A critical-discourse analysis of the mottos of public universities in China

University mottos, as culturally situated linguistic symbols, are extremely concise yet densely encapsulate institutions’ core educational philosophies and value orientations. They serve as important vehicles through which universities construct cultural identity and disseminate ideology. Public universities occupy a dominant position within China’s higher education system; examining their mottos therefore offers insight into the prevailing values and ideologies underpinning Chinese higher education. Existing studies have largely focused on the 116 elite universities officially designated by the Chinese government, making it difficult to capture the broader discursive landscape. Methodologically, prior research has tended to adopt historical or educational perspectives, while linguistically oriented analyses—particularly those grounded in critical discourse analysis—remain relatively limited. Drawing on Fairclough’s (1992) three-dimensional framework, this study conducts an exhaustive analysis of the mottos of 848 public universities in China. Departing from approaches that rely primarily on textual form or lexical frequency, the study develops a semantic framework comprising nine categories and applies a dual-coding procedure to systematically classify and quantify all mottos. The findings show that, on the one hand, some university mottos have evolved over time, reflecting increasingly diverse value orientations and educational ideals; on the other hand, core values related to morality, scholarship, and practice continue to dominate the overall distribution. This study offers a novel perspective for comparative research on higher education discourse in China and Western contexts.