Self-promotion has become all the more popular among universities around the world as it has grown increasingly competitive for institutions of higher learning to attract quality faculty and students, obtain public and private funds, and secure collaboration with industries. Universities have deployed a variety of institutional activities to carry out self-promotion. Open Days, for example, provide an opportunity for the universities to invite perspective students and their parents to visit their campuses to get to know more about various aspects of the universities through live experience and engagement (Wernick, 1991). Students’ brochures and prospectuses are distributed to promulgate the universities, and newspaper advertisements are posted to attract high-profile faculty members to join the institutional enterprise (Fairclough, 1993; Xiong, 2012). In this Internet age, social media and institutional official websites are also useful platforms for self-promotional purposes (Feng, 2019; Zhang and Tu, 2019; Zhang et al., 2020).

In all these promotional activities semiotic symbols play a vital role, as the success and efficiency of these self-propagandas depend heavily on the way in which the universities are visually or verbally presented to their stakeholders. Visual semiotics, due to the special affordances they possess, can be communicated to the audience in a more straightforward manner (Martinec and Salway, 2005; Bateman, 2014). As a result, universities often present visual images that can evoke positive evaluation from the audience to achieve their promotional goals. For example, they often show in their enrolment brochures successful and happy students wearing graduation gowns, capable teachers giving specialised instructions, researchers demonstrating their latest inventions, picturesque campus sceneries and landscapes, and advanced infrastructure and facilities. In addition to the content of the images, they also strategically calibrate the ways in which the images are presented (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006). When featuring individuals, they often choose close shots rather than middle or longshots. Direct or oblique shots are selected to create desired promotional effects. Low angle pictures are preferred over high angle ones when university architectures are presented, because the former tend to create an imposing and remarkable impression and make an authoritative and noble university image (Tu, 2016). The colour and design of university websites seem to have multiple promotional functions, including interpersonally denoting the institutional identity, directing visitors’ attention, and creating a welcome feeling and atmosphere (Zhang and O’Halloran, 2013).

Studies have also probed the use of symbolic meaning and visual metaphor in pictures presented by the universities (Ng and Koller, 2013; Ng, 2016). Ng and Koller (2013), for example, found that positive values (e.g., freedom, flexibility, and empowerment) were visually communicated by foregrounding symbolic representations, which were frequently expressed through decontextualisation (e.g., without clear verbal anchoring) and improbable content that subverted naturalistic norms and expectations (e.g., students tossing the dean up in the air). Moreover, it was found that visual metaphors in universities’ prospectuses endowed inanimate entities with human cognition and emotion, which represented the university favourably and thereby enhanced its branding effects on its potential students (Ng, 2016).

Aside from visual pictures, some research has focussed on the emblem and logo of universities and investigated the promotional functions performed by these visual elements. Symbolic meanings represented in universities’ icons have been found to contribute to visualising institutional identities–corporates competing in the higher education market or organisations enacting local and academic tradition, contextualised in specific cultures (Drori et al., 2016; Oberg et al., 2017). Such identity construction and presentation work to tell stories about the universities, appealing prospective students to be part of the ongoing institutional narratives.

Compared with the visual semiotics, the promotional mission executed by verbal texts has drawn much more research attention. Texts in students’ brochures and prospectuses, faculty recruitment advertisements, missions and visions, university self-introductions, presidents’ welcoming messages and graduation speeches have been extensively analysed with varying theoretical underpinnings and analytic lenses. Some researchers took a genre perspective and decoded the rhetorical moves of the verbal texts, based on which the promotional agenda behind the moves was revealed (Xiong, 2012; Han, 2014). Others focussed on types of discourse that have been appropriated in the higher education contexts, such as tourism discourse, business discourse, advertisement discourse, narrative discourse, and policy discourse. Interdiscursivity constructed by integrating and hybridising these types of discourse increased the complexity of communicative purposes, reflecting the growing promotional culture in the higher education context (Fairclough, 1993; Michelson and Valencia, 2016; Feng, 2019; Teo and Ren, 2019). Teo and Ren (2019), for example, examined the rhetorical structure and discursive strategies in presidents’ messages published on official websites of 36 top-ranked universities in China. A dynamic interweaving of three discursive strands were identified: bureaucratic, conversational and advertising discourses. The co-existence and intermix of the three types of discourse, as discussed by the authors, revealed the dual role of the presidents’ messages: to project an international outlook of the Chinese universities and to maintain their allegiance to dominant political ideologies and national interests.

Still other researchers have zoomed in on the lexico-grammatical resources in the texts from the perspectives of corpus linguistics and/or systemic functional linguistics (SFL). For example, adopting the corpus-based approach, Mautner (2005) revealed that there was a prevalence of keywords with the word root of enterprise (e.g., entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial) in the texts on universities’ websites, clearly suggesting the commercialisation of higher education. The study also found that the universities tended to promote their academic entrepreneurship through ample use of positively loaded lexis on both sides of the searched keywords. Another corpus study on university websites revealed that the keyword research was often collocated with quality and world, indicating that quality and globalisation of research were foregrounded in the self-promotion (Sanigar, 2013). Moreover, drawing on the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) framework as an analytic tool, research (e.g., Askehave, 2007; Teo, 2007) has scrutinised ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings construed in universities’ promotional texts. This strand of research has highlighted the role of interpersonal meaning in the creation of positive institutional image and the establishment of desired institution-audience relationship through deliberate manipulation of various linguistic devices. Stemming from the interpersonal dimension, the concept of evaluation has taken the centre stage in the construction of style, the way institutional or personal identities are discursively constructed (Fairclough, 2003). In this regard, Appraisal theory developed by Martin and White (2005) is regarded as a theoretically grounded and systematically delineated conceptualisation of evaluative meanings (Hood, 2004; Hunston, 2011; Alba-Juez and Thompson, 2014).

According to Martin and White (2005), Appraisal deals with evaluative resources concerning people’s feelings (i.e., Attitude), dialogistic value positioning (i.e., Engagement), and grading phenomena whereby feelings and positioning are adjusted in written or spoken locutions (i.e., Graduation). As part of a larger research project, this study focuses solely on the Attitude dimension. Attitude concerns people’s inner feelings and emotions (e.g., happiness, satisfaction, desire, and security) (i.e., Affect), judgements of people’s characters and behaviours (e.g., capacity, bravery, diligence, propriety, honesty) (i.e., Judgement), and evaluation of things and abstract qualities (e.g., value, attractiveness, and loftiness) (i.e., Appreciation).

Previous studies have employed the Attitude framework to investigate the evaluative meanings communicated in universities’ promotional texts (Morrish and Sauntson, 2013; Xie and Teo, 2020a). It is noteworthy that these studies tend to take a comparative lens. For example, Morrish and Sauntson (2013) compared how the older, research-intensive universities and the younger business-oriented universities used attitudinal resources to fulfil their promotional goals, and found that the former group of universities mostly appraised themselves in a positive manner, whereas the latter group evaluated entities external to them, such as local industry and technology. Xie and Teo (2020a) compared the use of Attitude markers in the About Us texts of top-tier and second-tier universities in China and America. The examination of the Attitude markers revealed that while Chinese universities seemed to construct a more university-centric, authoritative, and distant image, their American counterparts tended to build a more people-oriented, friendly, and approachable image. The top-tier universities in both countries underscored their prestige and history, while the second-tier ones appeared to foreground the positive college experience their students could enjoy.

Apart from the cross-country and cross-tier comparisons, there were also diachronic studies that compared the promotional texts produced at different historical periods, though this research did not focus specifically on Attitude markers (e.g., Fairclough, 1993; Zhang and O’Halloran, 2013). These studies uncovered a historical shift in the objectives and functions of promotional texts shaped by the broader social setting of accelerated marketisation of higher education: a progressive transition from communicating ideational information to tactically manipulating the information for promotional purposes.

There is no doubt that the studies reviewed above have shed much light on the marketisation of higher education. However, what seem to be under-researched are how this historical transition is discursively manifested, and how Attitude markers contribute to the realisation of such discursive manifestation. In view of these gaps, the following research questions are posed to guide this study.

This study employed a mixed method research design to answer the three research questions. Detailed lexico-grammatical analysis of the About Us texts was carried out with reference to the contexts to locate Attitude markers and to identify themes related to the markers. Statistical measures and close textual examination were employed to address the second research question: the diachronic comparisons on the use of the markers. To these ends, an About Us corpus was constructed to cater to the fine-grained lexico-grammatical, thematic, and statistical analyses. Finally, the themes identified in the first research question and the diachronic changes noted in the second one were brought together and scrutinised to answer the third research question.

To answer the three research questions, we collected online About Us texts of the selected Chinese universities as our raw materials. The collection of data involved the following steps: sampling top-tier Chinese universities, retrieving the online About Us texts of the sampled universities at the two time points, and importing the raw texts into a corpus tool for the ensuing coding and analysis of attitude markers.

As our study was interested in the attitudinal markers in the About Us texts of top-tier Chinese universities, we selected the very best universities listed in the ‘‘Double First Class’’ universities (Category A) by the Chinese MOE, which included 36 prestigious universities in Mainland China. While it posed little challenge to retrieve the latest About Us texts posted on their official webpages by the 36 universities, we initially had some difficulties in getting the earlier versions of About Us texts posted by these universities around 2,000, because the websites had been regularly or irregularly updated, and the texts had kept changing. The issue was finally addressed by the Wayback Machine¹, an Internet archival library, which could help get the earlier versions of the online texts of 35 universities, with the earliest being East China Normal University (January, 1997) and the latest Fudan University (May, 2004). As a result, these 35 universities were sampled for this study and correspondingly their About Us texts posted around 2000 (Phase I) and 2021 (Phase II) were retrieved. Table 1 shows the total number of words and the average number of words per text for the two phases.

The 70 texts were then imported into a corpus tool, UAM CorpusTool, for coding and further analysis. The Attitude Framework, as the coding scheme, was inputted into the CorpusTool to facilitate the coding process. Both automated and manual coding approaches were used to assign coding labels of the coding scheme to the text segments with any attitudinal meanings. A second coder who was familiar with the Appraisal framework and the operation of the UAM CorpusTool was invited to code 10% of the data. Her coding results were compared against with the results coded by the first author, and a satisfactory inter-coding agreement (94.3%) was observed. Fuzzy and ambiguous cases were settled through discussion and consulting with an expert in discourse semantics and a senior administrator of a university. Subsequent to these steps, the first author coded all the remaining data. Coding validity was also checked through two rounds of reviewing and within-group comparison among instances assigned with the same labels.

Data analysis in this study involved both textual examination which was qualitative in nature and statistical comparisons which were quantitative in nature. For the first research question, instances of the different types of Attitude markers identified through the CorpusTool were closely examined to explore the themes positively evaluated in the About Us texts. Particular attention was paid to the contents and the contexts of the Attitude instances, such as the appraiser/appraised, the polarity of the Attitude construed, and the characteristics displayed in the evaluations.

As for the second research question, statistical analysis was first conducted to compare the frequencies of different types of Attitude at the two time points. To offset the text length effects, we standardised the raw frequencies of attitude markers in the corpora to relative frequencies (per 1,000 words) for the diachronic comparisons. Both Kolmogorov–Smirnov and Shapiro–Wilk tests showed that the standardised data from the Phase I corpus were not normally distributed. As such, we ran four Wilcoxon signed-rank tests to compare the relative frequencies of the four types of markers (for Attitude, Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation) between the two phases. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests are non-parametric tests where two sets of data from the same participants are compared when normality in the data is not assumed. The α value was set at 0.05 for all the Wilcoxon signed-rank tests. The statistical tests were then followed by nuanced qualitative analysis, where instances of the different types of Attitude markers were scrutinised to identify diachronic differences in construing the attitudinal meanings. The UAM CorpusTool automatically categorised the coded textual extracts into different groups according to their attitudinal meanings, so that grouped examples were offered for detailed textual analysis. In-depth textual analysis facilitated a contextualised understanding of the attitudinal markers. As with the theme analysis noted above, we also considered the contents and the contexts of the Attitude instances in the in-depth textual analysis.

The analysis of data for the last research question was primarily based on the answers to the first two research questions. The major themes unveiled and the diachronic differences identified in the earlier analyses were compared and synthesised to explore the underlying meanings constructed in the texts.

Our detailed textual analysis revealed seven major themes positively evaluated in the About Us texts of the selected top-tier Chinese universities during the past two decades, including geographic location/city, scenery and landscape, history and culture, academic and research strength, faculty capacity, alumni and students, and international collaboration and cooperation.

Although the About Us texts produced at both time points used positive Attitude markers to highlight the seven major themes summarised above for the promotional purpose, quantitative and qualitative analyses did reveal some differences in the use of Attitude markers between the two time points. The following section reports the identified diachronic differences.

As mentioned earlier, four Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were run to compare the relative frequencies of attitude markers in the About Us texts at the two time points. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test on Attitude as an aggregate category showed that there was a significant difference between the two corpora. The texts in Phase II (M = 52.64, SD = 2.99) used significantly more Attitude markers than those in Phase I (M = 39.43, SD = 3.20), Z = −2.817, p = 0.005. Under this aggregate Attitude category are subcategories of Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation.

From both the major themes evaluated and the diachronic difference over the past two decades summarised above, it is not difficult to realise that positive evaluation has been strategically employed by the top-tier Chinese universities to extensively conduct self-promotion, to aggressively attract potential students, and to actively compete in the higher education market.

More specifically, these universities like market vendors are explicitly promoting what they have to offer, such as educational resources, facilities, environments, products and services, to prospective students who, like consumers in the market, have free choices and decisions to make. Over the past 20 years or so, more and more Attitude markers were used in the About Us texts, more students-related evaluations were deployed, more diverse and informal Attitude instances were utilised, and more Attitude instances were employed to boast a cosy and comfortable environment that students could enjoy in and outside of the campus. All these discursive strategies jointly pointed to a clear tactic on the part of the universities: to gain the students’ (i.e., the consumers’) favour and to influence their choices and decisions. This, in part, reflects an ongoing transition to marketisation within the context of Chinese higher education over the two decades.

The findings summarised in the previous section can be explained by a host of factors exerting influence on Chinese higher education. One prominent factor is related to the marketisation of higher education, which has been intensified by the trend of globalisation. The market-oriented economy in China has replaced the old-fashioned plan-oriented economy and the market-oriented system has been gradually introduced in the domain of higher education. One significant change in Chinese higher education lies in the shift from elite higher education to mass higher education (Hayhoe, 2012; Mok and Jiang, 2016). The massification of higher education has rendered students more choices. As a result, the Chinese universities are taking measures to enhance “consumer choice” in the “quasi-markets” (Mok, 2000, p. 111). This partly accounts for the more human-related, and especially student-related, Attitude markers in the About Us texts in the Phase II corpus. Relatedly, the presence of conversational and informal style in the Phase II corpus could be attributed to the fact that the top-tier Chinese universities are pulling down their poker faces and vying for quality students in the competitive higher education market. The marketisation logic also endows universities with relatively higher institutional autonomy as compared to decades ago (Pan, 2009), though Chinese higher education is still known for its culture of uniformity and conformity (Cheng, 2006).

The second factor is concerned with higher education policy, more specifically, the way in which the universities are governed. Different from their Western counterparts that have seen a reduced role of government due to the influence of neoliberalism, Chinese universities have witnessed a persistently central role played by the state. The governance of Chinese higher education is unique and is emerging as the Chinese model (Marginson, 2011; Li, 2012). Underlying the governance are two fundamental functions to be performed by the universities: transmitting knowledge for the purpose of national rejuvenation and transmitting to students a set of socio-political values prescribed by the state (Pan, 2009). For the first function, facilitated by state initiatives, China’s economic modernisation is expected to advance the development of selected elite universities. In terms of the second function, patriotic sentiment and the red revolutionary spirit are constantly emphasised in the cultivation of talents devoted to the Socialist cause. As rightly pointed out by Saichaie and Morphew (2014), university websites can reveal the purpose of higher education followed by the institutions. Patriotism and embracement of the dominant ideology can be easily traced in the About Us corpus. Extracts 27 and 28 are instances where contribution to the motherland is clearly articulated.

The negative Attitude markers provide an interesting perspective on this point. Both Extracts 29 and 30 are instances of negative evaluation. However, these negative Attitude markers are not directed at the universities but at the foreign invaders in the first extract and at the historical situation of the nation in the second. The negative markers in the extracts function to arouse a sentiment of patriotism, which seldom fails to evoke solidarity and empathy among the Chinese readers.

It should be acknowledged, however, that little is known about international students’ views on such ideology and revolutionary spirit. Given that the English version of the About Us texts targets primarily at international readership, these Chinese universities need to examine the effectiveness of this promotional strategy in attracting international prospective students. In our comparison of the Chinese and English versions of the About Us texts of the same universities, it was clear that the English versions of some universities’ About Us texts were translated word-for-word from the Chinese versions. Considering the fact that what works for attracting Chinese students may not necessarily work for attracting international students, it stands to reason that Chinese universities should tailor their About Us texts specifically to international prospective students so as to better suit their reading habits and expectations as consumers of higher education.

Another factor is associated with Confucianism which has long penetrated into the education sphere in China. The Confucian doctrine stresses five integral virtues of man: benevolence (仁), righteousness (义), trustworthiness (信), propriety (礼), and wisdom (智) (Waley, 2012). The thinking has such an enormous impact on current Chinese education that “establishing moral integrity and cultivating talents” (立德树人) has become the fundamental task in higher education nationwide. It could therefore partly account for the considerable number of Attitude markers that positively evaluate the moral aspect of faculty and students in the About Us corpus.

It is noteworthy to mention the psychological mechanism by which student choice could be influenced by the promotional strategies employed by the top-tier Chinese universities. According to van Dijk’s (2009) Discourse-Cognition-Society triangle model, language use and social interactions can influence each other through people’s “cognitive interface of mental models, knowledge, attitudes and ideologies” (p. 64). The interface involves cognitive processes and mental representations in the comprehension of discourse. In the case of this study, the About Us texts are meant to be interpreted by student audience with shared mental models, knowledge, and attitudes situated in a specific epistemic community. In this process, positive Attitude markers predispose the top-tier universities to be perceived by student audience as authoritative, trustworthy, or credible agents, whose beliefs, claims, knowledge, and opinions inscribed in the texts tend to be accepted by the students (van Dijk, 2015). Therefore, when students’ attitudes constructed in the specific epistemic community are aligned with the attitudes construed in the texts, shared social cognition operates to legitimise the institutional promotional activities and thereby shape student choice.

As discussed above, the marketisation process has influenced the outlook of Chinese higher education, which was once characterised by state planning. However, students now are no longer enrolled according to pre-allocated recruitment quotas, nor are they assigned to pre-defined working positions upon graduation. Features such as “quasi-markets” and “consumer choice” have brought out a higher degree of diversity in Chinese higher education (Mok, 2000, p. 111). This indicates that there are both commonalities and differences between the Chinese higher education system and the Western higher education system.

The differences between the Chinese and the Western higher education systems, in particular, are rooted in a series of socio-political imperatives, socio-economic constraints and socio-cultural norms that are in constant dialogue with each other (Xie and Teo, 2020a,b). While government authority headed by the MOE predominates in Chinese higher education, market forces exert considerable impact on Western universities, which enjoy much more institutional autonomy (e.g., Fairweather, 2000; Ding and Levin, 2007; Pan, 2009). In exploring the diversification/homogenisation in American universities, Fairweather (2000) published an article entitled Diversification or homogenisation: How markets and governments combine to shape American higher education. Almost a decade later, Zha’s (2009) article addressed a similar issue in the Chinese context: Diversification or homogenisation: How governments and markets have combined to (re) shape Chinese higher education in its recent massification process. The reverse order of “governments” and “markets” in the two article titles is, in a sense, indicative of the relative weighting of the two major driving forces that shape modern higher education in their respective socio-political contexts. Correspondingly, the motivation to serve the national interest seems to outweigh the aspiration to satisfy students’ personal needs in the Chinese higher education system. The opposite seems to be true in the Western context, where investment-return logic is celebrated and personal development tends to be prioritised over other social agendas.

This difference is related to another observation clearly seen in the extracts presented earlier: Chinese graduates are encouraged by the universities to serve their country and take pride in their traditional culture. In contrast, many Western universities endorse the individualistic spirit and encourage students to challenge orthodoxy and bring about change. This difference can be attributed to the collectivism-individualism distinction between China and the West (Hofstede, 2001). China is recognised as a typical collectivist culture characterised by a preference for group identification and interconnectedness among members within a largely homogeneous cultural community. By contrast, the Western world often valorises individual autonomy, which places emphasis on individuals’ needs and goals, and prefers looser ties among social members (e.g., Xu and Xia, 2013; Chen, 2017).

Mirroring market economy with Chinese characteristics, we can come up with a term to capture the ground reality in the domain of higher education in China: higher education with Chinese characteristics. In this emerging model, while the effect of neoliberalism has been tempered and that of the marketisation logic mediated, the role of the government has been administratively effective and financially supportive.