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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 595

Part of General Poster Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Media Images, Migrant Reality: A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis of the Representation of Migrant Workers in English Newspapers in China

Authors: He, Xianzhong (1); Weninger, Csilla (2)
Submitted by: He, Xianzhong (Chang'an University, China, People's Republic of)

Migrant workers in China constitute a social group for whom the rural-urban divide has been painfully real in its consequences. Estimated to make up nearly 9% of the country’s population, migrant workers are mostly farmers who lost their agricultural livelihood and moved to the city in search of jobs. Since China’s rigid household registration system, the hukou, ties the provision of services (such as education, medical care, housing) strictly to one’s place of origin, many rural migrants working in cities remain without access to basic rights and amenities. Such marginalization stands in stark contrast to the economic role migrants have fulfilled in the last few decades, serving as a fuel to propel China from a traditional country into the world’s third largest economy today. Since the reform and opening-up in the late 1970s, millions of farmers have left their villages and farms to take advantage of the work opportunities offered by the urban areas. The world’s largest mass of migrants has furnished the muscle for China’s economic development as well as the backbone for the country’s urbanization and industrialization. At the same time, urban governments have had to face the challenges of accommodating such massive influx of rural workers, within the constraints of the hukou.

Due to their special resident status and economic and social impact on Chinese society, migrant workers have drawn scholarly attention mainly from sociologists and economists (Fan, 2008; Han, 2006; Murphy, 2002). However, no studies to date have looked at media representations of migrant workers despite the high coverage they receive in both Chinese and foreign-language news reporting in China. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating how migrant workers are discursively represented in English news media in China. Taking a methodology that combines critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, the study analyzed a special 0.6-million-word corpus of news articles collected from the websites of two official English newspapers, China Daily and Global Times. The analysis was carried out on two levels. First a transitivity analysis of the syntactic structure of clauses aimed to describe the semantic roles allocated to migrant workers. The second component involved identifying frequent lexicogrammatical patterns with the term migrant worker. The results reveal that migrant workers are predominantly represented as passive and beneficiary participants rather than active contributors in processes. The study concludes that such imbalanced media representation underscores the construction of migrant workers as a ‘social problem’ at the expense of emphasizing their enormous economic impact in China today.  

Fan, Fan, C. C. (2008). China on the move: Migration, the state, and the household. London and New York: Routledge.

Han,Han, C. (2006). 中国农民工发展趋势与展望 [The trend and perspective of rural migrant workers in China]. 《经济研究》 [Economic Research Journal], 12, 4-12.

MurMurphy, P. (2002). How migrant labour is changing rural China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.