Dual Racial Discourses in China’s Official Media (1946-2021)

• In Event: Media Influence in Authoritarian States

Abstract

How does an authoritarian regime shape the national identification and racial imagery through press coverage? Numerous studies have examined the media’s construction and influence on racial discourses in western countries, while how media construct race in non-western context is understudied. To bridge this gap, this study examines how China’s most prestige official media, the People’s Daily, construct racial consciousness over a seventy-year span with more than 800 thousand articles. We use the word-embedding algorithm in natural language processing to identify what words are connected to expressions about race, and then determine the topics related to the racial discourses. Our research delineates two distinctive racial discourses within the People’s Daily. Firstly, the foreign races, i.e. the White and Black, are connected to four topics, class, colonialism, development and culture. The class topic and the colonialism topic dominate the foreign race discourse, while in the recent years the development and culture topics grow moderately. The second discourse is on racial Chinese, which has limited correlation from the foreign race discourse. This discourse emphasizes the construction of racial Chinese identity as a component of the integral national identity. In align with previous studies on China’s racial nationalism, our findings indicate that racial Chinese discourse is a strategic pivot in state media towards reinforcing nationalistic and patriotic sentiments. These findings suggest that the racial discourses in China’s official media serve two functions for the same goal of legitimation. When the racial Chinese discourse aims to cultivate nationalist sentiment, the foreign race discourse serves to depict an unsafe external world featured by class struggle and colonialism. It fills the gap of racial construction by media in non-western context, and delineates how historical dynamics shape the composition of racial discourses.

Author

• Xinyi Jiang, Zhejiang University