Voices in the shadow of power: A corpus-assisted exploration into defendants’ discursive resistance strategies in Chinese criminal proceedings

Despite their constrained discursive space, defendants in Chinese criminal trials often resist interrogators’ domination in pursuit of favorable judgments. This article delves into defendants’ deployment of discursive resistance strategies and strategic clusters in courtroom interaction and examines the impact of gender, education, and penalty on strategic choices. A corpus of Chinese criminal trial discourse, totaling 15,388 minutes of recordings and 3.3 million transcribed Chinese characters, was constructed for analysis. Quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrate that defendants’ discursive practice are predominantly characterized by covert resistance strategies, supplemented by overt resistance strategies, and their strategic clusters demonstrate marked preferential patterns, generating synergistic resistance effects that optimize defensive efficacy. Additionally, gender, education and penalty significantly shape strategic choices, with the impact of penalty particularly pronounced. This study elucidates the bidirectional operation of power between dominant and subordinate parties in courtrooms, providing valuable insights particularly for research on conflict-laden institutional interactions.