Rhetoric and Authority in a Polarized Transition: The Case of China’s Stock Market
研究中国改革领导人在建立和发展股市时，如何通过不同修辞策略来维护自身权威，并应对意识形态和利益极化带来的矛盾。
How do actors in positions of authority attempt to justify their right to rule while introducing controversial institutional practices that potentially delegitimate their authority? China’s reform leaders have found themselves in a legitimacy conundrum when they established and developed the stock market, yet have been able to assert a central role for the party-state in managing the stock market. Using a critical rhetorical perspective, we analyze how actors use “rhetorical genres,” that is, argumentation and narration with differing content and style, to construct new roles of the speaker and speaker–audience relationships that imply new bases of authority, and how these rhetorical genres can be conceptualized as “discursive spaces” that could accommodate contradictions in the rhetorical situations characterized by polarization in ideologies and interests.