| This paper examines five annual press conferences delivered by Zhu Rongji, former Premier of People's Republic of China, from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis. Government press conference is a subfield of political discourse analysis, which is one of the main fields of Critical Discourse Analysis. Critical Discourse Analysis originates from traditional schools of language studies and studies language, power, and ideology in relation to each other. This paper employs Fairclough's three dimensional framework of critical discourse analysis to examine government press conference at three levels: a textual level, a discoursal level, and a socio-cultural level. The findings reveal that: a) the structure of a government press conference is based on question-answer pairs made by correspondents and the government representatives; b) the nature of a government press conference is a combination of information enquiry and information release, which also reveals the shared beliefs and ideas of different social groups that the correspondents and the spokesman represent respectively; c) the functions of a government press conference include: to familiarize government policies, to justify decision-making, to send out certain messages to people concerned as an alarm or a warning, to remove misunderstanding, and to gain support from the public, etc.; d) the mechanism of a government press conference exemplifies that language is a basic constituent of power and meantime is also conditioned by social political power, which represents and serves for interests of a certain social group, i.e. the ideology; e) Critical Discourse Analysis proves itself to be a useful instrumental discipline in studying political discourse, more specifically, in studying government press conference.
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