A Pragmatic Approach to Evasions at the Press Conferences of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs

The paper focuses on evasions at the press conferences of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and aims at providing a linguistic explanation for the existence and strategies of those evasions within the framework of the Cooperative Principle and the Relevance Theory. The author collected 229 questions and answers from seventeen press conferences in May, 2021. Based on the analysis of the data, nine evasion strategies are recognized. And three typical evasion strategies are analyzed by three examples. The results show that Chinese spokespeople tend to use covert and overt evasions to save country’s face and safeguard the national interests. And the cooperation between the spokesperson and the questioning journalist is limited, which gives rise to evasive answers.