‘Disclosure Is the Norm, Non-disclosure Is the Exception’. A Genre-Based Analysis on Institutional Discourse on the Government Information Disclosure in China

Abstract

Government information disclosure in China is a set of procedures, tied to the public institutions, aimed at generating a steady and timely flow of information between the state and the citizens. From 2007 to 2016, the scope and the procedures of this policy have been codified by a number of official documents, and these texts can be considered expressions of the Chinese institutional discourse on government information disclosure. The policy on open government information has led to a scholarly debate on the concrete goals the Chinese central government is pursuing through the implementation of information disclosure. In this chapter, a corpus of texts on government information disclosure (including all of the relevant official documents published from 2007 to 2016) will be analysed through a genre-based approach, in order to contribute to the discussion on the implementation objectives and their development. Finally, the statements stemming from genre analysis will be examined taking into account a variety of lexical features of the corpus documents.