Critical discourse studies eleven years on in China (from 2011 to 2021): A critical review

Abstract

Since critical discourse analysis (CDA) was introduced to China in 1990s, it has developed into an influential and thriving field. This article reviews the development of CDA in China from 2011 to 2021, during which CDA had thrived to be a productive field in terms of the in-depth theoretical and methodological explorations and the overwhelming majority of empirical studies which considerably expanded its scope to a much wider range of discourses. It also came to involve a broader array of disciplines including corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, multimodality, translation studies, and eco-linguistics. It can be found that while keeping pace with the international CDA studies, Chinese scholars consistently gear CDA to China’s social, political, and cultural contexts and strive to use CDA to deliberate on and solve social problems in contemporary Chinese society. This brief review endeavors to communicate with the international academia regarding the latest developments of CDA in China.