A Chain of Oppression Against Chinese Deserves a Counteract

Wenshan Jia

(Shandong University, China; Chapman University, USA)

Fangzhu Lu

(Renmin University of China, China)

US media’s coverage of China’s handling of COVID-19: Playing the role of the fourth branch of government or the fourth estate? is published in Global Media and China, Volume 6(1) 8-23, 2021. This paper focuses on exploring the role of American mainstream media in reporting COVID-19 relevant news, especially how American mainstream media reported Trump government’s “China virus” and “kung flu”. Through analyzing the news frames and media’s reporting discourse analysis including Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Foreign Policy, we find that U.S. media have played a major role in promoting government’s ideology and political strategy, and they use rhetorical tools such as naming, shaming, blaming, and taming in their news coverage of China’s fight against COVID-19. U.S. media seize the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan as an opportunity to serve Trump’s “America First” doctrine. We select the above mentioned sampled media agencies due to their international reputation, circulation, as well as a series of restrictions they faced during January, 2020 to July 2020.

We apply an integrated analysis framework including naming, shaming, taming and blaming in news analysis, and develop this theoretical analysis since improper naming can be regarded as a form of power abuse and is closely intertwined with shaming, and blaming is a tool used by the Trump government to reach their purpose to tame China and further contain China’s rise on the international stage. According to our collected news reports, we define naming as “a process of designating or ascribing someone as something negative, inferior, or undesirable” which goes hand in hand with shaming, which can be well reflected from “China is the real sick man of Asia” done by Wall Street Journal. The goal of naming/shaming is to make the target audiences feel ashamed and deprive their confidence. Secondly, blaming is defined as “taking the form of other-directed wrongful and outright fingering-pointing at the target audience without any intention to reflect upon one’s own actions and to take one’s own responsibility”, and its goal is to scapegoat China and shift U.S. government’s responsibility of poor virus management to China. Finally, we think taming is a result brought by naming, shaming and blaming brought from the U.S. side, which is mutually harmful for U.S.-China relations. We conclude that the U.S. media is becoming more of the fourth branch of government and less of the fourth estate under the Trump administration with an important aim to serve Trump’s National Security Strategy. The theory of naming-shaming-blaming-taming , used as a chain of oppression and a tool of neo-hegemonic practice by the Trump regime against Chinese people, could be further tested and refined to better uncover its internal mechanism of oppression.

Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2059436421994003