Author(s)

Yining Hou

Corresponding Author

Yining Hou

ABSTRACT

In recent years, Xinjiang region has become a U.S. "outpost" to contain China. The U.S. government has characterized the Xinjiang issue as a "human rights issue" and has been "hyping" it through government statements, news reports and human rights reports, and has also signed into the so-called "Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020," signifying its "legitimization" and "normalization" of its interference in China's internal affairs. This paper selects the U.S. Human Rights Reports on China released in 2017-2020 as the corpus, and uses critical discourse analysis methods to reread the U.S. human rights discourse on Xinjiang in a post-structuralist perspective, deconstructing the U.S. human rights discourse on Xinjiang from three aspects: text, discourse practice and social practice, revealing the neglected power operation and ideological infiltration behind it, and restoring the construction mode of U.S. discourse hegemony. It is hoped that this article will help China to examine and dismantle the hegemonic discourse, and provide suggestions for a more targeted counteraction to discourse hegemony, the use of discourse to shape China's national image, and the construction of a national discourse system.

KEYWORDS

Post-structuralism, critical discourse analysis, discourse hegemony, identity, Xinjiang-related discourse