Chinese Intellectuals as Represented in ‘New Era’ Fictional Dialogues

Abstract

This book explores the status of Chinese intellectuals from 1980 to 2005 and its diachronic change in this period, as represented by dialogues between intellectuals and their leaders in fiction. June 1989 serves as a historical dividing line on which to base this diachronic study. First, the direct speech of intellectuals and their leaders is extracted and compiled into corpora for a ‘key key-words’ analysis. The key key-words derived from this analysis describe features of the speech of intellectuals, the speech of intellectuals as compared to the speech of leaders and the speech of leaders as compared to that of intellectuals. Second, a detailed qualitative investigation of three dialogues in each of the two periods is undertaken. The study shows that the key key-words indicating topics of the speech and those characterising the style of the speech represent the social identity of intellectuals. The corpus approach is complemented by a stylistic analysis, which explores dialogues selected from different years to emphasise the diachronic change in the status of intellectuals between the two periods. A dual model is formulated to incorporate dialogue analysis into a larger structure of goal development analysis. The study shows how speakers use discursive strategies to manage relationships and have their situational goals achieved in interaction, and, further, how negotiation of goals invokes the institutional and social identities of speakers. The research shows that a corpus approach can be combined with stylistic analysis to present a more comprehensive description of data. It is hoped that this will shed some light on studies of post-Cultural Revolution Chinese intellectuals and on how quantitative and qualitative approaches merge in the investigation of interaction between superiors and subordinates.