Abstract The social development and judicial reforms in mainland China over the past 40 years have greatly influenced the way courtroom trials are conducted and how courtroom discourses are purposively constructed to fulfill a variety of judicial, social, and cultural functions. This creates a research gap between the former monolithic understanding of courtroom language as a homogeneous legal entity and the examination of the present hybridizing nature and characteristics of judges' discourse. Drawing on tape recordings and fieldwork notes from 16 Chinese civil trials, this paper aims to fill this gap by invoking the newly developed theory of Critical Genre Analysis (Bhatia, 2017). An analysis of these materials reveals the interdiscursive features of the discourses of Chinese judges in civil trials and at the same time allows us to explore the background social, cultural, and institutional ideologies circumscribing the production, communication and reception of these discourses.