Understanding Changes Of Social Relations In China From The New Year Editorials Of People’s Daily: A Multi-perspective Model

Chinese society has undergone dramatic changes since the founding of the country,especially after the reform and opening up. With the socioeconomic development, China’smainstream political concept has accordingly changed a lot. These changes may bring aboutcorresponding changes in interpersonal and social relations. People’s Daily is the officialnewspaper of Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the most authoritativeand influential national newspaper of China. As a specific genre of political discourse, theNew Years editorials (hereafter the NYEs) are published regularly every year and have neverbeen suspended. They can clearly manifest the evolvement of Chinese society and mirror thechanges of social relations from a diachronic view.The present thesis, through bringing together both the qualitative and the quantitativemethods, makes a diachronic analysis of the65NYEs in the People’s Daily (1949-2013). Itendeavors to explore how the social relations change in China since the founding of thecountry.This thesis puts forward a new model that suits the present study by integrating Bhatia’s(2004) multi-perspective model and Fairclough’s (1992) conceptualizaiton of intertextuality.By applying this model, the thesis carries out the analysis from three dimensions. In thetextual dimension, it explores how changes of social relations are manifested through microlexico-grammatical features and macro generic-textual structures. In the discursive dimension,it analyzes the changes of social relations between the institutional or individual authority andthe public from the perspectives of manifest intertextuality and interdiscursivity. Finally, inthe social dimension, it explains the changes of social relations through connecting thesechanges with the three tendencies of the contemporary public discourse. Through analysis, itis found that the power relations between the institutional or individual authority and thepublic have gradually shifted from asymmetry to equality. It is hoped that this study will shedsome light on our understanding of changes of social relations in China.