Recently, John Benjamin Publishing House officially published an English monograph written by Prof. Wu Peng, School of Foreign Languages of Jiangsu University (JSU) intitled Responding to questions at press conferences: Confrontational maneuvering by Chinese spokespersons (hard installed version of ISBN number 9789027213495, online version ISBN number 9789027253262). The book is the first English academic monograph written by Chinese scholars independently, and it is also the first academic work that focuses on diplomatic argumentative discourse and Chinese argumentative discourse since the 1970s.
The monograph is based on the real corpus of China’s diplomatic press conferences from 2016 to 2022. Within the framework of Pragma-Dialectics, the monograph systematically investigates five typical argumentative strategies (dissociation, personal attack, declaring a standpoint unallowed or indisputable, topic shifting, putting emotional pressure) used by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespersons in the empirical counterpart of the confrontation stage. It carefully analyzes the continual effort spokespersons make in keeping a balance between dialectical reasonableness and rhetorical effectiveness. Based on the analysis of the various modes of confrontational maneuvering adopted by the spokespersons, it elucidates how China’s recently established “progressive” diplomatic style is shaped by its spokespersons’ argumentative discourse and interprets China's diplomatic position in the new era in a way the international audience can understand.
The book writing process took nearly 5 years and the manuscript was revised five times. The top scholars in the field of argumentation, Prof. Manfred Kienpointner from University of Innsbruck, and Prof. Anka Gâță from Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, personally wrote a recommendation for the back cover, which highly affirmed its originality and academic value.
John Benjamin Publishing House was established in 1960. It is an independent academic publisher. The headquarter is located in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and has a publishing center in Pennsylvania, USA. For more than 60 years, the publishing house has been known for publishing academic works in the field of humanity and social science. It has enjoyed a high reputation in the fields of linguistics, sociology, logic and other disciplines.
