Questions and answers in Chinese political press conferences

Abstract

Since China’s opening up in 1978, there has been increasing interaction between the Chinese government and the domestic and international media. Previous research has shown that journalists from developed countries take an adversarial role when questioning politicians in news interviews and press conferences while journalists from developing countries like China take a role that furthers the agenda of their governments. The literature has also demonstrated that evasiveness is observed in the answers of politicians from both developed and developing countries. Although much attention has been given to politician-media interaction in the western developed countries, there is a scarcity of research on political communication in the Chinese context and on cross-cultural differences in political communication between China and other countries. Using conversation analysis methodology and quantitative analysis, this thesis analyzed questions and answers fro m political press conferences in China in order to show 1) how adversarialness and evasiveness were encoded in journalists’ questions and politiciansâ’ answers respectively; 2) whether there was a difference in adversarialness between journalists from different socio-political backgrounds, and 3) the relationship between adversarialness and evasiveness. The analysis revealed that journalists from developed countries displayed a higher level of adversarialness in their questions than Chinese journalist and that a higher level of journalistic adversarialness was more likely to result in a higher level of evasiveness in politicians’ answers. While journalists resorted to various strategies to pose adversarial questions, politicians also employed different structural designs and techniques to mitigate their evasive answers. Show more