Feminist Discourse in the Contemporary Chinese Prose: An Example of Lin Bai and Chen Ran’s Works

China was a country with a pronounced patriarchal ethics for a long time because of the Confucian values. As a consequence of this, women's freedom and rights were severely limited. Nevertheless, with the development and progression of the Chinese society, women’s issue found its interpretation and finally began to be considered in China in the second half of the 19th century, and the issue of women's rights began to be actively discussed at the beginning of the 20th century. The processes taking place in a society are often reflected in literature and sometimes a problem might be placed and discussed in literary works before it is massively indicated in society. Up to the 20th-21st centuries there were not many works related to the demonstration of the women’s issue in China. The beginning of the 20th century was marked by a period of growing unrest among the Chinese population and the spread of the women's rights movement, which had an impact on the literary discourse of that time. It is the 21st century that can be considered as the dawn of feminist literature in China. At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, there was the dawn of the works written by Lin Bai and Chen Ran, whose prose is connected with the feminist agenda and such literary style as “personalized writing”. The aim of this paper is to identify the characteristics of feminist discourse in the works of Lin Bai and Chen Ran using the methodology of critical discourse analysis, which is a mixed research design used to analyze text, as well as to empirically study the relationship between discourse and social and cultural changes in various social spheres. As a result, it was identifies that in most of the works, which to one degree or another are related to the feminist agenda the narration is conducted in the first person; female characters are the main characters; there is presence of the personal experience of the writers with which they endow some of the heroines of their works; male characters are representatives of a patriarchal society that have greater privileges and freedoms compared to women; there is a violation of heterosexual love norms, etc. Based on the analysis of the short stories “The Seat on the Veranda” by Lin Bai and “Breaking Open” by Chen Ren, it was identified that the features of the feminist discourse in them are revealed in particularly through linguistic features and discursive strategies. To convey female experience and expand the voices of women, most of the narrative in these works belongs to the female characters. Lin Bai and Chen Ran actively use means of artistic expression, such as epithets, metaphors, comparisons, etc., to show the position of women in patriarchal society. In the shorts stories of the writers, there are four main discursive strategies: exclusion and distance, argumentation, binary opposition, positioning, through which traditional patriarchal values ​​are discredited, the roles that endow women are disputed, gender standards are removed, etc.