The Anti-Corruption Narratives in Chinese Social Media (2012-2019)

This paper focuses on how Chinese government uses social media to establish the anti-corruption narratives and the current anti-corruption campaign in China. It tries to figure out why and how governments and organizations tackle social issues like “corruption” by telling stories. Taking China as an example, it applies a narrative policy framework to analyse the official texts in Chinese anti-corruption campaign between 2012 and 2019. It argues that there are four types of narratives of anti-corruption in China: “Confucianism”, “Dying dynasty”, “Economic well-being” and “Chinese Dream”. “Confucianism” addresses “self-regulation” in preventing corruption; “Dying dynasties” looks at educating officials by historical lessons; “economic well-being” echoes with the international norm that corruption destroy economy growth; “Chinese dream” aims at the final destination of anti-corruption campaign – a rejuvenation of China led by the Party. It will focus on Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption speeches on Chinese social media and employ a combined content and discourse analysis approach to work on the data. It will firstly map the trend and look at the word frequency of Xi’s anti-corruption speeches; and then select typical texts to analyze and support the four anti-corruption narratives respectively.