Jean Moulin University - Lyon

Temporary Lecturer (Attaché Temporaire d'Enseignement et de Recheche), Institut d'Études Transtextuelles et Transculturelles

Department of Chinese Studies

Thesis Title: Towards a "Harmonious" Consumer Society? Discourse and spectacle of social harmony in the course of the construction of a “civilised” China (1978-2008)

About

Based on a solid academic background of Chinese Studies, my main field of research is ideologies and political discourses in contemporary China. I specialized few years ago to transdisciplinary works on China’s official language, words and discourses, and how language is used as a controlling and disciplinizing tool by People’s Republic of China since 1978 and the beginning of « Reforms and Openness » (gaige kaifang 改革开放) politics. Calling on sociology, linguistics, semiotics and political sciences, my works aim to deconstruct words and discourse, in a approach similar the one developed by Viktor Klemperer, Georges Orwell or Georges Steiner. I therefore study civilization and disciplinizing process of the Chinese poor and the ideological campaigns launched in this sense (the « Eight Honors and Eight Shames » (barong bachi 八荣八耻) campaign, for instance), but my research works tend also to a deeper analysis and thinking on key-words such as « civilization » (wenming 文明), « quality » (suzhi 素质) or « ethics » (daode 道德), for they are regularly used in Chinese official discourses for disciplinary use. I also works on language as it is used in Chinese consumer society and society of spectacle, as theorized by French thinker Guy Debord.
My PhD thesis, titled « Towards a Consumer “Harmonious Society” ? Discourse and spectacle of social harmony in the course of the construction of a “civilized” China (1978-2008)”», was a study of contemporary China’s civilizing process and social harmony discourse.