Representations of ethnic minorities in China's university media

Abstract

This paper examines the representation of ethnic minorities in China through a review of campus newspapers, a major print medium in which universities exercise power over the discourse of cultural recognition. Three universities attended by minority students were selected. A two-dimensional mode (content and configuration) is established to analyze ethnic representations. A combination of content analysis and discourse analysis is used to categorize and analyze text and photographs relevant to ethnicity. The study concludes that (1) different discursive practices are employed to construct 'images' of ethnic groups as 'Others' or 'Us'; (2) representations of ethnic minorities and the Han generate three discursive dichotomies between minority and majority: minority groups are distinctive, potentially separatistic, and visible; and the Han people are normative, patriotic, and invisible, respectively; (3) the university media reflects an ideology of 'state multiculturalism' that constructs a reflexive representation of the relationship between majority and minority.

The power of knowledge: a critical analysis of the depiction of ethnic minorities in China’s elementary textbooks

“…The result of this 'diversity in unity' is a 'unified multiethnic country', or 'a big family of 56 nationalities'. The distinctive features of each ethnic group are still recognized, but are secondary to the overarching 'Chinese Nation' identification (Postiglione 2009;Zhao and Postiglione 2010). This is also consistent with China's historical ideological tradition of seeing ethnic differences as a threat to 'central civilization', which consists predominantly of the Han Chinese (Ma 2010).…”

“…(CMI 2010, vol. 12, 39) This narrative reflects a common stereotypical construction of ethnic minorities among Han that they are all natural-born singers and dancers (Zhao and Postiglione 2010) and that, as this example suggested, they are singing and dancing all the time. A similar discourse was also found in MES textbooks.…”

“…However, this concept of 'nation' didn't appear in Chinese discourse until Liang Qichao, a late Qing Dynasty scholar, borrowed the concept in the early twentieth century from Japanese translation of Western works in order to counter the anti-Manchu movement among Han nationalists (Leibold 2006;Ma 2010). The CPC inherited the same term 'nation' but adopted the nationality theories and criteria for national categorization from Stalinism of the Soviet Union and identified 55 official minority nationalities (Guo and Zhang 2010;Zhao 2010;Zhao and Postiglione 2010).…”

China's Ethnic Dilemma: Ethnic Minority Education

“…Chinese authorities establish, essentialize, and staticize cultural differences between groups, and at the same time also facilitate individuals to deny differences for social solidarity and national unity. That combines communitarian and liberal models of ethnic minority citizenship, informed by an ideology of state multiculturalism (Zhao and Postiglione 2010).…”

Untitled

“…Например, в таких странах, как Канада, Австралия и Финляндия, имеющих высокие показатели по индексу MIPEX 2 , СМИ склонны стереотипизировать представителей этнокультурных меньшинств и отображать население более гомогенным с точки зрения его этнического состава в сравнении с реальным положением дел (Pietikainen, Hujanen, 2003;Poindexter et al, 2003). Проблемы неадекватного отображения как отдельных этнокультурных групп, так и межкультурных отношений в целом могут привести к неверным представлениям о составе населения (Zhao, Postiglione, 2010), что, в свою очередь, может спровоцировать отторжение мультикультурализма и всех его проявлений. Однако попыток изучить отображение мультикультурализма в СМИ ранее не предпринимались.…”