The issue of how market ethos has colonized the discourse of higher education around the world has been a topic of growing concern. The Chinese case deserves close scrutiny since marketization of higher education in China is contextualized in a distinct bureaucracy-market duality. In this article, I offer an investigation of a contemporary genre – ads for academic posts – by using Askehave and Swales’s (2001) text-driven re-purposing model of genre analysis. The corpus is composed of 48 ads posted in a leading Chinese-language official newspaper. The aim is to unfold the rhetorical moves and discourse strategies on the one hand, and consider how they might throw light on an alternative way to understand the marketization of higher education in China on the other hand. The main findings are: (1) the establishing-credentials move plays a crucial role in promoting the relevant institutions; (2) a striking rhetorical feature is the predominant use of quantified terms to introduce items such as academic programs and facilities, and incentives; (3) the branding strategy has been frequently adopted to publicize academic posts as well as cities where the institutions are located; and (4) some face redressing strategies are used to lessen the power asymmetry constructed by the authorless bureaucratic discourse.
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