The Hypertextual Gateway of Elite Chinese Universities: A Genre Analysis of the ‘About’ Webpages

This article reports a genre study of the “About” webpages published in the websites of nine elite Chinese universities (the C9 League). This study explored the macro-level rhetorical structure and communicative purposes, followed by a micro-level discussion of the discursive strategies employed in this institutionalised genre. The findings reveal a dynamic interweaving of two distinct discursive resources – linguistic and multimodal – rhetorically organised through the interplay between the mixing of thirteen move types and various interdiscursive elements. The analytical results indicate that the trend of marketisation, other than a predominant rhetorical feature of being informative, indeed influences the institutional web structuring through employing branding strategies to promote academic excellence as well as strengthen relationship with web readers. The dynamic interactions unfolded by this research not only deepen users’ knowledge of a previously undiscovered yet discursively complex web genre, but also contribute to theoretical and methodological development in genre studies in this digital era.