environment. The media discourse strategy is critical to the party organ in emergencies,and has become an important tool for the government to get the initiative of the discourse. The proper way to use the discourse strategies can help the government solve emergencies and crisis, which is also the focus of this paper.Based on the theory of Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) and the Stage Analysis Theory, this paper has discussed the case of "8 · 12" Tianjin explosion. A content analysis and discourse analysis have been adopted in the research.This paper has tried to analyze the crisis situations in different stages of the incident that needed to be dealt with by the People's Daily (the organ of the Chinese Communist Party). Also, the media discourse strategies used and its correspondence with the crisis situations have been analyzed. With the analysis above, the paper has verified the correspondence in the SCCT and explored the localization of SCCT in Chinese media ecology.The research found that the general media discourse strategies in the People's Daily is consistent with the discourse strategies proposed in SCCT. The People's Daily used different media discourse strategies when the crisis was in different stages and also chose the appropriate media discourse strategies according to the crisis situations.Furthermore, as to the localization of SCCT, because of China's special national conditions and the mainstream media status of the party organ, the discourse strategies in crisis require some localized adjustments: the sub-strategy of "Denial Posture" need to be further refined; "Rebuilding Posture" should add the "Information Posture" as its new sub-strategy; more attention needs to be paid to the "Bolstering Posture".