Date of Award
7-5-2024
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Discipline
Arts
Department
English
First Advisor
Prof. HO Nga Man
Second Advisor
Prof. SEWELL Andrew John
Abstract
Recent years have seen deepened Sino-African ties. However, unlike friendly rhetoric at the state level, racial issues at the individual level are becoming increasingly salient. This study aims to enrich our current understanding of racial issues in China by examining the digital discursive representations of Africanness and Blackness produced by Chinese Weibo users. It investigates three African/Black people-related racial occurrences in China from 2020 to 2021. Those include the release of the draft of the Permanent Residence Law for Foreigners in 2020, the Okonkwonwoye case, where Okonkwonwoye physically assaulted a nurse during quarantine in 2020, and the Abdulmatten murder case where a Nigerian man named Abdulmateen murdered his student in 2021. Specifically, the thesis attempts to address: (1) What key social groups were involved in the digital racial discussion? (2) How were Africans and Black people discursively represented by Chinese Weibo users? and (3) What racial ideologies did those discursive representations of Africans and Black people reflect, and how?
The study collected 5289 posts and 53,759 comments from Weibo, one of the most popular microblogging websites in China. Regarding data analysis and interpretation, I first conducted the thematic analysis to grasp the general information of the texts and thus conceptualize the phenomenon. Then, I carried out critical discourse analysis (Discourse Historical Approach specifically) to delve further into the questions on the linguistic realizations of stigmatization, ideological contest, and identity construction. In particular, following the Discourse Historical Approach, I examined five discursive strategies (i.e., nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivization, intensification, and mitigation) used for constructing the ingroup/outgroup identities.
Overall, the research suggests the existence of explicit forms of racist and nationalist bias against Black people and Africans in the Chinese context. First, the thematic analysis manifests that racism in China is a complex fusion of anti-Black sentiment, anti-government sentiment, anti-upper-class sentiment, nationalism, and gender antagonism. Then, the results of DHA show that the nomination strategies, including xenonyms, dehumanizing metaphors, somatization, and historical terms, are effectively employed to construct Black people and Africans as inferior and Chinese as noble, delimiting us from them; Predicational strategies, including predicates, predicative nouns, and predicative adjectives, are also commonly used to associate Black people and Africans with unfavorable traits, erecting a division between a positive self and a negative other; This self/other dichotomy is further justified using argumentation strategies, which also help to appeal for exclusionary practices against the Black population in China; Intensification strategies are also frequently deployed to maximize the illocutionary forces of racist utterances. Lastly, the thesis uncovers the orthographic maneuverings crafted by Weibo users to circumvent censorship, exhibiting the empowerment of grassroots Chinese in digital space. However, those avoidance strategies may merely be the outcome of the “chilling effect”.
Taken together, this study presents a socio-linguistic view of racial issues in China, enriching the current scholarly discussion of race in a non-Western setting. Moreover, it also provides the implications of non-racist language use in China.
Language
English
Copyright
The copyright of this thesis is owned by its author. Any reproduction, adaptation, distribution or dissemination of this thesis without express authorization is strictly prohibited.
Recommended Citation
Gu, J. (2024). The discursive representations of Africanness and blackness in Chinese cyberspace: A critical discourse-historical analysis (Doctoral thesis, Lingnan University, Hong Kong). Retrieved from https://commons.ln.edu.hk/otd/209/