Alignment, 'Politeness' and Implicitness in Chinese Political Discourse: A Case Study of the 2018 Vaccine Scandal

Using as a case study the news releases of official written public announcements published in the wake of a vaccine scandal that erupted in China in the summer of 2018, this paper looks at the notion of 'politeness' in Chinese political communication. Authors Dániel Z. Kádár and Sen Zhang argue that, "[i]n the decidedly hierarchical and power-driven Chinese political culture, creating alignment with the public is the ultimate goal of political discourse, particularly when a national social crisis emerges and the public's trust and cooperation with policies needs to be reinforced."

Kádár and Zhang explain that the concept of alignment is fundamental in understanding how linguistic politeness operates in gong'gao ("public announcement"). In terms of participation (Goffman 1981), alignment in the Chinese lingua-culture is triggered by forms of communal behaviour that may not directly address a particular recipient/group of recipients, but rather are meant to be overheard. In examining 'politeness' in Chinese political monologues such as gong'gao, Kádár and Zhang stress its lack of interpersonal character (and use single quotation marks throughout the paper to signify this). Instead of meaning to be polite from the individual reader's perspective, or acting politely in an interpersonal sense, Chinese gong'gao political announcements use 'politeness' toward political decision makers to communicate the message that, in the context of a crisis, they are acting in accordance with the public's expectations. By so doing, these texts attempt to prompt members of the public to align themselves with their leaders.

The incident in question began when the national media "cautiously released information about a 'potential' problem with 'a limited number of vaccines'. It quickly became evident that the situation was significantly more serious than this euphemistic wording had suggested: a vast number of patients had been improperly vaccinated against life-threatening illnesses such as rabies." Kádár and Zhang observe that, from the outset of the 2018 incident, authorities and decisionmakers were prompt to react through gong'gao announcements featured in official news releases in which they repeatedly promised a thorough investigation of the case and strict punishment for those responsible for the production of substandard medicine.

Kádár and Zhang conducted a discourse analytic examination of 30 national-level announcements, 5 provincial-level announcements, and 5 local-level announcements that were made in the media between July 16 and July 30, following the earliest report of the incident on July 12. The announcements were disseminated by the main official media outlets. By July 30, the case was passed on to criminal investigators, and so formally ceased to be a part of the gong'gao agenda.

As outlined here through various examples, the first section of gong'gao reports includes a deferential discussion of the actions individual national-level Chinese decision makers have taken at the time of the report. This discourse is "heavily loaded with forms of 'politeness' - most typically, formal expressions that gain a conventional honorific function..." More specifically, in a hierarchical political context like the Chinese, deference triggers the acceptance of the leaders' authority in the management of the crisis." The second section of gong'gao texts focuses on the collective action decision makers and investigators intend to take in the future. As the analysis illustrates, this second section tends to be not simply an objective announcement of plans but, rather, "it features a further implicit attempt - along with the first part - to align with the public, without addressing its members directly." It is only national texts that discuss the action points in full detail (related to punishment and accountability). Announcements made at lower administrative levels tend to be richer in 'politeness' towards political decision makers, and, when it comes to releasing information on intended actions, these announcements simply echo what is stated by the national-level media in a much simpler way than their national-level counterparts. In this way, "gong'gao media releases follow a delicate order which is rooted in Confucian hierarchies, according to which the rights and obligations of leaders are different from that of their subordinates."

For Kádár and Zhang, the data analysis has revealed that gong'gao texts "not only deploy a rich vocabulary of deferential and ritual expressions, but also other 'politeness' strategies such as the temporal representation of events, reporting on the collaboration between political decision makers to resolve a crisis and the eagerness of lower-level decision makers to comply with the orders of higher-level authorities, and so on....The analysis has also shown that, in conjunction with 'politeness', gong'gao texts use action plans to address the public's concern, and hence implicitly create alignment without addressing the public, in the form of seemingly 'objective' (impersonalised) reports. A direct correlation exists between the power hierarchy and the right and obligation to trigger alignment through promising actions."

In conclusion: "The analysis has demonstrated that it is useful to apply politeness theory when examining political language beyond the dyadic framework of politeness, to capture the inner dynamics of language use in political texts."