Black humour as official slogan: The CDA from Chinese anti-epidemic discourse

Black humour is associated with illness, death, and crisis and is frequently used as grassroots resistance to hegemonic power. However, black humour has received little attention concerning how it is appropriated by the state. Thus, this study contributes to reconceptualise black humour as the anti-epidemic slogans of the Chinese Communist Party by combining Bakhtin's carnivalesque and Van Leeuwen's (2007) legitimation strategies within Critical Discourse Analysis paradigm to investigate how inhumane slogans are legitimised. Our findings reveal that the CCP employs three legitimation strategies–authorisation, moral evaluation, and rationalisation–to maintain its power status through official slogans. This study offers a new perspective on how power relations are sustained and renegotiated through the official language in China. • CCP's official language can take the form of black humour that combines humour with threatening language strategies. • De-legitimising traditional Chinese cultures is employed as the authorisation strategy to legitimise CCP's slogans. • Moral evaluation is used to legitimise CCP's health campaign, often through curses and insults related to grotesque images. • Rationalisation is used as a discursive strategy to legitimise state slogans by assigning them absolute ‘truth’ and ‘correctness’.