Discursive Construction Of China Food Safety: A Discourse-analysis Approach

With the high frequency of China food safety incidents, the government hasendeavored to adopt a series of measures to prevent the happenings of similar events,for instance, Food Safety Law and2011Main Arrangement of Food Safety SecurityWork. Up to now, there have been a series of works and articles being concerned withfood safety. However, almost all of them are confined within the specialized field offood safety. From the perspective of socio-cultural analysis and socio-linguisticanalysis, the present study intends to make full use of discourse analysis approach tointerpret how discourse construes China food safety. In addition,“order of discourse”and “discourse as social practice” will become the fundamental theories,“discoursehistorical approach”,“genre analysis” and “ethnomethodological conversationanalysis” will be the methodologies. The data are mainly concerned about two Chinafood safety forums.The main findings in this research could be illustrated as follows: orders ofdiscourse, sequence organization, discourse in public sphere, and move structure inthe two forums make us clear that the government discourse plays a mainstream rolein the construction of China food safety. As seen from the data, more concerns willcome to the concerted efforts by the government and food enterprises’ awareness,which promote the confidence of the consumers in the status quo of food safety. Inaddition, the transcription of the panel discussion has been detected from turn-taking,adjacency pair, topic maintenance and sequence organization which has been inclinedto the government option, while enterprises discourse, media discourse and experts’discourse serve to the government discourse, that is, the government discourse plays acentral role which functions as a mainstream discourse, i.e. power discourse, whilepublic discourse is a relatively marginal issue. Enterprise discourse, media discourseand experts’ discourse are apt to the government power discourse in China food safetyconstruction.In sum, although there has been the disequilibrium of mainstream discourse and marginal discourse in discourse rights, the marginal discourse is still subordinated tothe mainstream discourse in options, and both of them are dedicated to the discursiveconstruction of food safety. Moreover, the large portion of the government discoursewill be more authoritative in the public appeal, and the stronger power of thegovernment discourse will strengthen in the effects of the government-directed way tothe discursive construction of China food safety. In addition, it also proves that theChinese government has made great efforts in setting up the confidence of theconsumers, which embodies the philosophy of a harmonious society.