CMP Discourse Tracker #01

A month-to-month reading of the Chinese Communist Party's flagship People's Daily newspaper and key discourse trends – with crucial context. Here is the roundup for June 2024.

Dear Subscribers: 

After an absence of several months, we are pleased to re-introduce the China Media Project’s monthly discourse report, for which we previously partnered with the excellent Sinocism. Best viewed directly on your Substack, the report covers many of the key agendas highlighted in the Chinese Communist Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper. These discourse reports were first created in the 2010s by CMP founder Qian Gang (钱钢), a veteran journalist and former Southern Weekly managing editor who remains one of the world’s foremost experts on the often esoteric discourse of the CCP. 

Our early work on the keywords of the People’s Daily, which we sometimes called “the CMP method,” was dismissed by a handful of prickly China observers at the time as mere tea leaf reading. These days, efforts to “read” the CCP’s flagship newspaper are so numerous such endeavors need not be defended at all. However, some initial thoughts and explanations are in order. In the future, I promise you, this introductory letter will be brief. 

First, it is important to understand that the People’s Daily, which is published by the CCP’s Central Committee, is regimented in several ways that make it a valuable body of text through which to understand the agendas of China’s leadership. The paper is regimented in the sense that its structure is highly unchanged, comprising 20 pages Monday-Friday, and 8 pages on the weekend; and in the sense that the production of the paper is highly controlled by the leadership as a means of internal and external messaging. Even structurally, the paper is disciplined, and not prone to layout or visual surprises. 

Finally, the terms used within the paper are representative – in fact, the most representative outside of once-in-five-year political reports – of the CCP’s regimented political discourse, which in Chinese is referred to as tifa (提法). Tifa has been translated as “framing,” and this indeed is the effect. But the word refers also to the discrete and distinct terminologies of the party – its unique vocabularies, many passed down from Soviet times, and many invented and re-invented as the tapestry of party discourse is woven through the decades. I often think of tifa as interlocking Lego blocks. They have discrete sizes, and there are rules about how they can and cannot be snapped together or pulled apart. “Democracy” and “security” are not examples of tifa, and woe be to the researcher who imagines they are, and then counts them like so many broken blocks. “Whole-process people’s democracy” (全过程人民民主), by contrast, is a tifa. “National security with Chinese characteristics'' (中国特色国家安全) is a tifa.

These aspects of the People’s Daily and party discourse make the paper an excellent body of text through which to “read” the politics of the CCP by tracing the development – and even frequencies – of various tifa. Qian Gang used to tell me that the People’s Daily is “the party’s Bible,” and viewing the paper as scriptural is an apt metaphor for how the party operates, particularly at a time when Xi Jinping has cultivated an atmosphere of political religiosity. But cautions are in order. Many current efforts to “read” the People’s Daily (and now I am being the prickly one) confuse summary and translation, even machine translation, with reading. They treat CCP words as though leaders are simply saying things – so-and-so attended X meeting where they said Y. Such “readings” ignore the structure, context, and symbolic meaning of the party’s discourse. They crush and pile up the Legos. In many cases, they fog up what the party is already saying obscurely. 

The CMP Discourse Tracker is not a crystal ball. Nor does it “unlock” the People’s Daily. The report is our calm, considered, and unhurried look at the major trend lines we observe in tifa and other terms in the paper over each month, supported by our unique approach to scaling tifa frequencies using historical benchmarks. Along the way, we hope to offer in-depth definitions and histories of key terms, or tifa, as well as interesting and illuminating notes about the structure and logic of what remains an important, though mystifying, vehicle for communicating the leadership’s priorities. 

Enjoy. 

David L. Bandurski /CMP Director

Chu Yang / Editor, Discourse Tracker