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.

Keywords:

• university media
• ethnic minority groups
• representation
• China
• state multiculturalism
• discourse

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Dr Chen Bateer for his assistance in the fieldwork, and Professor Fazal Rizvi and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments.

Notes

1. Some other scholars have translated ‘duoyuan yiti geju’ as ‘Plurality and Unity in the Configuration of the Chinese Nationality’. See for example Gladney (2000).

2. Shortly after the foundation of the PRC in 1949, a large-scale program of team fieldwork including linguists, ethnographers and historians embarked on a journey to identify nationalities across China.

3. The three campus newspapers are respectively called the Inner Mongolia Normal University Campus Chronicle (Neimenggu shida bao), the Beijing Normal University Times (Beijing shifan daxue xiaobao), and the South China's University for Nationalities Post (Zhongnan minzu daxue xuebao). IMNU has two types of CNPs: the Mongolian language version and the Chinese version. This study uses the Chinese version since it has a larger coverage and more influence on campus life. The Chinese university newspaper was named IMNU Weekly (Shida zhoubao) before July 2001.

4. The reasons why six and seven copies of the BNU and the IMNU CNP, respectively, are missing are that all CNPs are stored only in their editorial offices and some issues are missing there. The number of issues, items of news relevant to ethnicity, and photos in each CNP are shown in Table 1.

5. It should be noted that the unit of analysis in this study is every item of news information we retrieved, and therefore, it will be counted only once despite the same ethnic concept's possible repetition in one piece of news.

6. These are the figures for when the research was conducted in 2004.