The changing terminology of chinese public administration

The paper, based on the analysis of a corpus of relevant sources in Chinese language, will focus on the lexical changes occurred in the Chinese civil service terminology in the 21st century. The relevance of the chosen terms was checked through interviews of high-ranking officials and professors, developed with the objective of pinpointing the intended connotations of the terms for the professional community. Besides, the materials selected for this work were civil service examinations textbooks and the official press, two typologies of texts which would convey the new terminology to a larger community of readers and contribute to their standardisation. The author aimed at verifying to what extent the reform of public administration in China has become established in a new discourse which has been accepted in the community at large, testifying therefore to the effectiveness of conceptual changes within the public administration.