Unwanted in the homeland? The image of Chinese international students on Chinese social media Zhihu
Keywords: Corpus linguistics; DHA; media image; Chinese international students; Covid-19
Abstract: The outbreak of COVID-19 and the surging nationalism and populism sentiments in China made Chinese international students (CIS) targets of online vigilantism on Chinese social media and they face alienation in the homeland apart from discrimination overseas. The first step to address a problem is to understand it. Thus, this research investigates how CIS are presented and discursively alienated on Chinese social media. Concepts and frameworks in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can yield valuable insights into this topic. I adopt the corpus-assisted CDA approach, and use the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), a major approach in CDA that often serves as an analytical framework for problem-oriented social research (Wodak, 2015), as the analytical framework.
328 posts consisting of 280995 Chinese characters published on a major Chinese social media Zhihu were collected. Major referential expressions of CIS in the corpus were identified and classified by browsing the general word and keyword lists and examining their concordances. Predication analysis was conducted by examining and classifying concordances of 留学生（们）international student(s), the most frequent referential expressions of CIS in the corpus. To check whether there are any differences between in-group and out-group presentations of CIS, I also distinguished between comments from CIS themselves and those from other Zhihu users establishing two sub-corpora, and compared the results of referential and predication analysis of the two corpora through chi-square tests.
It is found CIS were alienated and stigmatised as the problematic “other” through frames of trouble or degenerate, meritocracy, nationalism, populism, collectivism, and misogyny in the corpus though some comments try to challenge those frames and depict CIS as well-behaved people, victims, the socioculturally marginalized, patriots, ordinary people without privileges or high socioeconomic status, talents, individuals with rights, and cosmopolitans. Comparative analysis of comments from Chinese international students and other Zhihu users reveals both groups produce stigmatising discourses in their presentation of CIS, indicating tensions not only exist between CIS and non-CIS but also within the group of CIS. The major difference is that CIS group are more likely to object to the “trouble or degenerate” and “meritocracy” frames, present CIS as “socio-culturally marginalized or isolated”, recount reverse culture shocks CIS experienced, and depict CIS as cosmopolitans while non-CIS group is more likely to oppose the “victim” frame, stigmatize CIS as trouble or degenerates, position them in a meritocratic hierarchy, and perceive them from a collectivism (pro-collectivism in particular) stance.
Submission Number: 3
Loading