34.3165, Review: Responding to Questions at Press Conferences: Wu (2023)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-3165. Tue Oct 24 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.3165, Review: Responding to Questions at Press Conferences: Wu (2023)

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Date: 24-Oct-2023
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics: Wu (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.1174

AUTHOR: Peng Wu
TITLE: Responding to Questions at Press Conferences
SUBTITLE: Confrontational maneuvering by Chinese spokespersons
SERIES TITLE: Argumentation in Context   21
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson

SUMMARY

In this book, Peng Wu 吳鵬 gives a detailed analysis of rhetorical
strategies used by representatives of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in
responding to journalists’ questions at press conferences.

Wu claims in his introduction (quoting Yumei Ju 鞠玉梅) that Chinese and
Western rhetoric differ in various respects, notably that Chinese
rhetoric “accentuates how a rhetor’s intentions are (to be) conveyed,
while western rhetoric focuses on how to persuade the audience”.  This
strikes me as misleading.  In the West, the term “rhetoric” is by
definition about persuasion; the main definition of the term in my
desk dictionary is “the whole art of using language so as to persuade
others”.  The word was coined in Ancient Greece for a skill which was
crucial for a citizen of classical Athens, because public life
depended heavily on arguing cases before courts and assemblies, and in
consequence the subject came to play an important role in mediaeval
European education (rhetoric was one of the three elements of the
basic “trivium”, alongside grammar and logic).  Social conditions in
China were quite different from those in Greece, so Chinese had no
equivalent concept, and the neologism coined in modern times in order
to translate “rhetoric” from Western languages was perhaps poorly
chosen:  修辭學 ‘xiucixue’, literally “cultivate-wording-ology”, which
carries no suggestion of persuasion.  But that does not imply that
Chinese speakers operate differently from Westerners in practice (they
may do, but not because the name of a Western academic subject has
been poorly translated).  Wu’s book makes it clear that Chinese
Foreign Ministry spokesmen are very much in the business of persuasion
when they reply to journalists’ questions; though one difference from
other rhetorical scenarios is that the journalists are only the
spokesmen’s “secondary audience”, the “primary audience” – the people
the spokesmen are actually hoping to persuade of the soundness of
their government’s position – being the general public who will read
or hear the journalists’ reports.

Until fairly recently, rhetoric as an academic subject tended to be
seen by moderns as a dusty relic of the Middle Ages or, at latest, the
Renaissance.  But it was revived as a serious subject by the Belgian
Chaïm Perelman (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1958), and further
developed by others.  Perelman broadened its scope from exclusive
concern with face-to-face speech to cover also argumentation through
the written word, which in modern times is probably more important.
(In the course of his book, Wu identifies other innovations by the
“New Rhetoricians”, for instance some of them have rehabilitated ‘ad
hominem’ arguments, and arguments which deploy emotion in place of
reason, both traditionally seen as invalid modes of argumentation.)
One New Rhetorician is Frans van Eemeren of Amsterdam University (e.g.
van Eemeren 2018), who has developed what he calls a
“pragma-dialectical” theory of argumentation.  Peng Wu, who is based
at Jiangsu University and runs its International Learned Institute of
Argumentation Studies, did a PhD supervised by van Eemeren, and
applies van Eemeren’s ideas to press-conference data.

We learn that the utterances of Chinese government representatives on
these occasions have been regulated by a set of detailed guidelines
published in a ‘Workbook for Governmental Press Conferences’ in 2005.
They include maxims such as “The spokesperson should keep his/her
emotions in control”, and “… should not infringe on the personal
reputation of others”.  This might surprise British readers, whose
knowledge of these events will often derive mainly from reports at the
time when Chris Patten (now Lord Patten), the last British Governor of
Hong Kong, was negotiating an agreement on the future of that
territory after the 1997 handover with his Chinese opposite number Lu
Ping.  In his revealing account of these negotiations, Patten (1998:
69) described how Lu at his press conferences “was given to mild
hysteria and to the use of language from the most extreme lexicon of
the Cultural Revolution (he once said that I was a criminal who would
be condemned for a thousand generations).”  But this seeming
inconsistency may be explained by the fact that China is evidently
prone to making explicit, and sharp, changes to its diplomatic style.
Wu discusses in detail a “dramatic change” around the years 2014–16
away from a posture of “humility and respect” towards a
“hard-ball-playing”, “tough” style, the latter being the style
controlling the press conferences sampled in this book.  (In Chinese
it is called a “progressive” style.)  The 2005 Workbook presumably
relates to the “humility and respect” period; perhaps Lu Ping before
1997 exemplified a different diplomatic régime again.

Peng Wu’s Chapter 1 introduces his press-conference data and van
Eemeren’s theory of rhetoric, and outlines the aims of the book.  He
tells us that there is a rich Chinese-language research literature on
press-conference rhetoric, though he claims that “most of the research
on the ‘rhetorical devices’ selected by spokespersons is lacking a
solid theoretical foundation” – Wu’s use of van Eemeren’s theory is
intended to supply that deficiency.  In a brief Chapter 2 Wu sketches
a number of rhetorical manoeuvres Foreign Ministry spokesmen can
exploit in the face of awkward questions, in order to maintain their
government’s position in a manner that hearers will accept as
rational.

Then Wu’s next three chapters each examine in detail one of these
types of manoeuvre.  Chapter 3 is about what Perelman and
Olbrechts-Tyteca called the technique of “dissociation”, whereby the
speaker distinguishes separate strands within a question topic and
treats the strand for which he can produce a satisfactory answer as
the “real” subject of debate.  Chapter 4 deals with “manoeuvring by
personal attack”.  And Chapter 5 is about winning an argument by
“declaring a standpoint unallowed or indisputable”.  Each of these
rhetorical moves is illustrated by close examination of specific
exchanges between Chinese ministry representatives and journalists.

Chapter 6 deals more briefly with some further types of manoeuvre, and
ways in which spokesmen may combine more than one manoeuvre into a
single answer.

Then in Chapter 7 Wu stands back from the detail to discuss the
“general impression” or overall “argumentative style” produced by
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesmen through their deployment of the
various rhetorical devices examined in the previous chapters.  Wu
characterizes their current style as “uncompromising detached
confrontational”.  Wu looks at how this style has emerged from the
political background Chinese diplomacy currently finds itself in, and
why the choice of style may have been a natural response to that
political background.

Finally, the concluding Chapter 8 summarizes the findings of the book
and the implications of those findings, and proposes possible lines
for future research.

Western readers might come to this book assuming that an academic
making a career in a country like modern China is going to be
circumspect and will exercise considerable self-censorship about
anything that might show the Chinese government in a bad light.  If
so, again they may be surprised.  There are a number of passages (for
instance on p. 142, relating to discussion of US sanctions on trade
with Iran) where Wu is more or less explicit about the cynicism
displayed in some Ministry representatives’ evasive replies to
journalists’ questions.  On the other hand, Wu would only have reason
to self-censor if that cynicism would be perceived as objectionable
within China.  Other passages suggest that this may not be so.  At a
number of points, e.g. p. 158, Wu tells us that the new
“uncompromising confrontational argumentative style” is highly popular
among Chinese young netizens, who call those adopting it a “Super
Group of Diplomats”.  “Becoming this popular had since 1949 hardly
ever happened to any other generation of [Chinese Foreign Ministry]
spokespersons.”

EVALUATION

This is a valuable book – it is potentially of interest to students of
politics and current affairs as much as to linguists.

Sometimes I felt that Wu ought to have said more than he does about
points which he makes briefly but which sound important.  I said that
the first difference Wu identifies, quoting Yumei Ju, between Western
and Chinese concepts of rhetoric is only a difference in the meaning
of terms rather than in the nature of rhetoric, but Wu quotes a
second, more substantial point from Ju:  “in Chinese rhetoric
reasonableness (in the western sense) is hardly deemed a vital
criterion for evaluating argumentation, while in academic western
rhetoric reasonableness is in principle considered to be a vital
criterion”.  We need to know, surely (but are not told by Wu) what
sense of “reasonable” is a property which Chinese do not require in an
argument if they are to take it seriously.  (I am guessing that
“reasonable argumentation” in the relevant sense might mean
argumentation which displays a measure of openness towards the
contrary view – but that is only a guess.)

I also feel sceptical about Wu’s repeated claims that analysis of
rhetorical strategies cannot be done properly in the absence of a
“solid theoretical foundation”.  Quite often in linguistics,
theorizing achieves little more than to render obscure ideas that
could be expressed quite adequately in ordinary untechnical language.
Discussing the work of Yang Zhang 張洋, one of the scholars who wrote
about press conferences earlier, Wu complains that “since Zhang does
not explain what linguistic theory she draws upon, it is not clear why
the linguistic properties that could define a certain language style
include only phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, figures of speech, and
‘body language’.  It is also unclear why ‘body language’ should be
deemed one of the linguistic properties.”  Of course it will always be
open to anyone to argue that a list like Zhang’s “phonetics,
vocabulary, etc.” ought to include additional considerations that have
been overlooked (though Wu himself does not identify any specific
omission in Zhang’s list), but this will be no less true if the list
derives from a theoretical framework – that would just mean that the
sceptic’s disagreement is with the general theory rather than the
individual case.  And whether or not “body language” should come under
the heading of “linguistics” is a mere matter of definition, not an
issue of substance.

But one of Wu’s aims is to promote van Eemeren’s pragma-dialectical
theory.  We all have a tendency to exaggerate the importance of the
ideas of those who were our mentors when we embarked on the life of
scholarship.  Some views which Wu attributes to van Eemeren look quite
debatable, for instance the claim that “the general institutional
point of all communicative activity types in the (Western) political
domain is to preserve a democratic political culture”.  This might be
true by definition, if a society which moves away from democracy no
longer counts as “Western”, but if “Western” is being used in its
normal geographical sense then one can only comment “would that it
were so”.

Where analysis of government representatives’ rhetoric depends on the
precise meaning of utterances that were originally in Chinese, Wu
overlooks the fact that most of his readers will not understand that
language.  On his pp. 94–5 Wu discusses at length a piece of wording
which in one source is translated as “other countries are in no
position to make irresponsible and indiscreet remarks”, and in another
as “other countries are in no position to say otherwise”.  The
original Chinese is highly idiomatic and impossible to translate
literally, but Wu leaves readers guessing how the same words could be
rendered into English so differently.

There are also cases where I question Wu’s analysis of political
issues relevant to his discussion.  On p. 124 Wu comments that
countries such as the USA and Japan have “always maintained that China
should take much more responsibility than other countries in
preventing [North Korea] from developing nuclear weapons, thus
implying that China had been pulling the strings behind this nuclear
issue”.  I should have thought that the implication, rather, was that
China has more ability to influence North Korea than other countries
have – not that China had been pulling strings, but that it ought to
start pulling them (or pull harder).

These are limited blemishes on a book from which, as a whole, I have
learned much about a topic I knew nothing at all about before I read
Wu.  I recommend his book.

REFERENCES

van Eemeren, F., 2018.  Argumentation Theory: a pragma-dialectical
perspective.  Springer Nature (Cham, Canton Zug, Switzerland).

Patten, C., 1998.  East and West: the last Governor of Hong Kong on
power, freedom and the future.  Macmillan.

Perelman, C. and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1958.  Traité de
l’argumentation: la nouvelle rhétorique.  Sixth edn, Editions de
l’Université de Bruxelles, 2008.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Oriental Studies at Cambridge University
in 1965, and studied Linguistics and Computer Science as a graduate
student at Yale University before teaching at the universities of
Oxford, LSE, Lancaster, Leeds, and Sussex. After retiring from his
Computing chair at Sussex he spent some years as a research fellow in
Linguistics at the University of South Africa. Sampson has published
in most areas of Linguistics and on a number of other subjects. His
most recent linguistics book is ''The Linguistics Delusion'' (Equinox,
2017); in 2020 he published ''Voices from Early China'' (Cambridge
Scholars Publishing), a translation of an anthology of Chinese poems
dating from about 1000–600 B.C.



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