Do You Hear the People Sing:The Political Discourse Analysis of Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Cheng, Yen-Ling
Abstract
Taiwan and China had signed Cross-Strait Agreement on Trade in Services on June, 2013, which aroused much dispute among the society. Ten months later, the debate had reached a breaking point. Hundreds of demonstrators occupied the Legislative Yuan and Executive Yuan, managing to hold off the pact from taking effect. To understand the communicative process between demonstrators and the government during the movement, this study combines the perspective of deliberative democracy and Fraserian model of multiple public spheres. By deconstructing discourse of the government into five categories: claims, values premises, circumstances premises, goal premise and means-goal premise with critical political discourse analysis developed by Fairclough and Faiclough, this study elaborates the transformation in government’s discourse and the evaluation from discourse produced on the Gossiping Board and FuMoudiscuss Board on PTT. There are several results which indicate that the government’s discourse only reproduce the ideology of Neoliberalism over and over again, without responding to voices of the people. Moreover, the communicative process is confronted and falls into the counter sphere, which shows the incompetence of government to follow deliberative democracy. Finally, the discourse on the Internet transcends the traditional binary ideologies of “blue” and “green”, which instead discusses more about the negative effect caused by free trade on values such as “rights” and “equality”.
Subjects
Cross-Strait Agreement on Trade in Services
Sunflower Movement
Neoliberalism
Cross-Strait Trade
Critical Political Discourse Analysis
Type
thesis