A Discourse Analysis Of The New Year’s Day Editorial In The People’s Daily

Based on the61years’New Year’s Day Editorials collected from People’s Daily from1949to2009, the paper, by using a combination of quantitative, qualitative, synchronic and diachronic research methods, explores the relationship between political discourse and social political change, and aims to provide a new perspective for analyzing diachronic political discourse.The paper can be divided into three parts:theory and methodology, literature review, and textual analysis.The first part gives a review of the researches on New Year’s Day Editorial in People’s Daily done by other researchers. For example, Peng Ruqing et al. researched on the genres of New Year’s Day Editorials in People’s Daily; Huang Min et al. studied on the use of metaphor in New Year’s Day Editorials; and Zhu Keyi analyzed the New Year’s Day Editorials during the period of Cultural Revolution from the perspective of logical semantics.The second part is about theory and methodology. The paper first offers an introduction of discourse theories developed by M.M. Bakhtin, Michel Foucault and Fairclough, a definition of political discourse, and a brief description of the imputation of New Year’s Day Editorial texts in People’s Daily. Secondly, this paper explained the related analytical method—critical discourse analysis. And at last, the paper introduced the employed research methods—a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, and a combination of synchronic and diachronic research methods.The third part deals with New Year’s Day Editorials’analysis. First, the paper analyzed the relationship between discourse and social political environment by considering the diction and structural choices in the titles of New Year’s Day Editorials. The paper then analyzed the covariant relationship between political discourse in different periods and Chinese social politics by statistically analyzing highly used words in the61years’New Year’s Day Editorials.The following conclusions can be arrived at after analyzing texts:first, the words chosen in the title reflect the social political context of that period. Second, there is a certain regularity and stability in the structural selection of the title; imperatives are used in most of the titles and when to use what types of imperatives with what characteristics is related to the social political context of that period. Third, the use of high-frequency words in each period of New Year’s Day Editorials reflects the social political changes and the Chinese Communist Party’s political ideology development. Last, People’s Daily, by gaining the discursive power, acquires the power to reshape the social image and provide Chinese Communist Party with public opinion foundation to carry out policies and political leadership.