Immigrants on Chinese Television and Limitations of China’s Globalist Discourse

Traditionally perceived as a country of emigration, China has in recent years become an increasingly popular subject for immigration and diaspora studies, with an immigrant population that has been growing quietly and steadily since the 1990s. However, media representations of immigrants in China have not garnered much attention. This article provides a critical assessment of how immigrants and immigrant experience are portrayed on Chinese television, using the example of Foreigner in China (2013–19), the first-ever program on a national platform to tackle this topic. It argues that, while the program paints a rather insightful and entertaining picture of contemporary immigrant life in China, its representation of immigrants is restricted by not only the internal contradiction of the Xi administration’s globalist discourse, but also the exclusive, ethnocentric conception of Chinese nationhood, which remains the norm in a more heterogenous and globally conscious Chinese society.

Health Information Related to Cardiovascular Diseases Broadcast on Chinese Television Health Programs

This study aims to add to the knowledge about information depicted in television health programs in China. Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of death in the country. The threat it poses is particularly notable among the Hui ethnic minority people, who have a higher prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors. Little research has been conducted thus far on content concerning CVDs in Chinese television health programs, and this study aims to fill this lacuna. Qualitative content analysis was conducted to analyze The Doctor Is In and Health Body Light. The results revealed that these two programs presented information about what CVDs and CVRFs are, how the former are treated, and what strategies are used to communicate health information. A new topic also stood out: discussions on how traditional Chinese medicine prevents and cures these diseases.

Chinese Television in Africa

On the basis of the results of an ongoing research project on the activities of the Chinese media company StarTimes in Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, this paper analyses the fluid and fragmentary dimension of the engagements between Chinese media and African publics, while equally emphasizing the power dynamics that underlie them. Focusing on a variety of ethnographic sources, it argues for an approach to the study of Chinese media expansion in Africa able to take into account, simultaneously, the macro-political and macro-economic factors which condition the nature of China–Africa media interactions, the political intentions behind them (as, for example, the Chinese soft power policies and their translation into specific media contents), and the micro dimension of the practices and uses of the media made by the actors (producers and consumers of media) in the field.

Building axiological affiliation in televised Chinese job interviews: Attitudinal evaluations and their communication

Research on spoken interactions has long shown interest in the communication of evaluations or assessments, but it remains limited in revealing the functions of evaluations charged with attitudinal values. Based on the appraisal framework developed in systemic functional linguistics, this article examines the attitudinal evaluations in eighteen job interviews from a live Chinese television program entitled ‘Only You’, exploring how they are communicated as attitude-ideation couplings to negotiate and construct axiological affiliation between interlocutors. The findings reveal that axiological affiliation in spoken interactions can be built via four strategies, including attitudinal enhancement that involves two layers of attitude-ideation coupling; attitudinal elaboration that may appear as specification of a target of evaluation or elaboration of an attitude; attitudinal extension that works with consistent attitudinal polarity and similar evaluative function; and attitudinal projection that is realized through the expression of attitudinal affinity or attitudinal agreement. This article seeks to extend the existing linguistic account of dialogic affiliation and spoken evaluations and shed light on the systemic functional notion of individuation by construing it as a social process in which social persons’ negotiation of communal identities is coupled with their enactment of different personae.

The rite of reintegrative shaming in Chinese public dispute mediation

This paper examines the ways in which mediators deploy the rite of public shaming in the activity type of public mediation, as a pragmatic device by means of which they exert social control. Our data consists of episodes of public mediation events in rural China, aired in the Chinese Television. Our analytic framework is anchored to the model of interactional relational rituals: we interpret shaming as a morally loaded communal interactional practice, which the mediator can deploy due to their ratified role, but only within frame of the ritual activity type, and with the communal goal of resolving the conflict. Thus, while ritual forms of shaming may be interactionally intensive – e.g. the person who inflicts shame may inflict shame with little mitigation to put pressure on the shamed person – strict rights and obligations regulate the behaviour of the mediator who needs to act as a ‘moral educator’.