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.