This department R&D project aims to build a large corpus of Chinese news text designed to facilitate diachronic critical discourse analysis of social changes in contemporary China, helping to enhance the department’s already-strong reputation in corpus-based CDA by extending it to a language and culture other than English and the West. The resulting corpus will comprise more than 1.3 million news articles published in China’s most authoritative and influential newspaper, People’s Daily, between May 1946 and December 2003, covering all major historical periods in the history of Communist China. The prestigious status of the newspaper and the full temporal coverage of this collection will form the basis for a reliable diachronic discourse study of social changes in contemporary China since World War II to provide a true picture of contemporary China and yield critical insights into contemporary Chinese society.

For more information, contact the project director Richard Xiao at xiaoz@exchange.lancs.ac.uk.