Institutional language as power

in contemporary China
Interaction between officials and visitors
in government service offices

Yi Li
Nankai University

Against the backdrop of an increasingly divided society and the government’s

determined pledge to build social cohesion in China, this paper examines how
social institutions, through their discursive practices, participate in the con-
struction of the still evolving social relations in contemporary China, using data
collected from interactions between citizens and officials at two governmental
agencies. It finds that discourse is an important way of reflecting and realizing
the institutional power possessed by institutional officials and that institutional
power is exercised and reinforced through a variety of discursive practices
ranging from fixed procedures of questioning to speech acts of interrupting and
blaming. Based on these findings, this paper argues that for government agencies
to act as a force of social cohesion in contemporary China as they have always
claimed, their linguistic forms of interaction with society, as well as the ideolo-
gies and practices associated with it, all need to be dramatically transformed.

Keywords: institutions, officer, visitor, politeness, power relations, interaction,

social cohesion

1. Introduction

Those who are interested in the development of contemporary China will know
that the history of the People's Republic of China is divided into two distinct eras
in political and economic terms. The first era was from 1949 to 1978，which
was characterized by state planned economy, radical socialism, economic self-
sufficiency and a fair degree of egalitarianism. The second era was from 1978 to
the present. This is an era characterized by determined economic reform, steady

Journal of Language and Politics 9:4 (2010), 528–545.  doi 10.1075/jlp.9.4.04li

issn 1569–2159 / e-issn 1569–9862 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
 Institutional language as power in contemporary China 529

movement from a planned economy to a market economy, rapid economic growth

and greater socio-economic divisions in society.
Two concomitant changes in the post 1978 era of China formed the immedi-
ate context for this study. One of these changes is the increasing division of soci-
ety based on people’s socioeconomic status; and the other is the expansion and
diversification of social institutions. The first change emerged gradually as China
moved from the planned economy to market economy and as the wealth distri-
bution began to “allow some sections of society to become rich first”. As a result
of this change, the previous structure of Chinese society which officially classi-
fied people into the working class, the peasantry, and the intellectuals, and which
prevailed Chinese society since 1949, gradually gave way to a new structure of
ten social strata (Lu 2002). This new structure has also been characterized by a
great disparity between the advantaged and disadvantaged sections. By the begin-
ning of this century, China was already among the most polarized society in the
world with increasingly evident tension between different sections, particularly
between the most disadvantaged marginal (e.g., peasants and laid-off workers)
and the main stream society. It is against this background that the CCP pledged to
lead the country to build a socialist ‘harmonious’ society at the 4th Plenum of the
16th Party Congress Central Committee.
The second change came about as a result of a number of combined factors.
The first is the weakening of the role of the work unit1 in people’s life. Previously,
most, if not all Chinese citizens belonged to a work unit, which took care of literal-
ly every aspect of people’s life, from the practical aspects such as housing, nursery
and medical care, to developmental aspects such as training, and to cultural and
recreational aspects. Having a good work unit meant you seldom needed to inter-
act with other institutions. However, with economic reform, many of the previous
functions of the work unit were taken over by social institutions. This means that
people have to interact with a wide range of institutions for matters that are not
directly associated with their job. The second factor is the reform of the govern-
ment itself. As the country adopted increasingly the market economy, the govern-
ment has shifted its responsibilities and functions increasingly towards providing
public services, while entrusting more power to the market and the legal system to
take charge of economic activities and social order. As a result, a great number of
law reinforcing institutions, government agencies and public service institutions
are established. Interactions with these organizations have become an increasing-
ly important part of people’s everyday life. The third factor is the broadening of
people’s life sphere enabled by rapid economic development and the improvement
of living standards. The last three decades have witnessed a spectacular growth
of the Chinese economy and a corresponding increase in income level. People’s
life sphere has thus expanded from daily sustenance into cultural, recreational,
530 Yi Li

socialization and developmental dimensions. Consequently, they now have to

have contact with a wide range of institutions to meet their needs.
As the number of institutions that Chinese people need to contact in their
lives increased and as they open a new horizon for social interactions, they have
also become an important site where the changing social relations in contempo-
rary China are manifested and reconstructed. This becomes particularly worth
noting when a large number of institutions (government agencies and professional
institutions) are established with the primary remit to foster social cohesion (‘har-
mony’) or are re-charged with such responsibilities.
It is therefore imperative to examine how social institutions, through their
discursive practices, participate in the construction of the still evolving social rela-
tions in contemporary Chinese society. The current study attempts to begin ad-
dressing this question through a case study of the face-to-face communication
between government officials and the general public at two government agencies
in a metropolitan centre in north China. It aims to examine how linguistic re-
sources are employed in an institutional setting to influence social relationships
and social cohesion.
In approaching the above research problem, Fairclough’s (1992) notion that
discourse as a social practice is both determined by and reactive on the existing
social relations and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) notion that politeness strategies
are affected by the power relations during conversation were adopted to inform
both the data collection and data analysis.

2. Data collection

The current study forms part of a larger study which investigates social interaction
across a range of institutional settings, including government agencies, the legal,
professional and civil institutions, and commercial organizations. Data reported
in this study consist of over one hundred and thirty thousand Chinese characters
collected in two government agencies in a metropolitan area of north China. One
is called the Letters and Calls Office; the other the Senior Citizen Office.
The Letters and Calls Office is a government agency established according to
the State Council’s Regulations on Letters and Visits to deal with public enquiries in
letters, phone calls, emails, faxes, or by personal visits, in relation to their right enti-
tlements and welfare in everyday life. In dealing with these enquiries, employees are
required by the aforementioned regulation to act in a professionally conscientious,
prompt, law-abiding, just, and educative manner. In the office where the data col-
lection of this study took place, enquiries by personal visits were received and dealt
with in a hall with a big counter in the middle dividing the officials and visitors. The
 Institutional language as power in contemporary China 531

officials sit behind the counter with a file at hand and a telephone available, while
the visitors sit on the other side of the counter. While there is normally more than
one official on duty, enquiries are dealt with on a one-to-one basis (i.e., one official
answers one enquiry at any given time). When one session of conversation is go-
ing on between an official and a visitor, there are usually other visitors sitting on a
bench in the same hall waiting for their turn. The official usually begins the conver-
sation with a series of questions regarding the visitor’s identity such as his name,
address, contact number etc. before proceeding to answer the visitor’s enquiries. If
the conversation relates to previous talk, the official would also ask the visitor about
the progress with the issue under discussion before going on to further discussion.
The Senior Citizen Centre is another government agency dealing with public
enquiries but with a clear focus on senior citizens. The consultation procedure
here takes place in a similar way as that in the Letter and Calls Office. The only dif-
ference lies in that the problems dealt with in this place are normally age-specific.
Data collection was carried out by means of tape recording during the face-to-
face interactions between government officials and the general public in both of-
fices, with permission from the institutional heads and consent from both the offi-
cial and the visitor engaged in the interaction. The data collection process did meet
a number of objections from the visitors who were anxious about tape-recording
and from the officials who were concerned about the confidentiality of the content
of their work. Most of these people agreed to cooperate after the nature of the re-
search work and our obligation to preserve confidentiality were further explained.
The conversation was tape-recorded using a micro-recorder; participant observa-
tion was carried out at the same time as a complementary data collection method.
The interaction under recording proceeded smoothly and no obvious influence
from tape-recording was found in their language behaviour. The tape recorded
data alone amounts to over 100,000 Chinese characters.
In addition to tape-recording, we also interviewed some people who had ex-
perience with institutional consultation. The interview data provide us with fur-
ther insights in making sense of the primary data.
While data collection was going on, we started verbatim transcription of both
the conversation data and the interview data. We used coding conventions to mark
the characteristic use of language for the convenience of analysis. As all the data
are in Chinese, we literally translated the examples extracted from data into Eng-
lish in order to make analysis comprehensible. The translated version of the Chi-
nese data was checked and approved by an expert in translation.
The coding conventions used in this paper are as follows:
//: interruption
SV: senior visitor
532 Yi Li

3. Enacting power through language

The data analysis shows that in spite of the government’s claim to be more service
oriented, government officials still manage to maintain enormous bureaucratic
power through various language means. The following sections will exhibit the
micro-scenario of how the institutional power is enacted in the oral interaction
between government officials and the visitors who come to seek practical help, ad-
vice or information; they will also reveal the potential effect that these discourses
may have on the construction of relationships between the two parties.

3.1 Power from many accented words

(1) 接待员：您有什么事？
Official: What can I do for you?
(2) 老人：我来反应下问题！是关于那个住房问题//的
SV: I come to inquire about housing problem
(3) 接待员：您叫什么名字？
Official: May I know your name?
(4) 老人：刘凤云！
SV: Liu Fengyun
(5) 接待员：您多大岁数？
Official: How old are you?
(6) 老人：七十一岁！
SV: Seventy one!
(7) 接待员：您的联系电话？
Official: Your contact number?
(8) 老人：2－3－6－1，2－3－6－1－3－6－9－5！
SV: 2－3－6－1，2－3－6－1－3－6－9－5！
(9) 接待员：您是哪个单位退休的？
Official: Which unit did you belong to?
(10) 老人：我是，现在是并了，我们，原来是南市集成锭，后来是并到//
SV: I belonged, it has been merged, we originally belonged to Nan Shi Ji
manufacturer, it merged with//
(11) 接待员：是蔬菜公司，是哪个公司？
Official: A vegetable company. Which company?
(12) 老人：那个，服务！服务公司，给并的！
SV: That, that, the service, service company, it’s been merged
(13) 接待员：服务公司！
Official: The service company!
 Institutional language as power in contemporary China 533

This conversation took place in the Senior Citizen’s Office, which deals with prob-
lems encountered by senior citizens in their lives. The conversation involves two
people, one is a government official and the other is a senior visitor who has come
for help concerning the welfare to which she was entitled.
The most notable feature in this dialogue is the use of second person pronoun
nin by the official to address the visitor, which is closely followed by an abrupt
change of topic (line 3) and an interruption (line 10). As the Chinese language is
a T/V language, it has both nin and ni for second person, with the former indicat-
ing respect for the hearer and/or a distance between the speaker and the hearer,
and the latter indicating either an absence of respect of the hearer or closeness
between the speaker and the hearer. The use of nin shows negative politeness to
the hearer, while the use of ni shows either positive politeness or impoliteness. In
this dialogue, the juxtaposition of nin with abrupt change of topic and interrup-
tion shows clearly enough that the official intended to mark the distance between
the visitor and himself. Furthermore, the official’s language behaviour in line 3
and 10 also indicates that the distance he constructed is not an ordinary “here to
there” distance; it is in fact a level split distance with the visitor at a distant lower
position and the official himself higher up. The relationship is therefore retained
between this powerful government official and the powerless visitor who comes
for help, even though a politeness marker “nin” is used to show negative polite-
ness. The following is a similar example illustrating the connotation of the second
person pronoun.
(1) 接待员：你就到团市委，你不到团市委去吗？
Official: Go to the Municipal Committee of Youth League. Why don’t you
(ni) go there?
到团市委大楼它就告你找谁了！
If you (ni) go to the Municipal Committee of Youth League you (ni) ’ll be told
who to consult
你反映少年宫的事儿，他就告你找哪个部了！
You report about Children’s Palace, you’ll be told which department to talk to
不找，找了嘛，找的谁啊？
You didn’t go, did you? Who did you talk to?
(2) 老人：找过！我找谁我都忘了！我把材料还给他了！
SV: I did! I forgot who I talk to, but I did give him the materials!
(3) 接待员：你找的谁啊？团市委谁接待的你？
Official: Who did you (ni) see? Who from the Municipal Committee of
Youth League answered your inquiry?
(4) 老人：我是上团市委找书记去了，没找着！
SV: I went to the Municipal Committee of Youth League for the secretary,
but failed to find him!
534 Yi Li

(5) 接待员：找书记？
Official: Went to the secretary?
(6) 老人： 啊！
SV: Ah!
(7) 接待员：找哪个书记？
Official: Which one?
(8) 老人：找他们团市委的书记！
SV: The one from the Municipal Committee of Youth League!
(9) 接待员：书记，书记都在那儿，都在那儿办公！
Official: Secretary, where is a secretary, which office does he work in?
(10) 老人：都在，书记他也没接待！
SV: They were there, the secretary didn’t show up!
(11) 接待员：啊，他不会接待你！
Official: Ah, he wouldn’t see you!

A similar example took place in the Letters and Calls Office, in which the pro-
noun ni is used (see example 2). Like the word nin, the “T” form ni also has two
connotations: closeness and absence of respect. With connotation of closeness, ni
indicates positive politeness, whereas with connotation of disrespect, the use of ni
suggests positive impliteness. In this case, the official met the senior visitor for the
first time; he is also much younger than the visitor. Professionally and culturally, a
nin is expected. However, the T form is consistently and emphatically used, which
may well be considered as signifying disrespect to the visitor, threatening the visi-
tor’s positive face wants. The official’s disrespect for the visitor is also manifested
in his impatience with the senior visitor’s description of his problem.
From nin in the first example to ni in the second, the two officials also used
different words to address the visitor, the relationships they constructed between
themselves and the visitor were strikingly similar. They both constructed the rela-
tionships by evoking a particular meaning of the word in a particular context: the
former by evoking an implicit meaning of distance in the context of parallel use of
nin with interruption and change of topic, the latter by evoking an explicit mean-
ing of disrespect in the context of repeated and emphatic use of ni. In both cases,
power remained with the officials, which was clearly manifested through the use
of the second person pronoun in connection with the context.

3.2 Power from topic control

(1) 来访者： 我这么跟我们老爹也说了，等于我//

Visitor: I told this to my daddy. That means I //
(2) 接待员： 我跟您讲啊，承租了房子，
Official: I’ll tell you what, when you rent a house,
 Institutional language as power in contemporary China 535

住了房子就应该交房费。
you should pay the rent.
(3) 来访者： 现在修好了，我不//
Visitor: Now it has been repaired. I don’t //
(4) 接待员： 行了。 你漏， 漏是8月份，7月份漏？
Official: Quit it. It leaked. Was it in August or July?
(5) 来访者： 漏？ 从去年的四季度。
Official: Leaked? From the forth quarter of last year.

Interruption is an effective way of exercising topic control, but it also results in

face threatening effects. In line 1, the visitor begins a story which the official thinks
is irrelevant to the topic under discussion. By the act of interrupting, the official
brings the conversation back to the topic about the rent, thus realizing topic con-
trol. However, as this act of interrupting forces the visitor out of his speakership, it
threatens his negative face; as it at the same time indicates the official’s indifference
to the content of the story, it threatens the visitor’s positive face as well.
The second interruption takes place in Line 2 when the visitor attempts to
give a detailed description about repairing which is regarded as irrelevant by the
official. The latter interrupts him by a blunt “Quit it”. Here, as in line 1, the official
stops the visitor not because of a need to express something but to exercise control
over the topic. In this case, although the interruption appears to have pushed for-
ward the progress of interaction effectively, it threatens unmistakably the visitor’s
positive face.
Interrupters are often regarded as having more power and the number of in-
terruptions serves as an indicator of the speaker’s power and the property of power
relations in the interaction (Thornborrow 2002: 8). The same is true of the other
way round, that is, people with more power tend to interrupt more frequently
to issue symbols of status and power. In this study, officials appear to have used
interruptions far more frequently than visitors who, as a matter of fact, used few.
Such one-sided distribution of interrupting reveals not only the existence of power
asymmetry but arguably also the degree to which such a relationship is entrenched.

3.3 Power from closed questions

(1) 接待员：您有什么事？
Official: What can I do for you?
(2) 老人：我来反应下问题！是关于那个住房问题//的/
SV: I come to inquire about housing problem
(3) 接待员： 您叫什么名字？
Official: May I know your name?
(4) 老人：刘凤云！
536 Yi Li

SV: Liu Fengyun

(5) 接待员：您多大岁数？
Official: How old are you?
(6) 老人：七十一岁！
SV: Seventy one!
(7) 接待员：您的联系电话？
Official: Your contact number?
(8) 老人：2－3－6－1，2－3－6－1－3－6－9－5！
SV: 2－3－6－1，2－3－6－1－3－6－9－5！
(9) 接待员：您是哪个单位退休的？
Official: Which unit did you belong to?
(10) 老人：我是，现在是并了，我们，原来是南市集成锭，后来是并到//
SV: I belonged, it has been merged, I originally belonged to Nan Shi Ji
manufacturer, it merged with//
(11) 接待员：是疏菜公司，是哪个公司？
Official: A vegetable company. Which company?
(12) 老人：那个，服务！服务公司，给并的！
SV: That, that, the service, service company, it’s been merged
(13) 接待员：服务公司！你住哪？
Official: The service company! Where do you live?
(14) 老人：我住王顶堤，梨园西里，梨园
SV: I live in Liyuan Xili. Liyuan. Wangdingdi.
(15) . 接待员： 几号楼？
Official: Which building?
(16) 老人：一号楼
SV: Building No. 1.
(17) 接待员：哦，你有什么事？你丈夫怎么了“
Official: Well. What problem will you talk about? What’s up with your
husband?
(18) 老人：我们，哦….
SV: We, well… (omitted)

This excerpt consists of a series of questions and answers, the purpose of which, in
this context, is to obtain detailed information about the visitor’s identity and the
problem that she has encountered. The gathering of information at the beginning
of the interaction is believed to be necessary for filing and for searching the most
appropriate solution to the visitor’s problems.
Our data show that almost all face-to-face interactions that take place in the
institutional settings begin with these questions and the answers following a fixed
procedure. All the questions at this stage are closed questions, leaving the visitor
no room to digress, thus threatening the visitor’s negative face wants. In line 10
 Institutional language as power in contemporary China 537

and 12, the visitor made barely visible attempts to break away from the procedure,
but these were not tolerated. The procedure was so fixed that it seemed to embody
the power of authority in its own right, regardless of what phrases and ways of ad-
dressing are used. By ensuring that the procedure is strictly followed, the officials
established the power asymmetry at the very beginning of their interactions with
the visitor.
As shown in example 4, this beginning section is also characterized by one-
way disclosure of information, where the official asks questions to obtain personal
information about the visitor but gives no information to the visitor regarding his
name, work sector and responsibilities etc. Asymmetry of information will likely
lead to asymmetry of power, further reinforcing the power relationship construct-
ed through the fixed procedure of questions and answers.

3.4 Power from rhetorical questions (I)

Official: 问题它是厕所，不是储藏室啊。 ……你要是居室漏了,

The problem is that it was the toilet, not the basement. … If your room
leaked,
给你被子，给你衣服(糟蹋了)，你可以说补偿。
and ruined your bedclothes and clothes, you could ask for compensation.
你这厕所， 厕所就是厕所。 谁让你厕所放这么多东西？
But it was a toilet. A toilet is a toilet. Who told you to store so many things
in the toilet ?

A rhetorical question does not expect any answer from the hearer, because it has
the illocutionary force of an assertion of the opposite polarity from what is ap-
parently asked (Han 2002). This type of question may create resistant attitude,
particularly when people aren’t initially motivated to consider the message (Kevin
&Tracy 2006: 113)
In example 5, the official used a rhetorical question to disprove the visitor’s use
of the toilet as a basement to store his personal belongings. The question sounds
impolite in that it is evidently put forward for criticising rather than for eliciting.
It therefore threatens the visitor’s positive face. In daily circumstance, this kind of
question would be likely to receive a retort in return, but the official here met no
sign of resistance from the visitor. As in other examples discussed in this chapter,
this apparent asymmetrical power exchange reveals the existence of great institu-
tional power that has remained easily accessible to the official.
In addition to asserting a meaning opposite to what a question superficially
suggests, a rhetorical question also serves as an effective persuasive device (Frank
1990: 723). It is very often used in persuading the hearer to understand or to accept
the speaker’s argument, as shown in the following example:
538 Yi Li

3.5 Power from rhetorical questions (II)

Official: 结婚花了多少钱？ 你借了80万

How much did you spend on the wedding? You borrowed 800,000
跟人家没关系， 是吧? 因为嘛这样说？都是社会主义
but it was nobody else’s business, right? Why? We are a socialist country
结婚你愿意折腾。
but you were willing to ask for all the trouble for the wedding.

The rhetorical question in this example does not expect an answer either, but un-
like the previous one, this question does not have the answer entailed in itself, but
needs the answer from the person who asked the question. This means that the
official asks a deliberate question while knowing the answer. The locutionary effect
is that the official requires the visitor to repeat the mutually known facts, which is
clearly an offensive requirement; while the illocutionary effect is that the official
disproves what is implied in the fact and intends to draw the visitor’s attention to
the argument he is going to make. To ask a rhetorical question in this way indicates
the official’s positively impolite attitude towards the visitor. In so doing, the official
not only exhibits his power, but also maintains and even reinforces his power.
The use of rhetorical questions in the institutional context was found only in
the officials’ speech, whereas no such type of question was found in the recorded
speech of the visitors. This fact suggests that only those who are officially invested
with power would ask this type of question, and asking this type of question could
help the official strengthen his position as institutional representative.

3.6 Power from tag questions

Official: 毛泽东时代俩人领着戴大红花一定，就结婚了，
In Mao Tse-tung’s times, a wedding only meant the couple wearing a big red
paper flower on their bosom,
知道吧？ 现在，是你愿折腾的， 对不对？
do you know? Now, you were willing to ask for all the trouble, weren’t you?
并不是人家女方要求的，怪自己啊。怎么不是女方要求怪自己
呢？(illogical)
Your daughter-in-law didn’t ask you to do it, and it was all your fault.
是您自己找的
Why? You yourself asked for it.

According to research findings, tag questions occur more frequently in the speech
of those who are institutionally invested with rights and obligations and have some
kind of responsibilities for the success of an interaction (Cameron et al 1988), and
it is also used in an interaction as a confrontational strategy to challenge the other
 Institutional language as power in contemporary China 539

party by boosting the force of a negative speech act (Holmes 1995: 80). Our data
show that tag questions illustrated in example 7 were frequently used by govern-
ment officials but rarely by visitors.
In example 7, the official stated as a known fact that the amount of money bor-
rowed and spent by the visitor on his son’s wedding, and claimed that it is the visi-
tor who should be responsible for the loan. Before the visitor could give any reply,
the official continued to say “right” as a tag to pressurize the hearer for agreement.
The use of the tag in this context serves to force the visitor to make a decision
whether to agree or disagree with the official, thus threatening the visitor’s nega-
tive face. This suggests that the official was ready at the moment to refute any dif-
ferent ideas that may come from the visitor. Following this, the official described a
wedding in Mao Tse-tung’s times. Even though the visitor was much senior to her
and more likely to have personally experienced that period of history, the official
still asked the visitor, with the tag “do you know”, for a positive reply, conveying
explicitly her superiority to the visitor. Further to the two tags, the official contin-
ued to judge the visitor by a derogative utterance “you were willing to ask for all
the trouble” and to strengthen the force of this utterance, she used the tag “weren’t
you”. In keeping with the attitude expressed in the three tags, the official attributed
all the troubles to the visitor as the conclusion.
Even though these tags were markedly threatening to the visitor’s positive
face, hence conflict-eliciting, the official did not seem to show any concern for the
possible consequences. One may well ask “what on earth has enabled the official
to behave like that”, and the most likely answer is that she has been entrusted with,
or believes herself to have been entrusted with the institutional authority and that
she has managed to reproduce that authority through language.

3.7 Power from the construction of professionally illegitimate relationship

Official:
(1) 就那折子，哪天哪天买的房子，什么的！
That bank account, which shows the date on which the house was bought
and so on!
(2) 你打官司不能这样打！ 我出的主意有点儿也是个坏主意！
No, you can’t go to court with that! I’ll give you an idea, a bad one indeed!
(3) 别提知道 写她的名字我们不知道
Don’t say you know that. [Just say] we did’t know it was under her name;
(4) 现在发现了是她的名字，现在我们不同意了，现在, 我们不同意了，所
以提起诉讼。
we just found out that and we don’t agree. Now we don’t agree, hence the law
suit.
540 Yi Li

(5) 这官司这么打！你要是打早知道，打早知道,现在后悔了，法官半句话
就问住了
This is the way to go to court! If you knew it, and now you regretted it, the
judge can stump you with a question
(6) 你打官司那么打，当时让她买房，让她办房，她写的是自己的名字,
You go to court that way, she was asked to buy the house, she fulfilled the
procedure. She bought the house under her name
(7) 目前发现，因为这样儿，所以提起诉讼，知道吗！
We just found out that. Because of this, we sue her. Understand?
(8) 这官司那么打！回去先协商， 录音或是什么的，
This is the way to go to court! Go back to negotiate, or record your talk or
(9) 录下来，最后不行，最后不行一打官司这事儿就能成功！
Record the talk. If no agreement reached at last, you surely win the lawsuit
with recording
(10) 现在你就办!老爷子百年以后，完了你更乱套.
Do it now! It would be even more chaotic after the old man dies.

This conversation took place at the Letters and Calls Office, where a senior citizen
was inquiring about the legal procedure to settle a family dispute regarding who
should inherit his father’s flat when his father dies. The official used “No, you can’t
go to court with that!”, “I’ll give you an idea”, “don’t say you know that”, “Do it
now!” to construct a seemingly intimate and patronizing relationship with the old
man. According to Brown and Levinson (1987), to give advice is negatively threat-
ening to the hearer’s face, as it impedes the hearer’s freedom of action.
In the normal everyday life context — beyond the office of a government agen-
cy — this kind of relationship is culturally legitimate contingent on two condi-
tions: that the speaker is a close friend or relative to the hearer, and that he/she is of
the same or senior age. The official in this example met neither of these conditions.
He did not know the visitor; and he was much younger. To put it in another way,
it would be culturally unacceptable for the official to maintain such a relationship
were it not for his institutional power. By this way, the official tries to show close-
ness with the visitor, thus positive politeness.
However, by initiating a one-sided role change and constructing a culturally
invalid relationship, the official demonstrated that he was free to reshape their
relations according to his will and needs, to the extent that even the cultural norm
could be disregarded, and free to impose that relation on the visitor. In so doing,
he developed their asymmetrical power relationship even further and threatened
the visitor’s negative face.
 Institutional language as power in contemporary China 541

3.8 Power from Unchecked Blaming

Official:
(1) (对周围人讲) 不象话， 不象话，
(talk to people around) He is no good, no good.
光说人家媳妇的毛病，
He only talks about his daughter-in-law’s shortcomings.
你儿子没毛病啊？
Doesn’t your son have any?
这个我们就不接待这个。
We don’t want to receive visitors like him.
(2) 要是不到我这儿来您知道到团市，团市委解决吗？
If you hadn’t come here, how could you know that you should go to
Tuanshiwei?
(3) 让你厕所放这么多东西？
Who told you to store so many things in the toilet ?
(4) 你愿意折腾
You were willing to ask for all the trouble.

The above speech acts were all performed by the officials on duty after the visi-
tors talked about their problems or disputes. All these utterances are apparently
blaming acts characterized by some derogatory expressions. The performing of
a speech act of blaming is clearly threatening to the hearer’s positive face. In ev-
eryday contexts, these blaming acts would most probably offend the hearers and
cause conflict, as they threatened the visitor’s positive face. However, in this in-
stitutional context, no visible reaction was detected in the visitors and no sign of
being offended was noted. By performing these acts, the officials demonstrated
their identity as the representative of the institution and the associated power they
possess; the polarization of power between these officials and the visitors was in-
creased even further.

3.9 Power from use of power-laden Pet Phrases

Our data analysis shows that the officials also frequently used fixed colloquial ex-
pressions, which, in the context, were heavily laden with power. For example, they
often began a sentence with “I’ll tell you what”( 我跟你讲啊 ) or “let me reason
with you” ( 我跟你说这道理呀 ), “do you know” ( 知道吗 ) etc. The implication
of these pet phrases could be understood either as “You don’t know it and listen to
me” or “I know more than you” (Liao 2005). On the one hand, the frequent use of
these expressions threatens the visitor’s positive face; on the other hand, the use of
such phrases frames the official as “higher-up”, because each time they were used,
542 Yi Li

the listeners were in effect forced into a position in which they had to receive in-
formation and opinion that the official judged to be important or helpful.

4. Discussion

The data analysis in the foregoing sections has outlined some notable features of
language use in two exemplary institutional settings. It has also revealed that these
features are associated with certain power relationships in today’s China. These
linguistic interactions therefore provide us with a useful clue to understanding the
evolving social relationships and their implications for social cohesion in China.
As revealed in the data, the government officials employ a wide range of lin-
guistic means to demonstrate a powerful position over the visitors. These include,
among other means, interrupting, blaming, closed questions, and power-laden
phrases. In contrast, the visitors used very few of these devices and showed a con-
siderable acquiescence with regard to the officials’ clear demonstration of power.
This striking contrast helps to construct the officials as the dominating party and
the disadvantaged visitors as dominated.
Two social milieus in contemporary China may provide the immediate con-
text in which these micro characteristics of institution based language behaviour
can be further analyzed. The first is that of increasing division and polarization be-
tween different sections of the Chinese population. According to Lu’s classification
(2001), the contemporary Chinese population consists of ten strata; institutional
staff, such as the officials employed in the service offices that we have observed be-
long to the upper middle class, while the great majority of their clients are retired
senior citizens, laid-off workers and in general people who belong to the lower
middle class or the lower class. Seen from this perspective, the interactions in-
vestigated in this study, i.e., those between government officials and their visitors,
can be located, first of all, as part of the relationships between the privileged upper
middle class members and the disadvantaged lower class members.
This relationship may have had at least some bearing on the linguistic inter-
actions between the two parties involved. It can be argued, for instance, that the
increasing polarization between the rich and the poor and the emerging social con-
flicts resulting from this polarization may have given rise to at least a certain degree
of prejudice against the poor. In this study, the officials’ use of many linguistic devic-
es potentially offensive to the visitors (e.g. blunt interruption, explicit blaming), and
the visitors’ relinquishing of any linguistic means to challenge the officials, may be
seen, at least in part, as a manifestation of the unequal class relationship. If this is the
case, then institutions become a site where class conflict is carried out and discourse
resources are employed by the upper section to construct power over the lower.
 Institutional language as power in contemporary China 543

The second context in which the observed micro-characteristics of institution

based language behaviour can be examined is that of a self-reforming government
and its attempt to reconstruct the relationship between itself and associated insti-
tutions on the one hand, and the general public on the other. Seen from this per-
spective, the observed interactions between government officials and the visitors,
can be located as part of the relationship between government agencies as part of
the bureaucratic system and the general public as citizens.
It is clear from the data analysis that this relationship has had a profound im-
pact on the language behaviour of both the officials and the visitors. It is worth
noting that until very recently, Chinese government played a powerful managing
role in nearly every aspect of social life, which also endowed it with enormous
power for social control. This strong government role facilitated, to a large ex-
tent, the fortification of society’s bureaucratic power over individual citizens. In
recent years, the government has pledged to reform itself to become more service
oriented and in accordance with this, it has also begun a process to reduce the
power of government agencies and foster a culture of service among government
and public sector employees. However, excessive bureaucratic power, particularly
those entrenched in employees’ conduct, die hard. In this study, the closed ques-
tions that the officials throw at the visitors, the blaming and patronizing discourses
they abuse, and the power-laden phrases and rhetorical questions they frequently
use can all be seen as a reflection of bureaucratic inertia and power. The exercise of
discourse power by government officials in this study is therefore a continuity of
bureaucratic power in linguistic form.

5. Conclusions

As found in the data analysis, discourse is an important way of reflecting and real-
izing the institutional power possessed by institutional officials. Within the con-
text of interactions between institutional officials and the general public, who are
entitled to contact the institutions when they need to, institutional power is dem-
onstrated and reinforced through:
– fixed procedures of questioning, to establish information asymmetry which
places the visitor into the fixed procedures to provide the information needed
by the official,
– speech acts of interrupting to control topics,
– speech acts of blaming to construct the official in power relations as “one-up”,
– certain fixed expressions to show officials superiority in knowledge or infor-
mation.
544 Yi Li

Through these discursive practices, government agencies modeled on the two ex-
amples in this study will, in all probability, strengthen their own power at the cost
of those whom they pledged to empower. For government agencies to act as a
force of social cohesion in contemporary China as they have always claimed, their
linguistic forms of interaction with society, as well as the ideologies and practices
associated with it, all need to be dramatically transformed.

Acknowledgment

Works leading to the preparation of this paper were funded by National Planning Office of Phi-
losophy and Social Science.

Note

1.  Work unit refers to an organization in which one works

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Author’s address
Yi Li
College of Foreign Languages
Nankai University
94 Weijin Road, Nankai District
Tianjin China 300071
yli@nankai.edu.cn

About the author

Yi Li studied modern English and linguistics at Nankai University and was awarded Master De-
gree in 1990. He furthered his study in linguistics at Loughborough University in Britain and got
his PhD in 2000. Currently, he is a professor of linguistics at Nankai University (China). Apart
from his PhD thesis on cross-cultural politeness in the context of supervision, he has published
a book on politeness and a series of articles on institutional discourse. At the moment, he is
undertaking a project dealing with the role of language in the construction of social cohesion in
contemporary China, which is funded by China’s National Planning Office of Philosophy and
Social Science.
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