Politics and Aesthetics of Voice

Since late-Qing Dynasty, almost all important political figures, political thoughts, and political movements, have been involved in “speech” as a technique and a culture. The large amount of speeches influenced not only the situation of Chinese politics, but also the written style. This thesis mainly points to the political function and aesthetic practice of speeches, by dividing into five strata, i.e., the atmosphere, dialect, variation, danger, and poetics, discusses some of the political figures who are good at the theory and practice of speech and their famous speeches. Whether the concerning of cultural communication by scholars (literati), or the emphasizing of social mobilization by politicians (practitioners), the common place lies at the attention paid to transform voice into written text, and the gains or failures of “taking speech as text”.