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.
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