ABSTRACT
Discourse analysis (DA) has been a popular approach in both the humanities and the social sciences. While humanists focus mainly on the linguistic aspects of discourse, social scientists often go beyond this dimension to explore the relations between discourse and society. In this chapter, I contribute to contemporary Chinese DA in the social sciences through a case study. I begin this chapter with a brief overview of the concept of discourse and DA from the classics to contemporary works. I then present a summary of current research on Chinese DA in the social sciences based on both Chinese and English publications. Next, I present my analytical framework, critical cultural discourse analysis (CCDA), which combines critical discourse analysis (CDA) with Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory (2001[1985]) from a cultural sociological perspective. Culture in this framework refers to the general meaning system that assists people to make sense of the world. To conclude, I illustrate this framework through a case study of ‘civil society (公民社会)’ discourse in contemporary China.
