Abstract
China’s political press conferences have received increasing academic attention as they provide a revealing window into the workings of the political communication system in the authoritarian context. However, the interactional role that interpreters play in these cross-linguistic press conferences remains underexamined. Taking a conversational analytic approach, this qualitative study empirically examines the interactional import of government interpreters’ practices at the Chinese Premier’s Press Conferences (CPPCs) from 2007 to 2023. The analysis reveals that interpreters consistently transform journalists’ questions with respect to (1) word choices, (2) contextual backgrounds, and (3) question forms. These transformative practices work to soften the critical messages that these questions would otherwise convey while also enabling politicians to more easily address these questions without having to deal with the negative consequences that might otherwise follow. I argue that government interpreters in CPPCs actively intervene in substantive ways consistent with a spin doctor role within press conference exchanges.
Keywords
Introduction
Press conferences have come to be regarded as an institutional arrangement and part of the foundation of government in democratic societies (Kumar 2007). Research on the communication between journalists and politicians in press conferences has shed important light on numerous aspects of the political communication system (Blumler and Gurevitch 1995), including journalistic norms, political accountability, and press–state relations (Clayman et al. 2012; Clayman and Heritage 2002a, 2002b; Ekström and Eriksson 2017; Eriksson and Östman 2013; Kumar 2007; Manheim 1979; Smith 1990). The analytic framework developed in the Western context has been adopted to examine joint press conferences involving non-Western political leaders (Banning and Billingsley 2007; Bhatia 2006) and press conferences held in non-Western societies (Du and Rendle-Short 2016; Wu et al. 2017; Zhang and Shoemaker 2014). Although this line of research affords empirical insight, a key political actor in these cross-linguistic settings has been largely overlooked under the current framework—interpreters, whose facilitation is indispensable for communication between speakers who do not share the same language. Drawing on a dataset of China’s political press conferences, where English–Mandarin interpreting services are provided, the present study investigates the underexamined role that interpreters play in political communication.
China has one of the world’s most restrictive media environments, where authorities impose censorship of any information that they deem harmful to their political interests (Shambaugh 2013). Although privately owned media outlets have emerged in the past few decades due to China’s orientation to media commercialization (Stockmann 2013), the communist party-state continues to maintain tight reins on the press and the media through licensing, regulating, and allocating resources to state-owned media (Fang and Repnikova 2022; Winfield and Peng 2005). This instrumental view of media being a resource for facilitating political and social control is also imposed on foreign correspondents in China through “control of credentials, regulations restricting access to sources and information, and a set of uncodified state coercion or censorship mechanisms ranging from official flak, access blockage, to harassment and surveillance” (Zeng 2018: 1400).
In this authoritarian context, press conferences have become part of China’s propaganda system, whereby the authority seeks to dominate news coverage, build public support, and strengthen its legitimacy (Yi 2016a; see also Eshbaugh-Soha 2013; Kernell 2006). During political reform in the 1980s, Chinese leaders, in response to market forces, began to make government information more accessible to the public by hosting the Chinese Premier’s Press Conference (CPPC), which then became routinized as an annual event in 1993 (Yi 2016b). The CPPC provides domestic and international journalists a public avenue to directly communicate with the premier of the State Council, that is, the head of the Chinese government and the second-ranked party-state leader (after the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party). This high-profile event attracts hundreds of journalists to Beijing every spring and has been broadcast live on television since 1998, delivering the policy, stance, and decision-making of the Chinese authority to domestic and international audiences.
The communication in CPPCs is fundamentally distinctive from the patterns identified in liberal press systems. Although the CPPC appears to be an unscripted, spontaneous communicative event, it is well documented that all journalists’ questions are subject to a meticulous prescreening process, through which who gets to ask and what gets to be asked are determined in advance by Chinese officials (Yi 2016a, 2016b). While international journalists associated with liberal press systems often work to confront the premier within such constraints, Chinese journalists typically pose softball questions that are intentionally designed to be easy, allowing the premier to boast about the achievements of his administration (Du and Rendle-Short 2016; Wu et al. 2017). The CPPC is thus commonly viewed as a relatively controlled arena in which Chinese officials and journalists collaborate in the promotion of a favorable image of the Chinese state and society.1–3 Such collaborative presentation is targeted not only at the international media but also at Chinese citizens. Specifically, the Chinese party-state relies on performance legitimacy—the regime’s right to rule is derived from governance outcomes, including economic growth, social stability, and national unity (Zhao 2009; Zhu 2011). It is thus crucial for the authority to present a flawless image of political leaders and highlight the accomplishments of the government in CPPCs to boost domestic support and reinforce regime stability (Yi 2016a).
Interpreting is also part of this collaborative presentation. Through interpreters’ facilitation, the Chinese government is able to articulate its official discourse in the international lingua franca, English, to a global audience. Given China’s increasing reliance on cross-linguistic press conferences for bolstering its media influence, a growing body of literature in the field of translation studies has focused on government interpreters’ renditions in this context (Gu 2019; Li and Zhang 2021; Liao and Pan 2018; Sun 2014; Wang and Munday 2021). Researchers are virtually unanimous in recognizing that interpreters in CPPCs are not impartial conduits (Cronin 2006) or voice boxes (Goffman 1981; see Davidson 2002) who simply perform literal conversions of utterances from one language into another. Rather, as members of the Chinese Communist Party and employees of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, government interpreters act as active participants in a social context (Wadensjö 1998). They regularly add, omit, and modify messages. Moreover, in contrast to liberal press systems where interpreters’ impartiality is expected and emphasized (Kadrić et al. 2021), in China, government interpreters consistently invoke their institutional identities and display ideological positioning when performing their tasks (Gu 2019; Li and Zhang 2021; Liu 2023; Wang and Munday 2021).
While there is a general consensus that government interpreters’ modifications are often employed for ideological motives, the role that interpreters play in Chinese political communication remains open for debate. Sun (2014) viewed government interpreters as “institutional insiders” (p. 167) who merely make subtle modifications that soften journalists’ questions. In contrast, Gu (2019) conceptualizes government interpreters as “institutional gatekeepers” (p. 16) who explicitly control the flow of information through ideologically salient interventions, such as rendering “the 1989 Tiananmen demonstration” into “1989 nien fasheng de zhege shiqing” (the thing that happened in the year of 1989). By replacing such sensitive expressions, Gu (2019) argues, government interpreters display an institutional alignment with the Chinese administration (see also Li and Zhang 2021).
As the “Tiananmen demonstration” example shows, current research has thus far been concerned with the lexical level of analysis, especially how interpreters render aggressive, sensitive, or problematic expressions. Building upon this body of work, the present study extends the analysis beyond word choices and investigates how interpreters’ practices matter for broader aspects of interactional construction. That is, how do interpreters’ practices shape the overall design of journalists’ questions and the sequential unfolding of interactions between journalists and politicians? This is particularly important because interpreters’ renditions are not produced as isolated texts but rather as sequentially occasioned practices governed by the organization of press conference interchanges, that is, journalist’s question–interpreter’s rendition–premier’s response–interpreter’s rendition. Each action produced within this sequential organization is proffered by reference to what came before and influences what comes next (Schegloff 2007).
Taking an interactional approach, this qualitative study empirically examines how Chinese government interpreters render journalists’ questions in CPPCs in ways that shape the overall design of questions and the sequential unfolding of the triadic interaction between journalists, interpreters, and politicians. The analysis shows that interpreters work to transform the more adversarial questions in ways that mitigate the critical messages that these questions would otherwise convey while also enabling politicians to more easily address these questions. I argue that rather than serving as passive institutional insiders or gatekeepers, government interpreters in CPPCs actively intervene in substantive ways consistent with the role of a spin doctor—a sociopolitical actor who seeks to sway public opinion and boost politicians’ public images by managing information presented to the media and the public (Esser et al. 2001; Figenschou et al. 2023).
Data and Method
The present dataset draws on seventeen televised CPPCs from 2007 to 2023 hosted by former Premier Wen Jiabao (2007–2012), former Premier Li Keqiang (2013–2022), and incumbent Premier Li Qiang (2023). Since the CPPC is an annual event, the dataset is comprehensive with all events held during this period. The video recordings were retrieved from YouTube and other media websites. Each event ranges from 84 to 182 minutes, bringing the corpus to approximately thirty-eight hours of spoken data. In line with previous interactional research on political press conferences (e.g., Clayman and Heritage 2002a), the video data were transcribed verbatim for analysis.
This dataset yields a total of two hundred twenty-eight journalists’ questions produced by Chinese and international journalists. One international journalist affiliated with the Associated Press put their question in Mandarin and then rendered it in English on their own. Since the government interpreter did not provide a rendition, this question was excluded from the current dataset. All remaining 227 questions were analyzed.
Whereas prior studies on press conference interpreting predominantly adopted linguistic or discursive approaches that maintain an exclusive focus on the composition of a single utterance, the present study utilizes conversation analysis (Sidnell and Stivers 2013), a methodological approach that views the sequential positioning of an utterance (e.g., a response following a question) as fundamental to the analysis of its significance as an action (Schegloff 2007). While usually characterized as a qualitative method, conversation analysis typically involves numerous examples of a given interactional phenomenon. Through systematic examinations of these examples, analysts arrive at a general understanding of the focal phenomenon (Clayman and Heritage 2002b).
Guided by these principles of conversation analysis, I relied on case-by-case analyses of each journalist’s question with a particular focus on meaningful discrepancies between the original utterance and the rendition provided by the government interpreter. More specifically, I focused on the substance of the questions and excluded turn-initial greetings (e.g., “Good morning, Mr. Premier”) and turn-final expressions of gratitude (e.g., “Thank you”) as these were routinely omitted in renditions. Modifications involving necessary facilitation of understanding were also excluded, such as rendering the policy of dan du er hai (literally “one single second child”) into “married couples can have a second child if one of the parents is a single child.”
Out of the two hundred twenty-seven questions in the present dataset, one hundred and one questions were identified with meaningful discrepancies between the original utterance and the rendition provided by the government interpreter, most of which were originally produced by international journalists. I then analyzed each question–rendition–response sequence in this subset of data to investigate whether and how the sequential unfolding of the communicative event was shaped by the interpreter’s practice. These analyses then lead to generalization across cases, and three recurrent interpreting practices were identified.
Analysis
Treating interpreters’ renditions as sequentially positioned practices governed by the organization of press conferences, I examine the question–rendition–response sequences in CPPCs and identify three practices of government interpreters: (1) transforming word choices, (2) transforming contextual backgrounds, and (3) transforming question forms. As the analysis reveals, when journalists adopt an adversarial stance and design their questions in ways that exert pressure on the premiers, government interpreters consistently transform one or more of these aspects of question design. In these practices, we can see recurrent efforts to both mitigate any critical message implicated by the question and make it easier for premiers to resist or evade the question. I argue that interpreters in CPPCs take up an interactional role as spin doctors who actively reconstruct the sequential actions produced by journalists to foster a favorable bias toward politicians.
In what follows, we first examine interpreters’ transformative practices at the level of word choice, and then their practices operated at the level of the overall design of the questions, including their contextual backgrounds and structural forms. Data extracts of examples of these practices are presented and analyzed. Transcripts of data extracts are organized in the order of the journalist’s original question, followed by the government interpreter’s rendition of the question, and finally the premier’s response to the question. For data in Mandarin, transliterations, linguistic glosses, and idiomatic English translations performed by the author are provided.
Transforming Word Choices
We first examine interpreters’ transformative efforts that operate at the level of word choice. My observations regarding word choices confirm previous translation studies of China’s political press conference interpreting (Gu 2019; Li and Zhang 2021) while demonstrating that such transformative efforts are interactionally consequential. As we shall see, these practices work to create an alternative course through which the premiers can resist or evade questions more easily.
As a first example, Extract 1 concerns Taiwan’s presidential election and referendum in 2008, which touches upon the sensitive issue of China’s state sovereignty and territorial integrity. The following transcript presents first the journalist’s question originally produced in English, followed by the government interpreter’s rendition in Mandarin (including transliterations, linguistic glosses, and idiomatic English translations). This analysis focuses on expressions embedded in the two bolded utterances.
(1Q) 2008 CNN You’ve always said that Tai- China will never tolerate the independence of Taiwan. [Government interpreter’s rendition of the focal utterances]
‘
‘Will the Chinese side
In their rendition of the first focal utterance, the interpreter displays an ideological alignment with China’s official stance on the Taiwan issue by replacing “Taiwan” with “the Taiwan region.” This lexical transformation explicitly treats Taiwan as a “region” within China rather than an independent state, thereby downgrading the import of the upcoming election (see Gu 2019). Nonetheless, the interpreter does more than simply convey an ideological stance.
The second focal utterance “Will China go to war to stop that?” is a question grammatically designed to push for a yes answer (Heritage 2010). The journalist adds further pressure toward confirmation by invoking the premier’s previously made statements (“You’ve always said that China will never tolerate the independence of Taiwan”), which implies that, if the premier refuses to confirm that China will do everything to stop Taiwan’s independent movement, including declaring war, he would be turning his back on his own words. However, this extreme position being presented for confirmation (i.e., war as opposed to less extreme measures, such as economic sanctions or diplomatic negotiations) would likely incur significant consequences, thus creating a preference against confirmation.
This cross-cutting pressure is relaxed by the government interpreter’s transformative practice—“go to war” is rendered as “caiqu xingdong” (take actions), a broader concept that may refer to declaring war but not necessarily so. This shift of word choice allows the premier to give a yes-type confirmatory answer while withholding taking a position on a hypothetical war. Premier Wen Jiabao’s response in Mandarin is documented in Extract 1A.
(1A) Wen Jiabao
‘We hope as- under the one-China precondition, as soon as possible, to resume
By addressing the “action” that China would take in response to Taiwan’s movement, Premier Wen seemingly provides a relevant and appropriate response without mentioning “war” at all, although he implicitly reserves declaring war as a possible measure.
It is important to note that politicians can and do develop their own strategies to resist or evade journalists’ questions in the absence of an interpreter (Clayman 1993, 2001; Clementson and Eveland 2016; Ekström 2009). Premier Wen would likely still have dodged this question had the interpreter not intervened, but doing so would not be cost-free. Answering questions is normally treated as a basic moral obligation in society (Schegloff 2007). This norm is further strengthened in political press conferences, where politicians’ responsive conduct is closely scrutinized by the press and the public (Kumar 2007). Politicians’ attempts to resist, sidestep, or evade journalists’ questions can be costly since the audience may account for the breach of conduct via unflattering or incriminating inferences. Such endeavors thus typically involve “an elaborate array of remedial practices that work to ameliorate the breach of conduct” (Clayman and Heritage 2002b: 297). In this case, the interpreter’s transformation allows Premier Wen to reap the benefits of evading without paying the cost—for the Chinese audience, the expression “war” does not appear in the journalist’s question, and therefore, Premier Wen is not accountable for responding to it.
A similar example is shown in Extract 2 from the 2022 CPPC, where the journalist invokes “China’s support for Russia” when questioning the premier’s stance on the war in Ukraine.
(2) 2022 Associated Press On Ukraine, how does China’s important trading relationships with Europe and the US factor into the government’s response to the crisis? Are you concerned that [Government interpreter’s rendition]
‘Regarding the Ukraine issue, what is the position of China’s important trading relationship with Europe in China’s response to this crisis? Is China concerned that
To reframe “China’s support of Russia,” the government interpreter ambiguously refers to “this kind of relationship with Russia” while also transforming “help” into “the current handling of the crisis” in the rendition. Subsequently, Premier Li Keqiang made general remarks on Ukraine without responding to China’s role in supporting Russia.
Extract 3 illustrates how the interpreter’s transformation of word choice works to reduce the premier’s accountability concerning a scandalous allegation. The journalist draws on “Under the Dome,” a banned Chinese documentary about air pollution, and its accusation that two yanqi (literally “central business”; business owned by the State Council of China), Sinopec and PetroChina, are obstacles to the enforcement of environmental laws. The journalist then questions the premier whether he agrees that the two state-owned businesses are to blame for this issue.
(3Q) 2015 Huffington Post
‘In Chai Jing’s Under the Dome, one of its very important perspectives is that Sinopec and PetroChina, these two [Government interpreter’s rendition] In Under the Dome, a documentary made by Chai Jing, she complained that such
As Sinopec and PetroChina explicitly characterized as “state owned” in the journalist’s question, the premier and his administration are implicated as accountable for this issue. However, the interpreter masks this relationship by identifying Sinopec and PetroChina as “such big oil companies” and subsequently “these companies” in their rendition, which works to conceal the full control that the Chinese authority has over these two companies and downplay the premier’s accountability.
In his response, Premier Li Keqiang reiterates the government’s resolution in fighting against air pollution and sanctioning illegal emissions, yet he generalizes his response as applying to all businesses. The two alleged state-owned businesses were never explicitly mentioned.
(3A) Li Keqiang
‘Regarding businesses that violate the laws of production and emission,
Although Premier Li alludes to the special status of the two companies by stating that the law will be enforced “no matter what type of businesses they are,” he immediately distances himself from such businesses by constructing the ideology of us versus them, which is evidenced in his use of “naxie” (those) when referring to the businesses. The premier’s maneuver would be more obviously disjunctive without the interpreter’s transformative action. By disguising the two state-owned businesses as ordinary businesses, the interpreter helps the premier shift his accountability—the premier is responsible for enforcing environmental laws as the head of the government but not for violating the laws as the owner of the two alleged companies.
In this section, I have shown how government interpreters modify problematic expressions in ways that allow the premier to tackle these questions more smoothly, not having to deal with the negative consequences that might otherwise follow (e.g., avoiding war as a possible measure that China would take in response to Taiwan’s prospective independent movement). These transformations in interpreting are consequential not only in terms of how the Chinese government communicates with the foreign media but also in how it presents itself to Chinese citizens. In what follows, I examine how government interpreters’ interventions operate beyond the level of word choices.
Transforming Contextual Backgrounds
In the current dataset, a vast majority of journalists’ questions are designed with prefatory statements. That is, rather than directly posing the question, journalists usually provide contextual background information to establish the relevance of the impending question. Prefatory statements can also be designed in ways that embody presuppositions and assert propositions, which work to exert pressure on politicians (Heritage, 2002a). In this section, I show how interpreters transform contextual background information embedded in prefatory statements so that the premiers are able to resist the constraints imposed by such statements.
Extract 4 exemplifies how the government interpreter adds to the prefatory statement. In this question about the China–EU trade partnership, the journalist draws on the trade deficit in favor of China as the contextual foundation that renders appropriate the subsequent question regarding China’s policy toward the EU businesses.
(4Q) 2017 Radio France The European Union is China’s second-largest commercial partner with a trade deficit of 137 billion Euros in favor of China, and a large number of European businesses complain about that. What is China proposing to improve market access condition to European businesses? [Government interpreter’s rendition]
‘The European Union is China’s second-largest trading partner, but the EU trade deficit in favor of China is as high as 137 billion Euros.
After faithfully rendering the statement of the trade deficit in favor of China, the government interpreter adds that “this is the European side’s statistical data.” The contextual background is thereby transformed from an established fact into a European perspective, which is arguably hearable as implying doubt and implicitly inviting the Chinese perspective. This alternative route provided by the interpreter’s addition is then taken up by the premier in his response.
(4A) Li Keqiang
‘The China-EU trade deficit issue you just mentioned is
Following the government interpreter’s rendition, Premier Li Keqiang treats the data provided by the journalist as “the European side’s statistics” and then proceeds to discuss how “we the Chinese side” perceive the situation. Premier Li, of course, could push back against the imposition in the absence of the interpreter, but doing so would likely be perceived as pursuing his own agenda, thus violating the normative ground rules for press conference communication. Thanks to the government interpreter’s addition, Premier Li can challenge “the European perspective” while minimizing the costs associated with that risky course of action.
In Extract 5, an assessment of China’s economy provided as contextual background information is transformed by the government interpreter. In this question about China’s deflation, the journalist invokes data on China’s consumer price index (CPI), based on which the journalist asserts “so I think China has already entered deflation.” This statement establishes the foundation of the forthcoming question regarding the impact of China’s deflation on neighboring countries.
(5Q) 2015 Korean Broadcast System
‘In the last few months, China’s CPI rise has always been maintained at around 1.5 percent. This January it was merely 0.8 percent. [Government interpreter’s rendition] In the last few months of 2014, China’s CPI rise hovered at just about 1.5 percent. And in January this year, the figure was mere 0.8 percent.
The premier, as the respondent, is restricted by the presupposition that China has entered deflation—since this is given as a factual account rather than a debatable issue that the premier is invited to discuss, the premier cannot legitimately push back on this presupposition. Nonetheless, the government interpreter reformulates the asserted statement (“I think China has already entered deflation”) as a genuine question (“So are we to conclude that China entered deflation?”) to which the premier is able to legitimately disaffirm as the selected respondent without breaching the norm.
In accordance with the transformed contextual background, Premier Li Keqiang treats China’s deflation as a debatable issue in his response. Citing a different criterion of deflation, Premier Li points out that there has been a consecutive positive growth of China’s CPI, “so one cannot say deflation has already happened in China.”
(5A) Li Keqiang
‘The CPI of our country, or consumer price level, had a positive growth this January. In February, it was even higher than in January.
This recurrent pattern of transforming contextual backgrounds demonstrates that interpreters’ supportive efforts on behalf of the premier plainly extend beyond the level of word choice. Although international journalists in CPPCs often mobilize prefatory statements in the service of aggressive forms of questioning (Du and Rendle-Short 2016), interpreters are equipped with the institutional power to legitimately reframe the contextual background to the authority’s advantage. Such interpreting transformations allow the premiers to handle the more adversarial questions without being restricted by their asserted presuppositions.
Transforming Question Forms
The last section of the analysis focuses on how interpreters transform question forms. In the course of asking questions, journalists set agendas by identifying a specific topical domain as the relevant domain of response, and politicians are accountable for addressing such agendas (Heritage 2002a). Journalists can also make the question agenda more constraining by designing the structural form of the question to imply, suggest, or push for a particular response (Clayman and Heritage 2002a; Heritage 2002a, 2002b). This analysis investigates how government interpreters redesign the forms of journalists’ questions in ways that mitigate the adversarialness, thereby relieving the premiers from contesting the propositions and justifying their positions in their responses. In a previous section, we have already examined how question agendas can be shifted by replacing certain expressions at the level of word choice. This section focuses on transformations at the level of the overall structural design of the question.
Extract 6 concerns China’s zero-COVID policy, which involves mass testing, quarantine, and lockdowns to stop community transmission of the epidemic. The journalist questions how long this policy is sustainable, and a relevant and appropriate response to this question should include a timeframe. Furthermore, in light of the fact that most countries have begun to transition toward the endemic phase and return to normal at the time of the 2022 CPPC, this how-long question seems to imply that the policy would not be sustainable for much longer, and China will need to reopen soon.
(6Q) 2022 Agencia EFE We are already two years into the pandemic, and China has remained closed to the world during all this time. So my question is [Government interpreter’s rendition]
‘It has been two years since the pandemic occurred. During the past two years, China has basically been closed.
In the government interpreter’s rendition, instead of how long the zero-COVID policy is sustainable, the question agenda is reformulated as whether China is going to make the zero-COVID policy even more sustainable. This modified version is distinct from the original question agenda in two major aspects: (1) it does not request a timeframe and (2) it presupposes that the zero-COVID policy is sustainable, and the Chinese government can make it even more sustainable.
(6A) Li Keqiang
‘We will, based on the evolving situation of the pandemic and features of the virus, make the prevention and control more scientific and precise, and protect people’s lives and health.’
In his response, Premier Li discusses how China would adjust its prevention and control policy to make it more sustainable without providing a timeline for lifting the zero-COVID policy. As previously discussed, Premier Li can and would likely resist providing a timeline for reopening anyway, but the audience would infer his motive for avoiding the question—China is not planning to phase out its untenable policy anytime soon, and the authority has no viable justification for their decision-making. The escape route offered by the interpreter’s modified version allows Premier Li to address this question more easily under the spotlight.
The next case exemplifies how the government interpreter drastically transforms the degree of the hostility of a question by redesigning its structural form. In the 2008 CPPC, a journalist grills the premier on the case of Hu Jia, a Chinese civil rights activist under detention, a few months before the Beijing Summer Olympic Games.
(7Q) 2008 Reuters Today a young man named Hu Jia goes on trial in Beijing, charged with inciting subversion of state power. I feel confident you have heard of his case because I know that visiting leaders including Condoleezza Rice have- have raised it with China’s leaders. [Government interpreter’s rendition]
‘Today we know a person called Hu Jia is on trial in Beijing. He is charged with subversion of state power. I think you should know this case well because the US, including Rice, has raised this individual case to leaders on the Chinese side. I hereby would like to seek your expertise, now internationally, there are public opinions criticizing China for having further increased this type of force to arrest some people with critical views prior to the Olympics.
As shown in 7Q, there are several salient interventions made by the government interpreter, such as trivializing Hu’s detention as merely an “individual case,” a formulation subsequently picked up by Premier Wen Jiabao in his response (see 7A below). The focus of this analysis, however, is on the level of the overall question form.
The original question takes the highly accusatory how could you form, which not only asks the premier to defend the crackdown on dissents but assumes that there is no acceptable account for such actions, that is, China could not possibly defend itself (Clayman and Heritage 2002a). Yet, the government interpreter transforms this highly confrontational question into an extremely deferential request for the premier to comment on the criticism (“What comments do you have?”). Given that highly assertive grammatical structures are available in Chinese and have been utilized by government interpreters on other occasions in CPPCs, this example is arguably a strategic transformation to shift the strong accusation implicated in the how could you design.
To further temper this question, the interpreter uses the honorific second-person pronoun “nin” (in contrast to the plain second-person pronoun ni) to refer to the premier, which indexes the speaker’s inferior status and respect to the recipient. Two self-referencing question frames are also added to the rendition: “I hereby would like to seek your expertise” and “I would like to ask briefly,” both of which function as a ritual display of politeness that reduces the magnitude of the imposition of the question (Brown and Levinson 1987; Clayman and Heritage 2002a). These transformations work to deceptively construct the journalist’s deferential and submissive posture.
(7A) Wen Jiabao
‘The issue of the individual case you mentioned, I can say clearly, China is a country under the rule of law. These issues will be dealt with according to the law. The so-called “arrest of dissidents before the Olympics” is purely out of nothing and totally non-existent.’
In accordance with the modified question agenda, Premier Wen Jiabao simply provides his comments on the criticisms, referring to the “so-called” crackdown on dissents as “out of nothing and totally non-existent,” rather than explaining or justifying Hu’s arrest.
The following case illustrates how the interpreter shifts the subject of the question, thereby minimizing the government’s agency and hence accountability. In Extract 8, the journalist prefaces the question with an assertion that China’s environmental pollution and food safety issues have become extremely serious with a reference to the smog in Beijing (“We can see the sky in Beijing”). The journalist then proceeds to pose a series of two questions, the second of which is the focus here.
(8Q) 2013 Le Figaro Nowadays environment pollution and food safety become a very, very serious issue. We can see the sky in Beijing this weekend. Is it possible for the Chinese government- is it possible to solve these problems while maintaining the speed of economic development? [Government Interpreter’s rendition of the focal question]
‘Are
In this question, the journalist uses the second-person pronoun “you” as the agent, which can be identified as referring to the premier and his administration—it is the premier who determines the extent to which Chinese people and media are allowed to monitor environmental pollution and food safety issues, and a lack of transparency is presupposed. In the rendition, although the topical agenda of this question appears similar to the original design, the subject is shifted to “Chinese people and media,” highlighting the public’s agency to take the initiative to monitor the government’s measures. The presupposition of the authoritarian nature of the Chinese system implicated in the original question is dampened by the transformative interpreting.
(8A) Li Keqiang
‘Whether it is the status of pollution and food issues or the effects of managing and handling them, all should proceed openly and transparently, so that the public and the media can monitor them sufficiently and effectively. This will also form a reversely forced responsibility, through which the responsibilities of businesses and the government will be solidified.’
Premier Li Keqiang also downplays his administration’s agency in his response. Albeit affirming that these issues should be made public and transparent, Premier Li treats the people and media as responsible for taking the initiative to monitor these issues and further argues that such initiatives will solidify the responsibilities of businesses and the government.
In summary, this analysis illustrates how interpreting transformation is operated on the overall design of the question, including reformulating the question structure, shifting the question agenda, and adding question frames. As adversarial messages are softened through interpreting, Chinese leaders no longer need to defend themselves and are able to tackle these questions more smoothly.
Discussion
By systematically analyzing interpreters’ practices in the question–rendition–response sequential context in CPPCs, this study provides empirical evidence in support of the argument that Chinese government interpreters actively participate in political press conferences in substantive ways consistent with a spin doctor role. Although the existing analytic framework of political communication developed in democracies cannot be directly applied to the Chinese context, interpreters in CPPCs roughly resemble what Figenschou et al. (2023) conceptualize as the ideal type of government spin doctor in terms of their institutional tasks—rather than citizen-centered service guided by norms of correctness, transparency, and accountability, their tasks concentrate on selectively and proactively pitching news stories and imposing a favorable bias to promote political leaders. In CPPCs, although the choice of how a particular utterance is rendered may be accounted for by reasons unrelated to the interactional goals of a spin doctor (e.g., the interpreter fails to pay attention to the design of the original message), the overall pattern across this dataset demonstrates interpreters’ recurrent effort to actively transform questions with respect to word choices, contextual backgrounds, and question forms in the service of political leaders.
The interactional import of interpreters deserves more attention because the general public tends to treat interpreters as invisible agents or voice boxes whose messages are strictly determined by the linguistic particulars of the original message, especially in extremely constrained, formal settings like political press conferences. Research on political and diplomatic interpreting in the Western context also suggests “actual changes in the positioning and representation of a politician are only rarely the result of the interpreter’s rendering” (Schäffner 2015: 437; see also Kadrić et al. 2021). This is not the case in China. As explicated in the analysis, interpreters’ transformative practices serve as additional resources for Chinese leaders to manage journalistic adversarialness. Although Chinese leaders can and do resist or evade questions on their own, the advantage of utilizing interpreting as an alternative route for achieving such goals is significant—people who are not familiar with both English and Mandarin would not be aware of transformations in interpreting. In other words, for most people in both domestic and international audiences, the premier appears to conform to the norm of answering questions. Since the breaches of conduct are hardly discernible, the premier’s image remains flawless. In this sense, interpreters as spin doctors contribute to China’s presentation of governance outcomes, which is essential for reinforcing the performance legitimacy of the ruling regime.
Dispelling the misconception that interpreting in CPPCs is impartial, faithful facilitation of cross-linguistic communication also has broader implications in media and communication. While the CPPC has been criticized for being a heavily scripted stage performance collaborated by Chinese officials and journalists,1–3 interpreters have not been identified as part of this propaganda system, and their renditions are widely cited as official sources of information in news reports without being further scrutinized (Zheng and Ren 2018). Similarly, in the realm of academia, researchers who investigate China’s political press conferences often draw on official transcripts of interpreted texts rather than work directly from video recordings of these events. Their findings may thus be compromised given that interpreted texts are often transformed. This study shows that interpreting as a political phenomenon can have more profound impacts on media and communication than previously recognized.
The current dataset spans three Chinese administrations: Wen Jiabao (2007–2012), Li Keqiang (2013–2022), and Li Qiang (2023). While this dataset represents two distinct periods of contemporary Chinese politics, no qualitative difference was identified with respect to government interpreters’ institutional role in CPPCs under the leadership of Hu Jintao (2002–2012) and Xi Jinping (2013–present)—as demonstrated in the analysis, all three transformative practices were performed by interpreters in both periods. This pattern indicates that transformative interpreting has become an essential part of the institutional arrangement of the CPPC over the years.
This pattern, however, by no means suggests that interpreters’ practices are independent of the political and media climate. Instead, more parameters within the political communication system would need to be taken into consideration to draw a more comprehensive conclusion. Take the frequency of interpreting transformations as an example. The frequency documented in the current dataset does vary from year to year, yet this trend alone is not necessarily indicative of the different approaches taken by the Chinese administration because various factors are involved. For instance, a low frequency of interpreting interventions (i.e., more faithful interpreting) may be explained by loosened state control in some circumstances. Yet, the 2023 CPPC, where the incumbent Premier Li Qiang made his debut, indicates the opposite: the duration was considerably shorter than other events in this dataset, and the least number of questions were taken. More importantly, most questions were not aggressive at all in the first place—only one question came from a journalist associated with a non-Chinese liberal press system, whereas the average of the rest of the dataset is 4.8 questions. It is thus unsurprising that interpreting transformations are exceptionally rare in 2023. To examine the long-term trend of interpreting transformation, future research will need to incorporate analyses on multiple parameters of CPPCs, including the leadership, the press, and the interpreter.
Focusing on China’s political press conferences, this study proposes the interpreters-as-spin-doctors framework for examining interpreters’ interactional role in the Chinese political communication system. The findings demonstrate how interpreters’ practices fit into the authority’s pursuit of the propaganda goal of “telling China’s stories well” 4 and make direct contributions to research on cross-linguistic, interpreter-mediated communicative events in the political domain. This analytic framework also provides broader implications for exploring the workings of media and politics in authoritarian regimes, particularly those depending on performance for popular support, by showing how interpreting can be utilized as an instrument for political control.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Steven Clayman and John Heritage for their guidance and support of this project. I am also grateful to Tanya Stivers, Yan Zhou, and four anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Duthie-Secchia Fellowship for Doctoral Research on Contemporary China, UCLA Center for Chinese Studies.
