Professional Committee of Discourse Studies (PCDS), an academic body affiliated to China Association for Comparative Studies of English and Chinese (CACSEC), was founded in October 2013 at the Fifth International Symposium on New Discourses in Contemporary China. It is developed from four previous international symposiums on “New Discourses in Contemporary China”, namely the first and third at Nankai University, Tianjin, China (2006, 2009), the second at Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK (2007), and the fourth at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China (2011). After its establishment, the 6th to 9th International Symposiums were held respectively at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China (2015), at East China Jiaotong University, Nanchang, China (2017), at Dalian University of Foreign Languages (2019), and Shanghai Jiaotong University (2021). The tenth International Symposiums on “New Discourses in Contemporary China” was held at Zhejiang Normal University in November 3-5, 2023, and the 11th will be held at Jijin University in 2025.
PCDS favours a policy of democracy in its administration, with a board of directors and a standing committee as its central academicians. The selected president of PCDS is Professor XIN Bin, a PhD supervisor at Nanjing Normal University. The vice presidents are: Professor TIAN Hailong from Tianjin Foreign Studies University / China University of Petroleum, Beijing, Professor DING Jianxin from Sun Yat-Sen University, Professor CHEN Xinren from Nanjing University, Professor MIAO Xingwei from Beijing Normal University, Professor RAN Yongping from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Professor ZHANG Hui from Nanjing Normal University, and Professor You Zeshun from Fujian Normal University,Professor Wu Jianguo from Huanan University of Science and Technology, and Professor Zhao Xiufeng from China University of Petroleum, Beijing. Professor TIAN Hailong serves as the Secretary-in-General, with Professor LI Shuguang, Professor Zhang Lei and Prefessor Zhao Peng as the three Deputies.
PCDS builds a network for scholars engaged in discourse studies in domestic universities and research institutions. Apart from the symposiums it hosts, PCDS also organizes forums every other year for scholars to present their research on discourse studies. This activity is developed from the two forums on Critical Linguistics held at Sun Yat-sen University, and the 3rd to 8th were held respectively at Zhejiang Communication College (2014), at Fuzhou University (2016), at Lanzhou University of Technology (2018), at Beijing Normal University (2020), China University of Petroleum, Beijing (2022), and at Huazhong Normal University (2024).
PCDS also publishes with China University of Petroleum Press Discourse Studies Forum, an official journal of the Association that started in December 2015. Discourse Studies Forum favours an interdisciplinary approach in discourse studies and welcomes research articles that take a linguistic approach to data and address issues of social concerns. All submissions are subject to anonymous reviews, and all articles published with Discourse Studies Forum are accessed on CNKI at https://kns.cnki.net/knavi/journals/HYYL/detail?uniplatform=NZKPT. More information at http://hyyl.cbpt.cnki.net.
Another activity by the PCDS is the “League of Institutions for Discourse Studies in China” which is a network among eleven discourse research institutions nationwide. Since its foundation at the 7th International Symposium on New Discourses in Contemporary China in November 2017, three academic conferences have been successfully held, namely the fist at Guangzhou University (December 2017), the second at China University of Petroleum, East China (July 2018) and the third at Dalian University of Foreign Languages (October 2019). A recent activity of this kind was held in 2022 online.