A Pragma-Dialectical Analysis of Chinese Government’s Argumentation: A Case of ‘Comment on Country Report of Human Rights Practice by the U.S. Department of State’

Abstract

This paper, adopting pragma-dialecticalapproach, analyses the Chinese government’sargumentative discourse in response to theaccusation of its human rights practices byAmerican government, in order to explore theformer’s argumentation in resistance toAmerica’s hegemony. It takes “Comment onCountry Report of Human Rights Practices bythe U.S. Department of State”, three pieces ofofficial documents issued by Information Officeof State Council of China (“IOSC”) from 1995 to1997, as the research texts. It analyses theclaim (standpoint), argument (reason), argumentstructure and scheme to find out theargumentative strategies of IOSC in these fouraspects. It was found that: 1) in terms ofstandpoint, IOSC denied the view of U.S. sidethat China had human rights abuses in someparts of its Country Report; 2) in terms ofargument, IOSC mainly provided four types ofreasons: the U.S. counterpart distorted China’sdomestic human rights practices in some cases,neglected the progress of human rights theChinese government had made, took a blind eyeto America’s own severe human rights violations,and American government’s accusation throughCountry Report was the embodiment ofhegemony; 3) As to the argument structure, theChinese government adopted non-mixed complexargumentation with their various types ofmultiple, coordinate and subordinate structurein combination on human rights issue; 4) interms of argument scheme, IOSC mainly adoptedsymptomatic scheme in its discourse. The studyprovides practical values for the improvementof a development country’s international humanrights discourse in the argumentative lens.