A Critical Analysis Of Relations In Contemporary China’s Higher Education Policy Discourse

As a newly-emerging linguistic perspective, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is acknowledged for its problem-oriented analytic goal and its keen insight into uncovering the interactive construction between language and social changes by selecting open, trans-disciplinary and flexible analytic methods. The present thesis mainly employs Fairclough’s three-dimensional model to analyze four pieces of China’s higher education policy documents extracted from China’s national education policy documents. Description and interpretation are fulfilled by marketing metaphor analysis, modality analysis and intertextuality. Explanation focuses on the discussion based on context analysis. The research discovers the newly-formulated relation network in China’s higher education, and keeps trace of its construction, and realizes that the newly-formulated relation network indicates the close relation between discursive changes in China’s higher education and China’s social-cultural changes. The research suggests, the newly-formulated relation network in China’s higher education reveals the permeation of market and society into China’s higher education, and the great influence of market and society on China’s higher education reform and China’s modernizations, and the reshaping of the interactive relations among main higher education participants, including governments at all levels, higher education, schools of higher learning, teachers, students and social groups.