Environmental Discourse On China’s Air Pollution:Constructing A Green Public Sphere Throuah Various Voices

China’s economy has developed rapidly in recent years; however, various environmental problems have emerged one after another. After the smog broke out in succession in more than 100 large and medium-size cities since 2011,air pollution became a heated topic in the society. As the problem of air pollution in China becomes increasingly severe, it also captures a wide attention from a diversity of social and scientific disciplines. After reviewing scholarship on air pollution at home and abroad, the author summarizes that there is a large scale of scientific literature about air pollution by using quantitative approaches, but the number of social-cultural literature is really small. Especially, very few studies on air pollution are from the perspective of discourse and communication.Therefore, the present thesis studies the problem of air pollution from a discursive perspective. Following Cultural Discourse Studies as a cultural-politically oriented framework of communication research, this study attempts to make a systematic analysis of China’s air pollution discourse in terms of its speaking subjects, contents, strategies and media use. Besides, the roles of these subjects in constructing the Chinese green public sphere and the relationships among them are discussed.Taking speaking subjects as the starting point of the present research, this thesis first makes an analysis of speaking subjects who are involved in air pollution discourse, and finds out that the governments, the environmental NGOs and the media are three main speaking subjects. Then the discourse on air pollution produced by these three subjects is collected as the data and thus analyzed in terms of its contents, strategies and media use. The governments produce and disseminate discourse on air pollution by making important policies and decisions. The discourse strategies that they use are analyzed from two aspects. From the aspect of time, the governments tend to seize three important occasions to communicate discourse on air pollution as follows:(1) when meeting some important festivals related to environmental protection; (2) when the laws and regulations about the environment protection are issued; (3) after the occurrence of environmental events. From the aspect of space, domestically, the discourse on air pollution is mainly communicated through the media and the community; internationally, the Chinese governments mainly carry out the environmental communication through some important international forums and conferences. ENGOs play the central roles in constructing the Chinese green public sphere. It is found out that there are three important strategies that they applied:the first is that they resort to all forms of media and public forums; the second is the application of visual image; and lastly, ENGOs produce greenspeak by the method of direct action or campaigns. The media, including the mass media and the new media, provides a space to produce and disseminate greenspeak.It is found that undoubtedly the Chinese government plays an important role in fostering the green public sphere, the construction of Chinese green public sphere depends critically on the public and environmental NGOs and on their creative use of the mass media and the new media.