Media Representation of Internal Migrant Children in China Between 1990 and 2012

Home , Censorship in China, Southern Weekly

Media representation of internal migrant children in China between 1990 and 2012

Lina Tao

A thesis in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Masters by Research

School of Humanities and Languages

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

February 2015

Abstract

Internal migrant children in mainland China remained virtually invisible or unknown in the early 1990s, but, as the number of such children surged, they soon became an object of media reports and public discussion. This thesis investigates and compares the representations of migrant children in the Chinese press from 1990–2012 and in the Twitter-like micro-blogosphere (weibo). It aims to understand the ways in which the media produce knowledge and opinions about this emerging group and, with regard to the discursive pattern, to trace the continuity and change over time as well as between different media forms.

People’s Daily and Southern Weekly are chosen to examine the portrayal of migrant children in an official Party-led newspaper vis-à-vis a commercial audience-oriented press. It is argued that, despite the domination of official voices (as in People’s Daily), the commercialisation of Chinese media institutions and the ensuing diversification of media content have facilitated the expression of migrant children and diversified their images (as in Southern Weekly). At the same time, Chinese micro-bloggers have contributed to topics related to migrant children from a grassroots perspective which usually prioritises charity and philanthropy. Weibo has helped to shift the power of agenda setting from the Party-state and professional news workers to ordinary netizens (who are mainly urban and educated), but not to migrant children or migrants in general. The weibo discourse has reinforced, rather than challenged, the existing stereotypes of migrant children in the Chinese public discourse, who are continuously portrayed as a passive, subordinate and inferior group and whose voices are rarely heard in either online forums or offline media discourse.

The research employs a combined methodology of qualitative discourse analysis and quantitative content analysis. The data set is comprised mainly of 217 press reports and 458 weibo tweets. The analytical themes of the discourse include the terminology referring to migrant children, rhetorical strategies, the general subjects of media discussions, and the quotations from different social groups. The discourse analysis approach is supplemented by classic content analysis which helps to reveal the general trends and themes in the texts.

Acknowledgements

In completing this thesis, I have been blessed with support and help from many sources. I owe particular thanks to Stephanie Hemeryk Donald and Yu Haiqing, who supervised each and every draft out of which the thesis has grown. They gave directions in my literature survey, helped to improve my critical thinking, and even corrected my grammatical errors with great patience. The support I received from Stephanie and Haiqing went far beyond the research work. They offered me valuable advice on how to go through the transition and deal with cultural differences as an international student. Without their encouragement, I would not have been able to complete this journey.

The thesis has been gradually improved over the last two years, and I am thankful for the advice I received from a few lecturers of UNSW, including Leanne Dowse (on qualitative research methodology), Jamie Roberts (on developing the research proposal), Sue Starfield (on research writing and presentation), Bronwen Phillips and Claire Aitchison (on English writing).

My mentor Sameera Durrani offered me good advice on how to refine research questions and how to present at a conference. I am also thankful for the interviewees who generously gave their time to participate in this study. King-Wa Fu from the University of Hong Kong kindly offered me access to a weibo database, and gave suggestions on processing big data.

I am grateful for the love and support I received from my family. I dedicate this thesis to my father, Tao Chang’an (陶长安), who has been working in the city as a ‘peasant worker’ since

1975 when he was 16 years old. Although he does not understand a single English word, he is eager to read my thesis.

Most of all, I thank God for being my strength and guide throughout the whole journey.

Without His blessing, I would not have had the wisdom or the physical ability to complete the thesis. He is the one who satisfies my heart.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Acknowledgements ...... iii List of Figures and Tables ...... vi

Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1

1.1 Background: internal migrant children in China ...... 3

1.2 Migrant children in the media ...... 7

1.3 Research aim and scope ...... 11

1.4 Significance and originality ...... 17

1.5 Overview of subsequent chapters ...... 18

Chapter 2 Methodology ...... 20

2.1 Research methodology ...... 20

2.2 Sources of data ...... 24

2.3 Data coding and analysis ...... 29 2.3.1 Subjects ...... 29 2.3.2 Quotations ...... 30 2.3.3 Special terms referring to migrant children...... 31 2.3.4 Social actors ...... 32 2.3.5 Style and rhetoric ...... 32

2.4 Limitations of the methodology ...... 33

Chapter 3 Press coverage of migrant children from 1990–2012 ...... 35

3.1 Politics of naming: from ‘blind floater’ to ‘new urban resident’ ...... 38 3.1.1 ‘Blind’ and ‘black’ children ...... 39 3.1.2 ‘Sons and daughters of peasant workers’...... 41 3.1.3 ‘Floating children’ ...... 44 3.1.4 ‘New urban residents’: from outsiders to citizens? ...... 45 3.1.5 Summary ...... 47

3.2 Subjects ...... 50 3.2.1 Educational plight of migrant children ...... 51 3.2.2 Crime and discrimination: stereotyping strategies...... 53 3.2.3 Human quality: a new dimension of difference ...... 56 3.2.4 Summary ...... 58

3.3 Voices and rhetoric ...... 62 3.3.1 Those who appear and speak up in the news ...... 62 3.3.2 Rhetorical strategies ...... 66

3.4 Summary of the chapter ...... 70

Chapter 4 Weibo portrayal of migrant children and comparison with press description ...... 74

4.1 Politics of naming: ‘floating children’ or ‘smart people’? ...... 78

4.2 Language style and rhetorical strategies ...... 82 4.2.1 Verbs: to rescue, aid and help migrant children ...... 83 4.2.2 Adjectives and adverbs: poor but happy ...... 85

4. 3 Those who appear and speak up in the weibo sphere ...... 89

4.4 Subjects ...... 93 4.4.1 The boom in charity and philanthropy ...... 93 4.4.2 Little recognition of equal rights ...... 95 4.4.3 Comparison with the press reports ...... 97

4.5 Summary of the chapter ...... 99

Chapter 5 Conclusion ...... 102

5.1 Research findings and contribution to existing literature ...... 102 5.1.1 Forms and modes of the stigmatisation ...... 103 5.1.2 Underlying ideologies ...... 105 5.1.3 Continuity and change in media discourse ...... 106 5.1.4 Summary ...... 109

5.2 Research implications and recommendations for future study ...... 111

Bibliography ...... 115

Appendices ...... 125

Glossary ...... 125

Guide to the interviews with Chinese journalists and editors ...... 127

List of Figures and Tables

Figure 1.1 Number of internal migrant children in mainland China ...... 4

Table 3.1 New terms employed by the press to refer to migrant children ...... 50

Table 3.2 Frequencies of news subjects in press reports ...... 61

Table 3.3 Frequencies of social groups mentioned in press reports ...... 68

Table 3.4 Quotations in news reports of People's Daily ...... 69

Table 3.5 Quotations in news reports of Southern Weekly ...... 69

Table 4.1 Terms employed by weibo users to refer to migrant children ...... 82

Table 4.2 Verbs with migrant children as subject of an action in weibo discourse ...... 88

Table 4.3 Verbs with migrant children as object of an action in weibo discourse ...... 89

Table 4.4 Adjectives and adverbs in the description of migrant children in weibo discourse

...... 89

Table 4.5 Frequencies of social groups mentioned in weibo discourse ...... 92

Table 4.6 Frequencies of subjects in weibo discourse ...... 99

Chapter 1

Introduction

China currently has 35 million internal migrant children who have typically moved from underdeveloped rural areas to the burgeoning cities (Duan, Lü, Wang and Guo, 2013:45). Today, four out of ten minors in Shanghai, and three out of ten in Beijing, are migrants (All-China

Women’s Federation, 2013). Migrant children remained virtually invisible or unknown to urban citizens and governors until the mid-1990s, but, as the number of children on the move surged, it soon became a prominent object of media reports and public discussion (see Figure 1.1;

Cheng, 2010:3-4). This thesis explores the representation of migrant children in Chinese media, to be specific, the images of such children that are constructed by news reports and other types of media texts. Firstly, the thesis offers a systematic account of the portrayal of the migrant child in Chinese mainstream press between 1990 and 2012. It traces the continuity and change over time with regard to the discursive patterns and the underlying ideology against the backdrop of China’s ongoing labour migration and media commercialisation. Secondly, the research investigates the portrayal of migrant children in the Twitter-like micro-blogosphere, weibo (微博), which represents the most influential online space for public debates in mainland China (China Internet Network Information Centre, 2013). Based on a comparison between press texts and weibo tweets, the thesis evaluates whether or not the diffusion of digital media has given rise to alternative knowledge, opinions, or ideology about migrant children.

This opening chapter first discusses necessary background information in regard to the definition(s) of internal migrant children, their social status and identity, and the general sociopolitical context in which they live and through which they are made visible in the media.

The chapter shows that migrant children have emerged alongside China’s economic reforms and rural–to–urban migration, both highly successful macro-economic strategies, but that the children are commonly exposed to routine discrimination, and are often deprived of

fundamental entitlements and life chances in host cities (see Goodburn, 2009; Kwong, 2011).

Within this context, the second section of this chapter goes on to establish a particular research territory, that of the roles played by Chinese media in the stigmatisation of migrant children. The literature review, conducted in the fields of media, childhood and migration, finds that few studies have engaged with media representation, in the sense of the ways in which media texts describe migrant children and pertinent social events. Where there are studies on the topic, some researchers find that migrant children are severely stereotyped in media discourse, and that these children’s own expressions and concerns are rarely heard (Luo, 2011;

Wang and Gao, 2010). Here a research gap is identified regarding why stereotypes of migrant children are established and perpetuated by the media, and whether any discursive changes have occurred over time and across different media outlets.

In the third section, the specific research aims are outlined and the theoretical framework of the thesis is explained. The hypothesis, that changes in media representation of the migrant child are theoretically possible over the last three decades, is valid because, during this period, most of China’s media institutions have undergone a remarkable transformation from serving as propaganda mouthpieces to operating as audience-oriented commercial organisations (see

Liu and McCormick, 2011; Qian and Bandurski, 2011). Media content is increasingly diversified, and the media–power relationship is continuously being reshaped in contemporary China. The state’s media landscape has become even more fascinating as a particular type of web-based media, weibo, exploded in popularity after its launch in 2009 (Sullivan, 2012:773). Against the backdrop of China’s unprecedented media transformation, the research reported here aims to investigate whether the commercialised, digitalised media have fostered diversified perspectives or ideologies to describe migrant children. The thesis is located in the field of

Chinese media research but it has also been informed by international minority representation studies, such as the racism discourse deployed in British mass media against immigrants (see van Dijk, 1991; Hall, 1997). At a theoretical level, media representation studies need to undermine the normality of a popular image and emphasise its contingency. The ‘difference’ seen in a minority or marginalised social group is not something simply found in the world, that

is thus essential and fixed, but is constructed through human discourse and is thus contingent and contestable (Rattansi, 1992:20; Hall, 1997:257). In this light, the research findings are expected to make media professionals and users more sensitive and more critical about the stigmatisation of migrant children. This objective informs the research significance outlined in the fourth section of the chapter.

1.1 Background: internal migrant children in China

The term ‘internal migrant children’ is used in this thesis to refer to the mobile population aged

0–17 within mainland China. In reality, the overwhelming majority of the group has moved from underdeveloped rural areas to the burgeoning cities where their parents serve as migrant workers. This migration process is inextricably linked to China’s economic reforms that commenced in 1978 and which have increased since 1992 (Winter, 2012:45). During the pre-reform period, the migrant population was relatively small due to the strict management of the planned economy (Yang and Cai, 1999:4). However, the number of China’s internal migrants has surged from 21 million in 1990 to 230 million in 2012, and the largest subgroup of this migration process is rural residents’ movement towards the nation’s coastal cities and the mega cities which pioneered in the economic reforms, such as Guangzhou, Shanghai and

Beijing (Winter, 2012:60). This rural–to–urban migration is comparable to the sizable population movements in other industrialising and urbanising countries and territories, such as

Brazil in the 1960–70s and East and Southeast Asia in the 1980–90s (Stelzig, 2008; Asis and

Piper, 2008:426). The primary factors that ‘push’ rural Chinese to move to the cities include surplus of rural labor and poverty in rural areas; whereas the key "pull" factors consist of better job opportunities in construction, service and manufacturing industries, urban-rural and regional disparity in economic and social development, and increasingly tolerate government policies towards population movement (Cheng, 2010:3).

Throughout the 1980s, China’s internal labour migration was dominated by male adults, with children and other family members left behind in their rural home towns. Since the mid-1990s, however, migrant workers have tended to stay longer in host cities and begun to bring their

children (Duan, Yang, Zhang and Lu, 2008:39). This is related to Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour in 1992, which had deepened China’s economic reforms and brought about more policies to facilitate labour migration (Li, 2011:71). In Beijing, for example, throughout the 1980s, migrant labourers were generally adult men, but an increasing number of couples and families, together with their children, have been migrating there since the mid-1990s (Woronov,

2004:295). According to the national census that was carried out in 2010, China’s internal migrant children numbered 35 million, which has increased by 40% than 2005 (All-China

Women’s Federation, 2013). More than 80% of migrant children came from rural areas; that is, rural migrant children accounted for approximately 29 million. In the same time, a larger number of rural children (around 61 million) have been left behind in the countryside by their migrant worker parents (ibid.). In summary, the emergence of migrant children in the Chinese context is inextricably linked to the nation’s ongoing economic reforms and the rural–to–urban labour migration over the last three decades.

Figure 1.1 N umber of internal migrant children in mainland China

(Unit: 10,000 persons)

Source: Woguo liudong ertong shengcun he fazhan: wenti yu duice (The situation of China’s floating children and their future development: challenges and solutions), by Duan C., Lü L., Wang Z., and Guo J. 2013, South China Population, 28(118), pp.44-80.

The overwhelming academic perception is that China’s migrant children are and may rightfully be subject to discrimination and exclusion in the wider society. According to the state’s authoritative policy documents, migrant children are defined as ‘floating children’ (liudong

ertong, 流动儿童): a group of minors who accompanied their migrant worker parents, and who have stayed outside their registered residency for more than six months (Duan et al.,

2013:45; All-China Women’s Federation, 2013). This official definition is interesting, because it excludes unaccompanied migrant children, attributes minors’ mobility to their parents’ movement and emphasises the role of one’s official residency status (hukou 户口) in differentiating migrants from locals. Established in 1955, the hukou system classifies an individual at birth as either a rural or urban resident based on their parents’ registration status

(Han, Huang and Han, 2011:206). This status often remains unchanged once it is recorded; that is, although the person’s actual residency changes as a result of migration, s/he may not be able to update the official residency status. An overwhelming majority of migrant children have officially been identified as peasants, simply because their parents hold a rural household registration: this is the case even if the child was born and brought up in a city (Duan and Yang,

2008:27).

In the pre-reform era, the hukou system was used by the Party-state as a means of separating urban dwellers from rural residents and restricting population movement (Yang and Cai,

1999:12). Since 1978 when the economic reforms were initiated, the demand for labour in the cities has attracted an increasing number of rural residents searching for jobs (Winter, 2012:70).

As a consequence, the Chinese Government has lost absolute control over population mobility, but it has preserved the hukou system to maintain a sense of control over migration inflows to the cities (Solinger, 1999:16).Moreover, this hukou system has been manipulated by local authorities, institutions and citizens to preserve their welfare privileges, including housing, education, health, child care and the pension which are largely unavailable to inflowing migrants (Solinger, 1999:16; Goodburn, 2009:502). Migrant children are often denied access to public schools and other fundamental life chances in host cities, simply because they lack local residency status. Such institutionalised exclusion and routine discrimination have constrained migrants’ upward social mobility (Han et al., 2011:206).

In the new millennium, there are signs that the hukou system, which has long played a crucial role in forcing migrants to live as second-class citizens in host cities, is becoming less relevant to 5

people’s entitlements and social status (Jacka, Kipnis and Sargeson, 2013:79). To give an example, the Chengdu Government in south-west China recently launched a reform to abolish distinctions between its rural- and urban-registered populations: rural residents in Chengdu are granted equal access to social welfare services which used to be exclusively available to the urban population. However, the reform is limited, as migrants from outside the Chengdu area are still excluded from equal access to social welfare services (ibid.). In July 2014, China’s State

Council pledged to relax the household registration throughout the whole country, although detailed schedules for the reform are yet to be disclosed (China Central Government website,

2014). Nonetheless, most migrant-hosting places, particularly mega-cities such as Beijing,

Shanghai and Guangzhou, continue to manipulate the hukou system and social service schemes to prevent migrants from accessing local social welfare services.

Since a few urban public schools first opened their doors to migrant children, strong objection has been expressed to this reform by many local citizens who firmly believe that migrant children are dirty, undisciplined and will lead local children astray (Kwong, 2011:873). Recently,

17 rural migrant children were admitted to a public school in Cixi city, but they were soon relocated to a segregated classroom after a short period spent mingling with local peers. The mixed classroom was abolished because city parents claimed that the newcomers had previously received poor-quality education and might be ill-mannered, even though the school teachers reassured them that the new students were ‘academically exceptional’ and ‘very mild’

(Ni, 2011). This blatant discrimination is reminiscent of the stigmatisation of migrant children in other continental entities, such as Europe and North America. As explained by Block and

Buckingham (2007:36), immigrant children and youth are largely rendered invisible in accounts and statistics about migration. When they do appear in media debates and political statements, they are depicted in a few fixed and simplistic roles—either as vulnerable victims of exploitation and corruption, or as (potential) vandals of the established social order. There is little recognition of the diversity of immigrant children’s experiences, and little attempt has been made to understand the issues from their perspective (ibid.). That is to say, the exclusion and stigmatisation of migrant children is a general practice across various countries and

territories, and China’s internal child migrants are no exception in this respect.

1.2 Migrant children in the media

So what roles do the media play in the stigmatisation of migrant children? Have the vibrant and diversified Chinese media channels ever constructed, reinforced or contested the stereotypes about the migrant child? To date, most studies of China’s child migrants have been focused on their educational disadvantages and social marginalisation (see, among many others, Woronov,

2004; Kwong, 2013; Xiao, 2011; Cheng, 2010), but little attention has been paid to the role played by the media. There is also a rich body of research on how migrant workers have been represented in the media in China. Sun Wanning’s study (2009) explores the subaltern figure of the rural migrant maid within the context of China’ uneven modernisation. Popular television serials and lively press discussions provide commentaries on the qualities that comprise ‘good’ or ‘bad’ maids, and produce entertaining stories about naive rural women in the big unfamiliar city. Moreover, such media productions raise questions about migrant workers’ citizenship, human value and self-development. As the anthropologist Yan Hairong (2008) argues, within

China’s national developmental discourse, urbanity and urbanisation (of both the self and of society) are regarded as the end goal of modernization. While migration is discursively positioned as the way to become modern in post-Mao China, the rural is effectively emaciated in relation to this urban telos. Indeed, media representation of the rural migrant is intricately linked to the national project. Dong Xiaoyu and Hu Yang (2010) find that back to the early stages of China’s ‘Reforms and Opening-up’, migrant workers were discursively constructed by the media as ‘‘pioneers of the new age’; they suddenly became ‘mindless gold-diggers’ in the late 1980s when the party-State started to curb labour migration; the figure of the migrant was then transformed to ‘ the afflicted outsiders’ in the 1990s, and to ‘the disadvantaged in social conflicts’ in the new millenium, which were notably influenced by the state urbanisation project. In the same time, new terminology has constantly been created and promoted in the media discourse to replace older words in reference to migrant workers (Wang, 2007). These studies have provided important contextual information for the present project in regards to

the rural and urban positioning within the state discourse, the shift of China’s migration policy, and the media discussions of migrants in general. However, these projects concern the media representation of adult migrants, not children.

Recently, given the proliferation of new information and communications technologies (ICTs) in

China, a few media researchers have interrogated migrants’ use of mobile phones and the

Internet, that is, their new media practices and the opportunities for self-representation.

Cartier, Castells and Qiu (2005) make important contribution to the field by addressing the formation of a new information class in China, i.e., the information have-less, who populate the vast gray area between the information haves and have-nots. Millions of rural migrant workers are making use of inexpensive and low-tech ICTs, such as bandit-phones and Internet cafes.

Such low-end technologies and services offer rather limited mobility, often constrained in a particular time and space. This ‘immobile mobility’, a term innovated by Cara Wallis (2013:183), allows migrants for overcoming myriad constraints, yet it can never erase these completely.

Wallis’ analysis shows that migrant women’s usage of mobile phones allow them to feel part of a modern cosmopolitan culture, but their lack of skills in dealing with mobile phones also reinforces their inferior social standing in an urban society. Similarly, migrant women’s mobile phone usage enriches their social networks and mediates their intimate relationships, but it rarely expands their social networks to other social strata. Based on ethnographic observation as well as quantitative information, Wang Xinyuan (2014) argues that to rural migrants, especially the young ones, a low-end Smartphone is the only access to the Internet and has become an everyday essential. Smartphone serves as a show box for young migrant workers, where they document the world they know, fashion the self they desire, and demonstrate their integration into a modern lifestyle. Young migrants’ self-representation via digital media, according to Tao and Donald (2015), takes place in a context where their voices have long been neglected. Migrant youth, as members of the most enthusiastic users of new ICTs, have managed to appropriate digital media to speak in their own terms.

It should be noted that migrants’ self-representation, which is facilitated by new ICTs, is often constrained in migrants’ own social networks, instead of being circulated among the public 8

(Wang, 2014; Tao and Donald, 2015). In addition, the studies of migrants’ digital media practices commonly set focus on migrant workers, instead of children. Previous research on

Chinese media and migration finds that most internal migrant children, particularly the younger, school-aged ones, have little access to a computer or mobile phone, due to their disadvantaged economic status and limited digital competence as well as the city officials’ punitive measures

(Donald, 2010:5; Kwong, 2011:876; Mo, Swinnen, Zhang, Yi, Qu, Boswell and Rozelle 2013:14;

Zhuang, 2012:54). In other words, rather than representing themselves via new media channels, China’s internal migrant children are more likely to be represented by the media used by other social groups, such as journalists, editors and privileged local citizens. Therefore, the current thesis takes a step back from the self-representation which is largely inaccessible to

China’s migrant children, and sets the focus on the traditional representation of such children in the media used by other social groups.

A survey of the literature finds that only a couple of studies have investigated the image of

Chinese migrant children in the mass media, and they both argue that the group has been severely stereotyped in news reports. A project carried out by the media scholar Luo Anping

(2011) interrogated the press coverage of rural migrant children in 2008–2010. She found that migrant children are rarely quoted as speakers in media discourse: among the 85 sampled reports, merely one-tenth of the 85 sample reports mentioned a child’s name or contained a quotation from a child. Migrant children are mainly discussed in relation to two topics: education and philanthropy, each accounting for approximately 40% of the reports. Notably, various texts garnered from six different newspapers seem designed to perpetuate minimal, simplistic, fixed and common images about migrant children who are thus depicted as:

(a) Passive recipients of social welfare who reportedly have received intensive subsidies and

support from government agencies and élite social groups. The newspapers reveal that these

children are occasionally sponsored for piano lessons, or for touring with the National

Theatre.1

(b) Vulnerable minors with low self-esteem. They are typecast as being unhappy and

quiet—often before the mainstream social groups extend a helping hand.

trendy lifestyle. Rural children’s ‘problematic’ behaviour and ‘ill’ manners are emphasised

and criticised in the reports.

(d) Hardworking children who are grappling with impoverishment. This positive image

balances the aforementioned negative (or passive) figures. However, where there are reports

of this type, children’s specific, diversified experiences are ignored.

Media stereotyping of migrant children is also found in a migration study conducted by Wang and Gao (2010:55). Based on news reports garnered from the Yangtse Evening Post in

2007–2008, the researchers suggest that migrant children mainly appear in discussions on education and welfare provision. ‘Their major role is to act as receivers of donations and welfares provided by local citizens and authorities. …The givers, that is, local urbanites, constitute the target audience of the press. Therefore, to emphasise the givers’ role in the news reports is to compliment the audience: you are a group of compassion and generosity’

(ibid.). As a result, migrant children are often relegated to an insignificant position in the narrative; that is, they are rarely allowed to act as the protagonist in the press accounts.

These studies suggest that migrant children are persistently stereotyped in media discourse with a few simplistic, fixed images being used to describe millions of child migrants. However, a couple of important dimensions are missing in the aforementioned media representation

1 The National Theatre, as well as various palaces and parks in Chinese cities, are often used by the authorities to launch propaganda campaigns and exhibitions. The ideal purpose of visits to these public cultural sites is more education than pleasure: they are pedagogic spaces where children are supposed to see and appreciate China’s culture, history and aesthetics in specific ways. See Woronov (2004).

studies. Firstly, the question of why Chinese media sustain a particular discursive pattern has not been explored. The studies have described how the media represent migrant children, but fail to investigate a more important question of ‘why do they do so’. The ideology underlying the news reports of migrant children has been overlooked or left untouched. Secondly, the studies have analysed news reports published very recently, but there is no consideration of relevant historical media representational practices. The previous projects thus fail to trace when a stereotype about migrant children emerged in the media realm, from what origin and whether the image has shifted over time. In other words, they are unable to trace the crucial moments when a discursive pattern was established, reversed or abandoned. The current thesis is expected to extend existing knowledge of the ideology underlying the reports, and to offer a historical account of the image of migrant children in the media.

1.3 Research aim and scope

The research sets out to investigate the representation of migrant children in Chinese newspapers from 1990–2012, and the description of the group in the micro-blogosphere. The overall objective is to understand the ways in which the media produce particular knowledge and opinions about a marginalised group of children. The specific research aims are to:

(a) Identify the forms and modes of the stigmatisation referring to migrant children in media

discourse;

(b) Unveil the ideological ideas that underpin the sampled media texts; and

transforming media industry and a shifting media–power relationship during the given

period.

The period of 1990–2012 is selected for the observation of change in the image of migrant children because the last three decades have seen the group initially emerging in host cities and then becoming visible or significant in the public realm. As mentioned in the background

section, China’s internal migrant children remained practically invisible or unknown in the public sphere until approximately the mid-1990s, and this represents a crucial moment for the encounter between the dominant local urbanites and the inflowing minors. The newcomers were aptly labelled as ‘children of outsiders’ or ‘floating children’, and were known as an impoverished, disadvantaged, homogenous group. Another crucial encounter took place in the early 21st century when a few urban governments first relaxed their rules to allow migrant children into public schools. This reform gave rise to intense debate on the ‘notorious qualities’ of migrant students and the possible threat to their local peers in host cities (Kwong, 2011:873).

The thesis explores which events or topics about migrant children have provoked most media debates, in what frame(s) the group is/are discussed and whether their image has been reconstructed or reshaped over time.

It is possible that migrant children’s image has been reconstructed or reshaped because the

Chinese media sector has been commercialised and diversified during the last three decades.

All forms of media institutions used to be under the tight control of the state’s Communist

Party (hereinafter referred to as ‘the Party’), serving as not-for-profit propaganda units and relying on government subsidies (Liu and McCormick, 2011:102). However, the turning point took place in the early 1990s when China’s market-oriented economic reforms were extended to the media sector. Business management and commercial advertising have since been introduced into media operation, and most institutions have eventually achieved financial independence (ibid.). As a result of commercialisation, types of media content are becoming increasingly diverse and audience-oriented which facilitates open and critical debates on public affairs (Qian and Bandurski, 2011:41). At the same time, the Party has managed to perpetuate, if not tighten, its effective control over the media industry. Newspapers, TV channels and publishing houses are threatened with closure for unruly behaviour, and individual journalists may have their careers ruined for releasing politically sensitive reports (Brady, 2012:198). In addition, many media organisations and managers have developed a vested interest in the propaganda campaigns; that is, they follow the Party line to gain financial benefits (Zhao,

2008:82). The result is that the commercialisation of Chinese media and the shifting

media–audience–Party relationship may entail new representational practices about migrant children, but it may also reinforce the existing class bias and fuel the stigmatisation of a marginalised social group. This issue is addressed in the current thesis.

In addition to the press, the research selects a type of web-based media, the micro-blogosphere (weibo), to conduct a comparative study. As a relatively new phenomenon in Chinese Internet culture, weibo emerged in 2009 and has garnered hundreds of millions of users, representing the most influential and vibrant online space for public debates (China

Internet Network Information Centre, 2013). With a word limit of 140 Chinese characters, it enables users to release instant messages, and republish and comment on others’ postings in real time (Zappavigna, 2012:27; Sullivan, 2012:776). This new function of digital media has provided ordinary people with opportunities to participate in public debates and express themselves relatively freely (Sullivan, 2012:775; Xiao, 2011:206). Debates in the micro-blogosphere are often regarded as a sensitive barometer of public sentiment and opinion which exert a remarkable impact on the political and news agendas (Tang and

Sampson, 2012:461).

However, weibo content has been increasingly managed by the Party-state’s censorship systems (Fu, Chan and Chau, 2013:43). Users are prohibited from searching for messages containing politically sensitive terms. Aside from search censorship, weibo websites have also employed censors to manually delete messages that contain banned keywords or subversive images (Bamman, O’Connor and Smith, 2012:3). The discussions on specific topics, such as individual corruption or traffic congestion, are allowed to develop in cyberspace, because they can function as a way to ‘blow off some steam’ without intimidating the Party-state’s legitimacy

(Yu, 2011:390). As Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret E. Roberts (2013:329) find it, weibo posts with negative criticism of the state, its policies and leaders are not more likely to be censored; instead, the censorship program is oriented toward curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization. Nevertheless, control over the weibo content is easier to subvert than that over the conventional mass media. The reason is that communication through the conventional media allows only a few key figures to 13

speak and consequently facilitates control, whereas the Internet-based digital media enable multi-directional communication, and the sheer size of the user base makes it almost impossible to monitor every netizen (Hu, 2002:194).

A comparative study between the conventional press and the dynamic weibo is viable because the two intersect with each other in many ways. Firstly, the phenomenal success of weibo in

China is partly due to the failure or inefficiency of conventional news agencies. As the print media institutions are owned and supervised by the Party’s propaganda departments at various levels, they often fail to cover sensational stories in a timely manner or to provide their readers with reliable information (Sullivan, 2012:775). Many breaking first-hand stories have been disclosed through weibo in real time, and are thus celebrated by the users as a success of citizen journalism (ibid.). That is to say, the usual caution of media professionals in response to news stories has lent credibility to micro-bloggers’ disclosure and interpretation. In politically sensitive categories like corruption, religion and disasters, weibo also fosters a more free-wheeling discussion than the average citizen would obtain from the newspapers (Hassid,

2012:12). Secondly, Chinese weibo users offer a kind of ‘protection’ to professional journalists and editors. If an issue provokes widespread debates in cyberspace, news workers in the conventional institutions are more likely to cover it despite the risk of offending the propaganda authorities. Journalists are able to defend their coverage as ‘neutral’ as it reflects public opinion expressed on the Internet (Tang and Sampson, 2012:462).

Thirdly, myriad Chinese newspapers and individual journalists have launched their own weibo accounts, acting as enthusiastic writers and even influential opinion leaders in this virtual space

(Wu, 2012:21; Li, 2012:36). Professional journalists and editors in China often serve as diligent gatekeepers of the mainstream news agencies; that is, they have to select news stories and prohibit a particular story from passing through the ‘gates’ of a medium. In cyberspace, however, they join the grassroots amateur bloggers to make short-form reporting, express personal opinions and collect information from other users (Yu, 2011:383). This new type of open, bottom-up journalism blurs the boundaries between the élite and the grassroots, the official and the unofficial, and professional and unprofessional interpretations of news. In 14

summary, given the multifaceted intersection between the traditional media and the web-based weibo, the current research would like to find out whether or not the vibrant digital media, compared to the conventional press, have facilitated any new perspective or paradigm to describe migrant children.

With a focus on the discourse of China’s press reports and weibo postings, the research locates itself in the field of Chinese media research, but it also speaks to international studies of minority representation, namely, studies of the immigrant image in other continental entities, such as Europe and North America. The stigmatisation of China’s internal migrant children is comparable to the practice of conveying negative images of transnational migrants: both demonstrate a process of ‘othering’; that is, inflowing migrants are constructed as the ‘other’ who is opposite to ‘us’ – the dominant local citizens and governors (Hall, 1997:230). The figure of the transnational migrant has long been loaded with stigmatised associations with criminality, demonisation and exploitation (Papastergiadis, 2010:245). Since the end of the 19th century, transnational migrants have long been constructed in popular representation as biologically inferior and innately subordinate subjects (Hall, 1997:239; Young, 1991:42). In the

1980s, immigrants were often differentiated from local citizens along the lines of cultural traditions which were supposed to be mutually incompatible, for instance, ‘Englishness’ and

‘blackness’ (Donald and Rattansi, 1992:2; Gilroy, 1992:54; Hall, 1997:256). In the early 21st century, it has become obsolete to stigmatise a social group based on biological differences

(such as the colour of their skin), but stereotypes about particular immigrant groups persist in the wake of terrorism attacks in the United States (USA) and Europe (Hermanin, Guidetti and de Kroon, 2012). In addition, alongside technological changes, digital media have now become a new channel for messages of racial exclusion and intolerance (Gilroy, 2012:380; Back,

2002:630).

Within a particular period of time, a few simplistic characteristics about a minority group are often emphasised and fixed across various media texts and political accounts. The ‘differences’ of the group, that is, the characteristics that distinguish them from members of the majority social group, seem to be natural and uncontestable. However, a historical and comparative 15

assessment can reveal that the image of a minority group has shifted across time: different characteristics have been constructed, reinforced and assigned to the whole group during different periods in history. In other words, the ‘difference’ of a social group is not something natural and permanently fixed, but is discursive and contingent. Therefore, the central question for minority representation studies is not what the differences about a minority group are, but how such differences are constructed through human discourse and are further conveyed as shared knowledge.

The thesis applies the analytical framework of minority representation research into a different context, that is, Chinese media portrayal of the nation’s internal migrant children. Racial and ethnic differences are pushed to the foreground in the international immigrant image, but what is said about race and ethnicity can equally be applied to the analysis of other differences, such as place of origin, official residency status and human quality which are often used to differentiate China’s migrant children from their local peers (Hall, 1997:225). In the first place, the analysis of the representation of a social group needs to undermine the normality of a popular image and emphasise its contingency. That is to say, the research needs to investigate not only what the stereotypes about migrant children are, but more importantly, when a stereotype emerged, from what origin, in the service of what purpose and whether the image has been contested across time.

Although one could carry out many micro studies of particular migrant groups, such as rural children in the Beijing municipality, or ethnic minority children in China’s north-west cities (see

Woronov, 2004; Wang, 2008), the present research is concerned with the image of internal migrant children as a general group on a nationwide scale. This has not previously been undertaken in detail: it is therefore a significant and necessary first step for the field. Issues in relation to a particular group of migrant children, such as those of an ethnic minority background, will be addressed if related texts emerge from the media reports, but the analysis of ethnic differences is not set as a primary research aim. Chinese political discourse and media debate often define migrant children as a group based on their place of origin and official residency status, and tend to overlook the fact that they are a heterogeneous group varying in 16

ethnicity, class, age and migration pattern (Wang and Gao, 2010:24; Luo, 2011). The thesis does not similarly overlook the heterogeneity inside the group of migrant children, but it approaches the study with a view to indicating what is present in the data, rather than what we might prefer to be present.

1.4 Significance and originality

The media play an influential role in producing and constructing the reality which goes far beyond simply observing and reporting on real things or activities. In the process of describing a social group or an event, the media define and shape that group or event by selectively attributing to it specific details or particulars (Tuchman, 1978:190). In other words, the media convey knowledge and opinions about a minority or marginalised group with whom most majority social members have little direct contact (van Dijk, 1991:7). Moreover, the mass media provide an ideological framework for the interpretation of minority events. This framework may be used to justify people’s prejudice and discrimination against specific social groups. For example, the strategic sentence ‘You read it in the paper every day’ is a well-known move in daily conversation when the speaker attempts to defend her/his prejudice against a particular group (ibid.).

A study of media representation is meaningful because it reveals the underlying media–power relationship and the broader sociocultural change. Sociopolitical power relationships are encoded in media discourse; the texts, in turn, produce, reproduce or contest the existing relationships by conveying knowledge, values and beliefs (Orgad, 2012:25). In addition, media discourse constitutes a sensitive barometer of social change, and thus serves as valuable materials for studying this type of change (Fairclough, 1995:16). In this light, the research is significant because it looks into two especially meaningful social phenomena in contemporary

China: a marginalised and disadvantaged group of children who are caught up in the nation’s reforms and economic change, and an influential new form of media that challenges the censorship system and transforms the media landscape. The research evaluates the extent to which migrant children have been presented as speakers in the media used by other social

groups: it explores how these children’s voices and concerns are mediated or ignored.

Furthermore, the research outcome may allow a reappraisal of the impact of the micro-blogosphere, in the sense of whether it has challenged, or entrenched, the representational paradigms sustained by the conventional press media. The research findings may serve as empirical evidence for media/childhood scholars and practitioners in the field. It is also anticipated that the findings may raise the awareness of media professionals and users about their practices of stereotyping migrant children.

The research is original, firstly, because it sets the focus on the image of migrant children in media used by other social groups. Although issues in relation to migrant children have received a great deal of attention in childhood and migration studies, previous research mainly focuses on specific challenges facing the group, such as educational barriers or social marginalisation: little attention has been paid to the role played by the media. Secondly, the research launches a comparative study between the mainstream newspapers and the web-based micro-blogosphere. These two forms of media interplay in many ways, and their continuity and disparity in representational patterns are unveiled through systematic and detailed text analysis. Thirdly, the originality of the research also lies in its reference to international studies of minority representation, particularly the racism research in the USA and Europe. The research applies the analytical framework of immigrant representation studies to the Chinese context to investigate the historical changes in the image of migrant children which is largely overlooked in previous studies.

1.5 Overview of subsequent chapters

Following the introduction to the overall thesis in the current chapter, Chapter 2 explains the research methodology, that is, critical discourse analysis (CDA) supplemented by quantitative content analysis. This methodological choice is justified by relating a few key principles in

Fairclough’s (1995) CDA approach to the particular research concerns in this thesis. The chapter then offers a detailed explanation of the data collection, coding and analytical processes.

Chapter 3 explores the press reports about migrant children that were published in the period

of 1990–2012. Based on 217 reports garnered from the two most influential Chinese newspapers, People’s Daily and Southern Weekly, the chapter examines the terms used in reference to migrant children, the subjects of media discussion, and the voices and opinions embedded in the texts. Chapter 4 investigates the portrayal of migrant children in the vibrant micro-blogosphere, and draws consistent comparison with the press discourse analysed in

Chapter 3. The concluding chapter then summarises the most important findings of the thesis, and discusses the general implications for future research directions.

Chapter 2

Methodology

This chapter explains the research methodology chosen, the justification of the choice, the sources of data, and the coding and analysis procedures. It first describes the research strategy of the thesis, that is, critical discourse analysis supplemented by quantitative content analysis.

The approach has been derived mainly from a review of the methods used by international studies of minority representation, including the seminal works on mediated racism by Teun A. van Dijk (1991) and Stuart Hall (1997), and a few recent projects on the image of migrants in the media (Rasinger, 2010; Papastergiadis, 2009; Kaye, 2002). These studies commonly engage in the detailed structures and strategies of a text, and highlight the relationship between ‘text and context’. In other words, they are primarily concerned with how the broader historical, social, cultural and political structures are manifest in the discourse, and how such discursive practices in turn help to create social identities and legitimate the power of élites (Jorgenson and Philips, 2002:5; van Dijk, 1991:45). The approach of analysing a text in the context is applied in this thesis to investigate the mediated representation of migrant children in association with Chinese cultural politics. The researcher then justifies the choice of methods with regard to the research questions, that is, the appropriateness of the discourse analysis approach for the study of migrant children’s image in Chinese media. The second part of the chapter provides a detailed explanation of the data sources, the logic behind the selection of data sites and the justification of the sampling strategy. The third section elaborates on how the data have been coded and processed, and identifies the main themes for the data analysis.

The chapter then ends with a reflection on the methodological limitations and the challenges arising from the data collection.

2.1 Research methodology

Discourse analysis is not just one approach, but a series of interdisciplinary approaches that can be used to explore language use and communication in many different fields, such as

anthropology, linguistics, poetics, psychology, mass media, history and political science

(Jorgenson and Philips, 2002:1; van Dijk, 1991:44). This thesis particularly engages in Norman

Fairclough’s (1995) approach of critical discourse analysis (CDA) in the field of mass media. The

CDA approach is appropriate for the research aim and questions due to the following reasons:

Firstly, CDA is based on Fairclough’s (1995:75) concept of ‘inter-textuality’ that describes the ways in which an individual text draws on elements of different texts. It helps to trace the continuity and change in the media portrayal of migrant children. According to CDA, concrete language use in a text always combines elements from various earlier discourses, because language users have to build on already established meanings (Jorgenson and Philips, 2002:7).

In this light, a news report should be regarded as a case of concrete language use which may draw on not only earlier texts published in the media, but also texts of different sources, such as political accounts, academic debate, colloquial conversation or pedagogical material.

Through the analysis of inter-textuality, that is, the interplay between different texts, one can unveil the consistency and change in the discursive pattern, that is, whether or not new elements have been introduced in an individual text. This helps to answer the research questions of when a stereotype or terminology of migrant children emerged, from what origin and whether it has been challenged in different media texts.

Secondly, CDA examines discourses ideologically; that is, discursive practices contribute to the creation and reproduction of unequal power relations between different social groups

(Jorgenson and Philips, 2002:63). Therefore, a useful methodological principle is that the analyst should always ask of any text whether and how it is working ideologically (Fairclough,

1995:14). As presented in Chapter 1, China’s internal migrant children have been positioned as a disadvantaged social group due to the nation’s obsolete household registration system and unfair social welfare services. This thesis thus sets out to investigate how the media texts construct social identities and relationships, and whether the discourse has entrenched the interests of privileged social groups, mainly local citizens and governors of migrant-hosting cities.

Thirdly, CDA engages in systematic, linguistic analysis of language use in association with the broader social context. It provides a method for the analysis of specific texts at a detailed level, but it also prompts the researcher to draw on social structures, power relations, and media production and consumption practices, instead of focusing exclusively on the texts (Jorgenson and Philips, 2002:62). That is to say, according to the CDA approach, a researcher has to combine micro textual analysis and macro sociological analysis. The reason is that the relationship between text and context is ‘dialectical’: media texts are shaping, and are also shaped by, sociocultural structures and practices (Fairclough, 1995:34). In this sense, the study of migrant children’s image in the media requires a systematic, linguistic, textual analysis of news reports, on the one hand, and, on the other, an analysis of China’s urban-rural divide system, internal labour migration, and media institutional reform and censorship measures.

This combination of micro textual analysis and macro contextual analysis leads to a deeper understanding of why the media reports have perpetuated a particular paradigm to portray migrant children.

In this thesis, the CDA approach has been supplemented by quantitative content analysis of the media texts as well as in-depth interviews with media professionals. Classic content analysis is used to reveal the prevalent themes of the texts, such as the frequency of a subject or a word, and the distribution of news actors and speakers in the media accounts (van Dijk, 1991:10). As a starting point of the analysis process, a simple frequency list provides an interesting first insight into the general patterns of media discourse (Rasinger, 2010:1023). This is followed by systematic, linguistic textual analysis in accordance with the CDA framework. In addition, the researcher has conducted a dozen in-depth interviews with veteran Chinese journalists and editors who have reported on migrant children. These interviews were designed to obtain direct knowledge about the production conditions of a text, such as propaganda departments’ interference in the coverage of migrant children, and news workers’ own attitudes in selecting news items and choosing language use. The insights garnered from the news workers have been used to deepen the textual analysis of the sampled media reports. In other words, the interviews serve as a triangulation technique to facilitate the CDA approach.

A combined methodology of discourse analysis and content analysis has been found in many international studies of mass media and minority representation. In his landmark study of racism in the press, van Dijk (1991:53) deployed both quantitative content analysis and qualitative discourse analysis to examine hundreds of news reports on the 1985 racial unrest in the United Kingdom (UK). A simple word frequency list revealed that the unrest was defined by the press with the more dramatic and negative term ‘riot’ (occurring in 320 headlines), rather than the more neutral terms ‘unrest’ or ‘disturbance’ (only in two headlines). A detailed textual analysis further found that the cause of the ‘riot’ was essentially attributed to black youths although, in reality, a significant number of participants were white. Van Dijk found that when black people were accused or jailed, they were addressed as ‘blacks’ in the news; but when they were cleared of an accusation, they suddenly lost colour and are identified by their individual names (van Dijk, 1991:64). This represented a typical strategy used by white journalists and editors to stigmatise ethnic minority groups.

Another example of the use of the combined methodology is Kaye’s (2002) study of the British media portrayal of refugees and asylum seekers. He deployed quantitative techniques to monitor the frequency of prejudicial terms, such as ‘phoney’ and ‘bogus’, applied to asylum seekers. Meanwhile, his qualitative analysis considered the context of use, that is, whether the authors used a prejudicial term in their own writing or were just referring to the use of the term by politicians or others. Rasinger (2010) also integrated quantitative evidence into the

CDA framework to study the representation of Eastern European migrants in a regional newspaper in England. The predominant depiction of migrants as actors of crime, with other social actors trying to stop them, was a salient feature in the reports (Rasinger, 2010:1024). In addition, the extensive use of water-based metaphors, such as ‘influx’, in association with migrants implied an unidentifiable collective mass with no individuals (Rasinger, 2010:1028). In summary, in these studies of migrants’ image in the mass media, quantitative analysis is commonly used as a starting point to identify the most salient features in the data, and the discourse analysis approach is then applied to study the textual strategies and structures in detail.

2.2 Sources of data

The research data were derived from the following three types of sources:

 News reports in the Chinese press;

 Postings on the Twitter-like micro-blogosphere (weibo);

 In-depth interviews with Chinese journalists and editors.

For the first type of data source, news reports, the researcher has selected two Chinese newspapers, People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao 人民日报) and Southern Weekly (Nanfang Zhoumo

南方周末). They were chosen mainly due to three reasons: (a) both have a long publishing history, thus making them stable enough for observations over the period from 1990–2012.

People’s Daily was established in 1946 and Southern Weekly in 1984 (Lu, 2008:48; Yang,

2014:65). For the second reason, (b) both are circulated nationwide and enjoy a wide readership. People’s Daily ranks in the top 100 newspapers in the world, with a daily run of around 2.5 million (BBC News, 2013). Southern Weekly is undoubtedly the most influential weekly paper for news report and review in the mainland of China, with an estimated circulation of 1.7 million (NF Media, 2012). Most importantly, (c) the two papers are remarkably different in their political leaning and report genre, opening space for a comparative study with regard to their discursive patterns about migrant children. Based in

Beijing, the nation’s political centre, People’s Daily is under the direct control of the Party’s top leadership, and is financially dependent on the Party-state funding (Qian and Bandurski,

2011:42). Articles in People’s Daily are often read for official interpretation of government policies, and for signs of political figures’ promotion. By contrast, Southern Weekly, with its head office in the southernmost Chinese city, Guangzhou, is much more commercialised in operation and audience-oriented in content. It is regarded as the most liberal, outspoken media outlet in mainland China (Yang, 2014:65).

As discourse analysis is vastly labour-intensive and virtually impossible to apply to a large amount of data, the research selected five publication years from which to collect news items,

that is, 1990, 1995, 2003, 2008 and 2012. These years were chosen because they witnessed a surge in the number of internal migrants or the promulgation/abolishment of an influential migration policy. To be more specific:

 In 1989, both the central and local governments put forward a series of regulations to

rigidly control the ‘mindless flow’ of rural migrants, and this is seen as a significant change

in China’s migratory policies during the post-reform era (Dong and Hu, 2010:12). The

present project thus sets out to examine the press reports of 1990 right after the

regulations were promulgated.

 Official statistics show that the number of internal migrants surged to 70 million in 1995

from 21 million in 1990, with an unprecedented growth rate (Duan et al., 2008:31). This is

largely due to Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour in the early 1990s, which had deepened the

economic reforms and led to a greater influx of migrants in the coastal cities (Li, 2011:71).

 In 2003, the death of a young migrant in a government-run detention facility sparked a

firestorm of media debates, and this eventually led the central government to end the

decades’ old custody and repatriation regulation2 (Hassid, 2012:19).

 2008 marked China’s 30th anniversary of the Reform and Opening up. Rural-to-urban

migration and migrant related issues appeared to be an important subject in the media

reports when reflecting on the past three decades (Dong and Hu, 2010:12).

 The project chose 2012 as the final sample year to investigate the most recent press

reports, given a more relaxed household registration system and a more inclusive

education scheme (see the discussions of recent hukou reforms and public schools’ first

admission of migrant children in Chapter 1).

The search function of the two papers’ online archives was used to identify texts which contained a reference to internal migrant children. In order to collect as many relevant reports

2 According to China’s custody and repatriation regulation that was established in 1982, rural migrants could be detained by the police and be returned to their place of origin, because they did not have a local household registration or a temporary residence permit in the cities (Winter, 2012:63).

as possible, a fuzzy search was conducted by using various search terms, including ‘sons and daughters of peasant workers’ (nongmingong zinü 农民工子女 and nongmingong zidi 农民

工子弟); ‘sons and daughters of labourers’ (dadong zidi 打工子弟); ‘floating children’ (liudong ertong 流动儿童); ‘children of outsiders’ (waidi haizi 外地孩子); ‘vagrant children’ (liulang er

流浪儿); ‘children of immigrant families’ (suiqian zinü 随迁子女); and ‘little migratory birds’

(xiao houniao 小候鸟). These phrases represent the common terms used by Chinese media to refer to migrant children and were collected by the researcher in interviews with journalists and editors in the field. The search results were then manually scanned and double-checked for accuracy. Included were all types of newspaper texts, including proper news reports, columns, editorials, background and feature articles, and letters from readers. The search process returned 0, 2, 38, 47 and 59 reports from People’s Daily, and 3, 5, 35, 11 and 17 reports from

Southern Weekly, published in 1990, 1995, 2003, 2008 and 2012, respectively. Overall, 146 reports were collected from People’s Daily and 71 reports from Southern Weekly.

For the second type of data source, namely, micro-blogging postings, the popular Sina Weibo website (www.weibo.com) was chosen for data collection. Established in 2009, Sina Weibo has garnered hundreds of millions of users and has become the leading micro-blog service provider in China (China Internet Network Information Centre, 2013). However, the tweets are constantly removed from the website due to a range of reasons, such as the act of a censor or personal deletions (Bamman et al., 2012:5). For instance, a micro-blogger once posted a message complaining about the influx of migrant children in Shanghai, which received around

45,000 comments overnight (25.04.2013/WB); but the original tweet, together with all the comments, was shortly deleted from the weibo website. The present project thus used the

Weiboscope Database for data collection. This database was developed by the research team of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre, the University of Hong Kong3. It offers the most comprehensive archive of Sina Weibo postings published in the year 2012, including the censored ones. Overall, it has archived 226 million posts, which are divided into 52 files. In

3 See more details at http://jmsc.hku.hk/2014/04/weiboscope/

order to make the workload manageable, the researcher randomly selected three files, i.e., approximately 13 million posts, for data collection.

Different search terms were used to identify the tweets in relation to migrant children. On the one hand, the same search strings were used on Weiboscope that were used in print media, including ‘sons and daughters of peasant workers’, ‘sons and daughters of labourers’, ‘floating children’, and ‘children of outsiders’, etc. On the other hand, in order to find out the newly created or less well-known terms on weibo in reference to migrant children, the researcher had followed a few particular micro-bloggers who are highly likely to write about migrant children, including a migrant worker (Sunheng wei laodongzhe gechang), a teacher in a migrant school

(Shenguan jiejie), and NGOs engaged with child migrants (Xingongmin jihua, Xinyuan shegong, and Kuaile xiaotaozi). As well, the researcher had consulted the literature on migrant youth and weibo to look for different words and expressions. Several new terms were discovered and were used as search strings on Weiboscope, including ‘non-locally registered student’ (fei bendiji xuesheng, 非本地籍学生), ‘new citizen’ (xin gongmin, 新公民), and ‘shamate’ (杀马

特). The search results were then manually scanned to eliminate false or repetitive records.

Overall, the thesis has found 458 tweets on migrant children out of around 13 million weibo posts.

Note that there are limitations in the method of weibo data sampling and collection. Firstly, the

Weiboscope Database used for collecting weibo content only offers tweets from 2012, and it only tracks the writings of important authors – with this deemed to be those who have more than 1000 followers online (Fu et al., 2013:43). That is to say, the tweets sampled and analysed are all produced by influential online writers. However, this limitation does not invalidate the research findings, because the majority of micro-bloggers barely produce any content, and a small group of influential writers has contributed more than 80% of the original posts on Sina

Weibo (Fu and Chau, 2013:6; Zappavigna, 2012:9). Secondly, the micro-bloggers’ usernames have been replaced with pseudo IDs in the database for ethical reasons (Fu et al., 2013:46).

This makes it difficult to ascertain who the authors are and whose voices they represent. Yet it is possible to identify an author by searching the exact content of a sampled tweet on Sina 27

Weibo website (www.weibo.com). The researcher was able to find out the authors of some of the tweets analysed, and this helped to qualify some of the research findings.

In terms of the third type of data source, namely, interviews with news workers, Chinese mainstream newspapers were surveyed for influential reports on internal migrant children, and the authors of these articles were identified as potential participants. Eventually, 12 in-depth one-on-one interviews were conducted with journalists and editors from different media institutions. Some participants served in commercial news agencies, and some in the Party’s official organs. Most of the interviewed news workers were targeting the mainstream urban adult population, but a few engaged with special reader groups, such as teenagers or business people. Some journalists had been writing about migrant children for more than 10 years, whereas others did not cover relevant topics until very recently. In addition, a few participants had some firsthand experience in issues around migrant children, as they had been a member of the target group, or their own children were currently on the move. The participants’ distinct working conditions and diverse personal experiences resulted in different perspectives and frameworks in their coverage of migrant children. The interviews were focused on the terms used by media professionals to refer to migrant children, the main subjects of media discussions, the censorship in the area, and the interplay between the conventional press and the vibrant micro-blogosphere.4

Overall, three sets of data were collected in the research, namely:

 news reports: 146 from People’s Daily and 71 from Southern Weekly;

 micro-blog tweets: 458 from Sina Weibo;

o The above two types of texts comprised the core data of the thesis, and were

examined according to the approaches of discourse analysis and content analysis.

4 This research project received approval from Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of New South Wales to conduct the interviews (the UNSW HREC Ref: # HC13226).

 Interviews: with 12 Chinese journalists and editors.

o The interview outcomes were used to support the analysis of the first two types of

data, news reports and online tweets, but the interview scripts themselves were not

analysed in a detailed systematic way.

2.3 Data coding and analysis

Each news report and weibo tweet was coded for a number of standard properties, including subjects, quotations, special terms referring to child migrants, social actors appearing in the text, adjectives and adverbs in the description of migrant children, and language style and rhetoric. These standard properties are, in fact, primary themes for data analysis, and they are explained below. NVivo 10 software was used to facilitate data coding and analysis.

2.3.1 Subjects

A subject is a single concept, such as crime, health care or education, which stands for a large social or political domain or for a complex issue about which the media can offer an infinite number of specific news reports (van Dijk, 1991:78). Instead of a short, simple list of subjects, the researcher developed a more extensive list that would better capture the specificity of media discourse. For instance, the term ‘wellbeing of migrant children’ was broken down into a few specific subjects, including mental health, safety, communication and interaction with parents, children’s own dreams and aspirations, and arts and science activities. Each text was coded for at least one and at most six subjects. The following issues were of main concern in the analysis of subjects:

 Frequencies and percentages of the subjects. The research examines which subjects are

most prominent in media discussions on migrant children. The prevalence of a subject

represents a major concern of the media. That is, the distribution of subjects indicates the

media criteria in selecting and evaluating myriad social events in relation to migrant

children.

 The subjects that are downplayed, overlooked or untouched by the media. The research

examines which topics in relation to child migrants are least covered in the media. In

particular, from the perspective of the concerns of migrant children, what are the

problems they face? Have the multiple fields of their social lives been covered in the

media?

 The combination or cluster of subjects. Some subjects are often found to occur together in

many texts. This phenomenon of clustering implies that authors of the texts have

established or confirmed a close relationship between a few particular subjects.

 The sociocultural domains in which migrant children are placed and discussed. The

distribution of subjects illustrates the general discursive framework in which a

marginalised group of children is represented and examined in the media used by other

social groups.

 Comparison across time and between different media channels. This issue considers which

subject(s) have long been prioritised in the media agenda, and whether the press and the

micro-blogosphere have given prominence to the same subject(s).

2.3.2 Quotations

Quotations are commonly used in news reports to enhance the credibility of the account. The insertion of quotes enables the author to safely voice subjective interpretations and opinions without the risk of these views being criticised as groundless or prejudicial (van Dijk, 1991:120).

This analytical theme focuses on the ways in which individuals, social groups and organisations are presented as speakers in the media reports. The research particularly considers child migrants’ mediated voices; that is, to what extent and on what subjects are they allowed to express their feelings and viewpoints? In addition, different quotation patterns may serve special ideological purposes. Fragments of source statements may be quoted verbatim, or be summarised and re-written in media reports, and direct/indirect quotes signal varying degrees of distance between the writer and the speaker (van Dijk, 1991:152). The questions that are asked of a sample text include:

 Who is speaking, how often and how prominently? What are the main social categories of

the speakers in issues about migrant children?

 How often do child migrants appear as speakers, namely, as definers of issues that are

directly relevant to them? Who else is allowed to comment on these issues at the same

time? Are the multiple speakers’ statements pitched against each other, or independent?

 Which particular issue or subject has invited more quotes from migrant children? Are they,

on any occasions, allowed to appear as the only type of speakers, namely, the exclusive

definers of a news event?

 Is a speaker identified by name or not? Are they quoted in direct, indirect or mixed

direct–indirect mode?

 How is a speaker described in the text alongside the quotation? Various descriptive

techniques may be used to credit or discredit a speaker’s voice. Therefore, it is worthwhile

paying attention to whether a speaker is portrayed in a negative, neutral or positive way.

 What is the specific quotation pattern? That is, are the words of a speaker duly marked or

addressed by any distance words? Are the words of a speaker quoted briefly or

extensively?

2.3.3 Special terms referring to migrant children

Different journalists, editors and micro-bloggers may choose between many varied terms to refer to migrant children as a group, and their choice is controlled by socially shared opinions, attitudes, and ideologies (van Dijk, 1991:210). A term can be neutral, positive or negative, depending on a particular sociocultural context and the associated attitudes of the writer and readers. These phrases constitute a valuable repertoire of ‘labels’ which have been attached to child migrants. Therefore, the researcher has collected the special words which were used to denote migrant children in the media texts, and has literally translated them from Chinese into

English. The rich meaning of each term is also explained in detail in association with China’s particular politico-cultural context. Particular concerns in this section include:

 The connotation of a term. The research examines what special characteristics of migrant

children have been captured and conveyed by a particular term, that is, the lines along

which such children have been distinguished from the mainstream non-migrant

population.

 The social origins of a term: where and whom it came from.

 The evolution of the terminology, that is, what has been transformed and what remains

unchanged over time with regard to the definition of child migrants as a group.

 The use of general terms versus the use of individual children’s names. The concern here is

to evaluate whether migrant children are more likely to be viewed as a general,

homogeneous group, or as different, identifiable individuals.

2.3.4 Social actors

The analysis of social actors focuses on different types of individuals and groups who are mentioned in media discourse. The analysis is concerned with:

 Frequency of appearances by social actors. The research investigates which social groups

are presented by the media as the most important actors in issues around migrant

children.

 The typical roles of a social actor, that is, whether they are often depicted as passive

recipients or active agents in media accounts.

 Whether or not a social actor is quoted. Different social groups may appear in media

accounts, but only some of them may be allowed to offer their opinions or interpretations.

 The roles designated for migrant children in media reports. The thesis explores whether

these children tend to take on passive, monotonous roles or active, diversified roles.

2.3.5 Style and rhetoric

The analysis of style and rhetoric engages with the local or micro levels of a text, namely, the meanings, structures and strategies of actual words and sentences. Firstly, it explores the use of presupposition and normalisation. Presupposition is an often-used strategy to conceal

controversial claims: rather than asserting that something is the case, the writer simply assumes that it is true (van Dijk, 1991:183). Normalisation, or the use of a passive voice, may also serve an ideological purpose, because the agents responsible for an action have to be concealed in the media narrative. Secondly, the research closely examines the use of rhetoric in the texts, which may convey special ideological ideas. Rhetoric is a non-obligatory, additional structure in a text, but it can generate emotional responses, draw extra attention and emphasise specific meanings (Cohen, 1992:63). In other words, rhetoric can be used selectively to strengthen the description and evaluation of a social group or news event. Rhetorical strategies include alliteration, hyperbole, understatement and metaphor, etc. In this thesis, the researcher has particularly examined rhetorical strategies that are applied to migrant children.

Although the above-mentioned analytical themes are outlined separately, the research in practice did not follow the framework in a linear way. Instead, the researcher moved backwards and forwards between different analytical themes a number of times before finding it appropriate to move on. In other words, the analytical process has been iterative and dynamic, instead of being straightforward and linear. Indeed, an iterative or repetitive process is not uncommon in qualitative data analysis (Savin-Baden and Major, 2013:449; Jorgenson and

Philips, 2002:77).

2.4 Limitations of the methodology

Systematic content analysis is labour-intensive, and the much more detailed discourse analysis of a large amount of data proves to be an overwhelming task. The researcher therefore has to make choices and impose limitations with regard to the scope of data sampling undertaken.

The study sampled two types of media texts published during particular periods of time, namely, newspaper reports released in 1990, 1995, 2003, 2008 and 2012, and weibo tweets from three sampling in the course of 2012. The many other media outlets, such as TV or radio, are not included in the scope of this Master’s thesis study. It should be noted that alternative discursive patterns may exist in a wider range of media channels and genres.

Another limitation of the thesis lies in the searching practices for data collection. Although the researcher has used many different phrases to identify media texts on migrant children, the list of search strings is by no means exhaustive. In addition, the Weiboscope Database used for collecting micro-blog postings only tracks the writings of influential authors in the year 2012

(see the details in Section 2.2). As a result, the tweets sampled and analysed in this thesis are quite selective, and a more diversified perspective may be found in a wider range of weibo postings.

Finding access to earlier press reports turns out to be a significant challenge. Although People’s

Daily has been thoroughly converted to electronic format and a search function is available online, the other sampled newspaper Southern Weekly does not provide any electronic version for its reports in the 1990s or early 2000s. The researcher visited the China National Library in

Beijing to access the earlier print copies of Southern Weekly, and read each print page in order to identify reports on migrant children. The collection of earlier press texts proved to a challenging task.

Chapter 3

Press coverage of migrant children from 1990–2012

This chapter focuses on the images of migrant children in the Chinese press over the last three decades. The analysis is based on 146 reports from People’s Daily and 71 items from Southern

Weekly, which were published during five sample years: 1990, 1995, 2003, 2008 and 20125.

The analysis first traces the terminological development, that is, the lexical items employed by media professionals to refer to migrant children in these different periods of history. In the early 1990s when migrant children made their debut in the mainstream press, they were designated as ‘little blind floaters’ and ‘black children’ (30.03. 1990/SW, 31.08. 1990/SW).

However, various new terminology, such as ‘floating children’ and ‘new urban residents’, was introduced later to replace words that had previously been used. These ‘replacement changes’ in the media language imply ideological reorientation and broad social changes in contemporary China (Kratochvil, 1982:688). The research also finds that both People’s Daily and Southern Weekly often adopted new terminology in the same time period, despite the two papers’ notable differences in political stance and writing style. Following the detailed terminological study, the second section of the chapter proceeds to explore the macro-level themes of news reports, that is, the general subjects of media discussion. This section answers questions such as ‘what does the press write about migrant children?’ and ‘why? ’. People’s

Daily and Southern Weekly both prioritise educational topics and emphasise government performance. In other words, the two papers demonstrate a high degree of commensurality in selecting news topics pertinent to migrant children.

Even though different media outlets may be employing the same terminology and covering the same topic, they may present different interpretations, and this is largely dependent on the types of quotations embedded in a news report. The third section of the chapter thus examines news actors and quotations in the reports, and this helps to unveil the distinct discursive

5 For sampling criteria and strategies, see the previous chapter of methodology.

patterns between the two sampled papers. While the Communist Party’s mouthpiece People’s

Daily is overwhelmingly dominated by voices of government officials, the commercial audience-oriented Southern Weekly is much more engaged with migrant children’s own voices and eminent analysts’ opinions. This thesis therefore argues that the commercialisation of

Chinese media institutions and the ensuing diversification of media content during the last three decades have facilitated the expression of migrant children and diversified their images, although stereotyping practices remain prevalent at the same time.

Before we touch on the analytical themes, some contextual information is needed with respect to the two sampled papers and the media–power relationship in China. Both People’s Daily and

Southern Weekly are supervised by China’s propaganda apparatus, but their political leaning, reportage genre and agenda setting are notably different. Established in 1946, People’s Daily is under the direct control of the Communist Party, and has consistently been subsidised by

Party-state funding (Lu, 2008:48). Reports in the paper are read for authoritative explanations of government policy, for signs of politicians’ career changes and for ongoing policy debates with uncertain outcomes. That is to say, the newspaper’s agenda is largely set by the political power of the Party (Qian and Bandurski, 2011:42). It should be noted, however, that the paper has suffered a marked decline in circulation and a crisis of public trust since the mid-1990s

(ibid.). This downward trend for the Party’s official news outlet has occurred in a context in which China’s commercial, audience-driven press has surged. As a result of China’s media commercialisation, fresh media offerings sprang up all over the coutry in the mid-1990s (Qian and Bandursky, 2011:41). Southern Weekly, a commercial spin-off of Guangdong Province’s official Nanfang Daily, often spices up official news with consumer-relevant styles, in-depth investigation and diverse intellectual opinions (ibid.). It has been regarded by readers and critics as one of the most outspoken and critical news agencies in mainland China (Kaiman,

2013; Hassid, 2012:13). Yet Southern Weekly remains regulated by the Party-state by means of the inspection of content and the appointment of senior managers (Volland, 2012:118). In other words, commercialisation, journalistic professionalism and persistent Party-state control are together setting the agenda for Southern Weekly.

Media discussions on migrant children are not politically innocuous according to the Party-state regulators (Informants 1, 4 and 8, personal communication, 17, 22 and 26 February 2014, respectively). Several journalists and editors6 who serve on different newspapers have received instructions from the Party’s propaganda department regarding the coverage of internal migrant children and related events. The Beijing-based press is generally prohibited from reporting on the Beijing Municipal Government’s demolition of migrant schools, which is often seen as a strategy deployed by the government to dissuade migrants from permanently settling (Informants 1 and 4, personal communication, 17 and 22 February 2014, respectively).

In addition, the coverage of breaking news about social events, such as sexual abuse or fatal tragedies involving migrant children, is required to emphasise the positive prospects and de-emphasise the negative facts (Informant 8, personal communication, 26 February 2014). In some cases, journalists and editors are only allowed to reproduce verbatim the official press release.

Nevertheless, the degree of media control varies from newspaper to newspaper. According to the researcher’s interviews with the press journalists and editors, commercial news institutions based in Guangdong, China’s southernmost and most reform-minded province, enjoy a higher degree of freedom of speech than their counterparts in Beijing, the political centre of the state.

For instance, the plight of migrant children’s schools has been a regular topic among the

Guangdong-based press from the early 1990s, but the subject is often seen as politically sensitive by the Beijing-based mass media (Informants 1 and 6, personal communication, 17 and 24 February 2014, respectively). Many migrant students have been injured or even killed in traffic accidents because their school buses were severely overloaded (China Labour Bulletin,

2009). When the government banned the usage of unsafe school buses, this policy caused more problems for migrant children who often have to cycle or walk a very long distance to get to school (Hope Project, 2012). When incidents have occurred in Beijing, such as the death of a young migrant child while cycling to school, Beijing-based media outlets gave only scanty

6 For more details about the interviews, please refer to the section on data sources in Chapter 2.

coverage for the sake of maintaining social stability (Informant 4, personal communication, 22

February 2014). By contrast, migrant children’s safety issues are frequently covered by

Guangdong-based newspapers, and local journalists state that they rarely receive any orders from the Party’s propaganda department regarding the coverage of migrant schools

(Informants 7, 8, and 9, personal communication, 25, 26, and 27 February 2014, respectively).

Overall, the Party-state control over the nation’s entire media sectors – although the level of control varies from case to case – may have a particular influence on news reports on the issues of migrant children (Brady, 2012:21; Volland, 2012:118). The specificity of China’s media–power relationship needs to be addressed in the analysis of media texts. Particular news subjects and ideological ideas in relation to migrant children can be promoted, filtered or silenced due to the intervention of political power in media practices.

3.1 Politics of naming: from ‘blind floater’ to ‘new urban resident’

In Chinese media discourse, different lexical items have been employed in different periods of history to refer to migrant children, and this terminological evolution reflects broader social changes in contemporary China. It is frequently observed that the Chinese language has greatly changed, perhaps more rapidly and profoundly than any other of the principal world languages

(Kratochvil, 1982:687). On some occasions, a new word is concomitant with new life situations; that is, a word is innovated in order to represent the emergence of new things, persons or actions in reality (ibid.). For instance, when migrant children firstly became visible to legal urban residents in the early 1990s, they were addressed by news workers as ‘little blind floaters’ (31. 08.1990/SW). This new phrase was created in reference to an emergent social group. On other occasions, a new word or phrase is introduced to replace the old one, although both items are referring to the same thing (Kratochvil, 1982:688). This type of linguistic change is often made to affect attitudes, beliefs, and thoughts (Ji, 2004:3). As shown in the subsequent analysis, the phrase ‘little blind floaters’ was soon eradicated, due to its offensive connotations, and was supplanted by new lexical terms, such as ‘sons and daughters of peasant workers’ or ‘floating children’. An analysis of the terminological development in

relation to migrant children may throw much light on China’s media transformation, ideological reorientation, migratory trends and policy readjustment.

This section tries to spell out the currency and obsolescence of a migrant child terminology in the media sphere, the meanings ascribed to the phrase, the ideological function it serves, and the social origin from which it stemmed. The notion ‘internal migrant children’ may sound innocuous in English, but in Chinese, there are a number of different terms, each containing rich meanings within a specific sociocultural context. Therefore, literal translation from Chinese into English has been undertaken in the process of analysis, and the meaning of the original terms is unpacked in association with China’s particular cultural politics. In order to unveil the underlying ideology, the research traces the origins and evolution of a lexical option, that is, from where and whom a term came, and whether it has been replaced by a new phrase. As new phrases are constantly innovated in reference to migrant children, a nuanced perspective is adopted to examine what has been transformed and what remains unchanged. In summary, the terminological analysis does not simply collect a cluster of lexical items in reference to migrant children but, more importantly, it reveals the ideological ideas underlying a language option, that is, the politics of naming.

3.1.1 ‘Blind’ and ‘black’ children

Back in 1990, the press used two particular terms to define internal migrant children: ‘little blind floaters’ (xiao mangliu 小盲流) and ‘black children’ (hei haizi 黑孩子). These are perhaps the earliest notions of migrant children in the mass media since 1978 when the

Party-state initiated ‘Reform and Opening up’. Since that time, Guangdong, the southernmost province and the leading pioneer of the nation’s economic reforms, has hosted the largest number of internal migrants. The Guangdong-based newspaper Southern Weekly recorded the

very first encounter between migrant children and local urbanites in the early 1990s. 7

Apparently, this initial encounter was not pleasant: it generated blatantly prejudicial discourse in the news, as indicated by the terminology ‘black children’ and ‘little blind floaters’. Neither

‘black’ nor ‘blind’ refers to migrant children’s biological or physical characteristics; rather, they are analogies to stigmatise and criminalise such children and their inflow into the cities.

More specifically, ‘little blind floaters’ was derived from another term, ‘blind floaters’ (mangliu

盲流), which had been widely used in China’s political and public discourse in reference to rural migrants. As highlighted by Michael Robert Dutton (1999:70), the character liu means ‘to float’ and, in combination with another character mang which means blindness, forms a pejorative compound word mangliu. This stemmed from the political statement in 1952, when the State

Council stipulated that local governments must ‘prohibit peasants from blindly floating into the cities’ (Chen, 2004:48). Under the planned economy, urban governors were concerned that the inflow of peasants would increase the unemployment rate in the cities and affect the state’s suppression of agricultural prices (Yang and Cai, 1999:12). Therefore, internal migrants were officially defined as aimless wanderers and potential criminals, rather than as active participants or self-motivated job-seekers in the economy. In the post-reform era, the authorities lost absolute control over population movement due to the spread of capitalism, but they have unceasingly backed their priority of maintaining order in the cities. Both little and adult ‘blind floaters’ have been the target group of China’s custody and repatriation regulation, and they have constantly been taken into custody and forced to return to their place of origin

(Winter, 2012:64). In summary, the word ‘blind floater’ for internal migrants is a legacy of the state’s planned economy, but it continued to be employed by policy makers and news workers throughout the 1980s and the 1990s in the post-reform era (Wang, 2007:89-90). Such words as

‘blind floater’ and ‘little blind floater’ were officially abandoned in 2003 when the custody and

7 China’s inland cities, such as Beijing, did not experience an influx of migrant children until the mid-1990s (Woronov, 2004:295). This probably explains why the Beijing-based People’s Daily reported nothing on migrant children in 1990.

repatriation regulation was abolished.

Another term, ‘black children’, refers to those who failed to be officially registered because their birth breached the one-child policy. In Southern Weekly’s reports, the violation of the one-child policy is firmly bound up with the floating population, even though the presupposition seems debatable. As argued by a journalist in the following news report:

The floating population is growing in some areas, and more and more families have left their

home town in search of employment. Some have been away for four or five years, and some

for eight or nine years. They never return to the place of origin, and no one knows where

their household registration (hukou) is. Many are on the run in order to have more babies.

Being scared of the penalties for the breach of the one-child policy, the parents opt not to

without a name in the state’s census forms.

– “To counter the ‘guerrilla’ operations of black children”, 30 March 1990, Southern Weekly

(30.03.1990/SW)

Both ‘little blind floaters’ and ‘black children’ emphasise the illegitimacy of migrant children’s status in host cities, and both terms originated from the political discourse, indicating an overwhelming influence of the Party-state on setting the media agenda. In the following sample years, these prejudicial lexical items were no longer used and were replaced by more nuanced words. Nevertheless, as will be seen in the subsequent analysis, the meaning

‘floating’ (liu 流) has been carried over by some new terms in reference to migrant children.

Indeed, ‘these people of liu stand for all that is foreign to majority society. They are the rootless characters of the everyday who form the opposite of the respectable and sedentary citizens of the city. These are the footloose forces that China most fears’ (Dutton, 1999:70).

3.1.2 ‘Sons and daughters of peasant workers’

Since 1995, a new expression, ‘sons and daughters of outsiders’ (wailai renkou zinü 外来人口

子女), has been adopted by both People’s Daily and Southern Weekly in their reports on migrant children. Variations of the term include ‘children of outsiders’ (waidi haizi 外地孩子);

‘students of outsiders’ (waidi xuesheng 外地学生); and ‘sons and daughters of (outside) labourers’ (wailaigong zinü 外来工子女 or dagong zidi 打工子弟). All these phrases are derived from the colloquial expressions of local urbanites (Wang, 2007:91). Although they are not authoritative expressions proposed by officials or scholars, they have been adopted by journalists and editors, and disseminated through the media as terms for defining public knowledge and opinion. Having fed on urbanite-dominant public discourse, the media in turn act as legitimation for prejudicial public opinions. The terms, revolving around the word

‘outsider’, commonly emphasise the ‘otherness’ of migrant children and their identity of

‘not-belonging’. Various news reports have attempted to establish the symbolic boundary between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, that is, local citizens and incoming migrants.

To date, the most widely used terminology in reference to migrant children as a group is probably ‘sons and daughters of peasant workers’ (nongmingong zinü 农民工子女). It was first proposed in 1984 by a professor of social science in a journal paper, and was then spread through government statements and media reports (Wang, 2007:90). The sampled news texts show that both People’s Daily and Southern Weekly began to use the expression in 2003. The word implies that migrant children’s existence in the cities is merely justified by their parents’ employment status, that is, the migrant workers who are needed for urban economic development. As a report reads, ‘Given the continuous growth in the number of peasant workers in the cities, issues in relation to their sons and daughters’ education (in host cities) have become worse.’ (6.11.2003/SW) Instead of being recognised as children in their own right, they are defined as descendants of adult migrant workers. That is, in the first place, their child-being is denied. Moreover, the identity of migrant children’s parents, ‘peasant worker’, seems problematic and dubious. As argued by a scholar of Chinese politics, Xiong Guangqing

(2011: 110-111), the word ‘peasant worker’ is ambivalent and contradictory: it fails to clarify whether the people thus signified are workers or peasants. Normally, professional titles are straightforward and self-explanatory, for instance, the title ‘peasant’ for those working on

farmland, and that of ‘worker’ for those in factories. China’s migrant workers play various professional roles in host cities, but they are not addressed according to their specific occupations (Wang, 2007:92-93).

In fact, peasants (nongmin 农民) and workers (gongren 工人) are two different social classes in China’s society. Peasant workers (nongmin gong 农民工) represent a particular social stratum in between: they live and work in the cities but are officially recognised as peasants in the household registration (hukou) system (Han et al., 2011:206). As explained in Chapter 1, the hukou system classifies an individual as either a rural or urban resident. In the pre-reform era, it had resulted in a two-tiered class system consisting of workers (non-agricultural urban residents) and peasants (agricultural rural residents). Workers often held permanent and inheritable positions in factories, enjoying a highly privileged class status that was out of the reach of Chinese peasantry (Donald and Evans, 2011). In post-reform China, rural migrant workers and their children are living in the cities together with legal urban citizens, but the institutional hukou system and related social welfare schemes have perpetuated apparent social-class distinctions between the migrant and non-migrant social groups (Han et al.,

2011:206). Legal urban residents continue to receive fundamental welfare privileges in housing, health care, education and the pension which are largely unavailable to peasant workers and their migrant children.

This institutionalised exclusion and discrimination have constrained the social mobility of migrants. After the initial upward move from the rural to the urban labour force, most peasant workers are unable to move up to higher positions in urban industries, even when changing jobs (ibid.). Peasant workers are not eligible for high-level positions within the government in the host cities unless they have permanent urban registration status. Their children, namely,

‘sons and daughters of peasant workers’, are often denied access to public schools in urban areas (this issue is further analysed in the discussion of news subjects). In summary, the word

‘peasant’ in the Chinese context does not necessarily describe an individual’s occupation, but indicates a particular, disadvantaged social status and an outdated social stratification system.

Having been tagged as ‘sons and daughters of peasant workers’, migrant children are exposed 43

to routine discrimination and institutional exclusion.

3.1.3 ‘Floating children’

In addition to ‘sons and daughters of peasant workers’, another commonly used phrase for describing migrant children in the new millennium is ‘floating children’ (liudong ertong 流动儿

童). This concept stems from the political discourse. The state’s official documents define

‘floating children’ as a social group aged between 0 and 18, who have left their place of origin for more than six months and have not updated their official residency (hukou) status (Duan et al., 2013:45; All-China Women’s Federation, 2013). The term ‘floating children’ is probably a concept exclusive to China’s sociopolitical context. In other countries or territories, the concept

‘migrant’ is based on spatial and temporal factors: a migrant is defined as an individual who has moved from one place to another, and who has stayed in the host country or area for a considerably long period of time. However, an additional and crucial factor underlies the definition of China’s internal migrants: the hukou status (Xiong, 2012:49). In practice, an overwhelming majority of internal migrants have failed to update their hukou status due to the deliberate hindrances set by local governors, and are thus labelled as ‘a floating population’.

Meanwhile, a small number of migrants have managed to update their household registration, and are thus treated as locals and insiders in political and media accounts (Duan et al.,

2013:45). As with the phrase ‘sons and daughters of peasant workers’, the terminology ‘floating children’ denotes the crucial role of hukou status in defining migrant children as a group.

The lexical term ‘floating children’, which was created and spread in the new millennium, is to some degree reminiscent of an old phrase, ‘little blind floater’, that was employed in the early

1990s because the meaning of ‘floating’ has been carried over. The word ‘floating’ or ‘to float’

(liudong 流动) is politically charged; that is, the meaning ascribed to the word and the ways to use it have been determined by the Party-government. This usage can be traced back to the early 1950s in the Party-state policy documents, and it gradually became an established formulation in political discourse and media reports when referring to individual-based internal migration (Wang, 2007:89). As shown in the analysis of earlier terminology in this chapter,

China’s internal migrants used to be labelled as ‘blind floaters’ in official documents, and to

‘conquer the phenomenon of peasants blindly floating into cities’ had been a primary task for governments at various levels from the 1950s to the 1990s (ibid.; Labour Bureau of the

Guangdong Province, 1990). Such lexical terms as ‘blind floater’ or ‘blindly floating’ in reference to migrants were innovated by the propaganda apparatus, and were then injected into media discourse and daily conversation. It was part of the Party’s attempts to manipulate language in order to affect public attitudes and beliefs on migration issues. This kind of linguistic manipulation was pervasive in the pre-reform era, particularly in the course of the

1966–1976 Cultural Revolution (Ji, 2004:3).

The Party’s control of language has been diminished alongside China’s ‘Reform and Opening up’, but a myriad of politically charged words remain relevant in today’s China (Schoenhals, 1994:1).

The word ‘floating’ has become a terminological convention, or an established formulation, to describe internal migrants and their journey. Nowadays, the usage of ‘blind’ or ‘blindly’ (mang) is almost eradicated in political and media accounts, as it is believed to underpin offensive attitudes against migrants. However, the word ‘floating’ (liudong) is preserved connoting

‘itinerant, unstable, shiftless and even dangerous’ in Chinese cultural politics (Loyalka, 2012:94).

The term ‘floating population’ that is used to describe internal migrants constructs a collective image of rootless and aimless wanderers, who pose a huge threat to the state’s established sociopolitical order (Solinger, 1999:1). The migration regulations and social welfare policies exclude migrants from accessing a host of city services, and ensure that they are forever seen as outsiders who temporarily float amid the true, legal urbanites. Migrant children, as well as migrants in general, embody the word ‘floating’ to the fullest: they are moving from place to place, school to school, with no tendency (or possibility) to settle down. The term ‘floating children’ is not a description of China’s young mobile people, but a signifier of inferior social status which can give rise to feelings of empathy, unease or hostility among the audience.

3.1.4 ‘New urban residents’: from outsiders to citizens?

In 2008, two new terms for migrant children arose in press reports: ‘new urban residents’ (xin

shimin 新市民) and ‘children of immigrant families’ (suiqian zinü 随迁子女). Both phrases originated from the political discourse, as did many other terms used in the past. Since 2004, a few local government departments have introduced the notion ‘new urban residents’ to describe migrant workers and their children, and have suggested eradicating such terms as

‘peasant workers’, ‘floating population’ and ‘outsiders’ (All-China Women’s Federation, 2013).

The new terminology conveys an official recognition of migrants as new members of the citizenry in host cities, as the governors have vowed to eradicate inequitable and discriminatory policies against migrants (ibid.). ‘Being recognised as new citizens instead of outsiders, migrants are now taking part in the city management as well as in its construction’, claimed journalists of

People’s Daily in a report (23.12.2012/PD). Various terms with a high degree of inclusiveness have emerged in the political discourse and media reports, such as ‘new Dongguan residents’,

‘new Guangzhou residents’ and ‘new Shenzhen residents’ for migrants in different host cities

(see, e.g., Chen, Wu, Wei and Gong, 2014). In 2008, the Beijing Municipal Government suggested adoption of the term ‘children of immigrant families’ when referring to migrant children. In comparison to ‘floating children’ or ‘children of outsiders’, these new terms demonstrate a higher degree of inclusiveness and openness. They no longer prevent migrants from permanently settling down in host cities – at least in the discourse.

It should be noted that only a tiny fraction of the 35 million migrant children are granted the title ‘new urban residents’, as this depends on the points obtained by their parents. Many urban governors have promised to grant local hukou status to migrant children, on the condition that their parents accumulate sufficient points through obeying the law, being hard working, and undertaking tertiary education and/or home purchase. Once they are provided with local household registration, migrants will be officially converted to legal residents in host cities, and will receive equal entitlements and social services as local urbanites. That is to say, in the new millennium, the hukou system underlying the definition of migrants has not been removed, but has opened up new spaces for a few outsiders to turn into privileged local urbanites.

The emergence of ‘new urban residents’ mirrors the stratification among China’s hundreds of millions of internal migrants. It is true that most migrant workers are employed as low-paid, low-skilled casual workers in the construction, manufacturing and service sectors; and their circumstances are comparable to those of temporary, unskilled or illegal immigrant workers in the United States (USA), Europe or Australia (Jacka et al., 2013:75). However, the migrant population also includes some well-paid skilled workers, successful entrepreneurs and white-collar professionals who tend to enjoy better living conditions and higher social status. In today’s China, the greatest inequalities are between poor urbanites, low-skilled migrant labourers, and impoverished peasants, on the one hand, and, on the other, wealthy urbanites, affluent villagers in the most developed south-east areas and successful migrant workers (Jacka et al., 2013:79). The group comprising migrant children is becoming increasingly stratified. As stated by a veteran journalist:

The advantaged migrant children, whose parents are wealthy, well-educated and resourceful,

are able to attend public schools together with local peers; but children of low-paid,

poorly-resourced migrant labourers continue to be deprived of access to educational

resources and other fundamental living chances. (Informant 1, personal communication, 17

February 2014)

This stratification of migrant children perhaps explains why the earlier terms, such as ‘sons

and daughters of peasant workers’, and ‘children of (outside) labourers’, continue to feature

in today’s press reports. Although the emerging terms, such as ‘new urban residents’, sound

far more inclusive and unbiased, they are only granted to upper-class migrant children.

3.1.5 Summary

The terminology that applies to migrant children is a category full of contestation and change.

Back in the early 1990s, migrant children were described by journalists and editors as illegal transients and dangerous wanderers, that is, ‘black children’ and ‘little blind floaters’. This negative discursive pattern against child migrants emerged in a broader social context where

heavy-handed regulations were put in place to control population movement and maintain the urban-rural division. That is, there is a dialectical relationship between text and context: media discourse is shaping, and is shaped by, other facets of the social (Fairclough, 1995:34). The blatantly prejudicial terms were soon abandoned by media professionals, while urbanisation and labour migration have notably contributed to the nation’s economic development. The inflow of migrant children seems irreversible, as migrant workers have been staying longer in host cities and, since the mid-1990s, started to bring along their children (Duan et al., 2008:39).

As indicated in the terms ‘sons and daughters of peasant workers’ and ‘children of (outside) labourers’, migrant children are largely regarded as a by-product of labour migration while

China is undergoing rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. When it comes to the new millennium, migrant children are addressed with new terms such as ‘floating children’ and

‘new urban residents’. This occurs within a wider context in which a labour shortage is looming in many migrant-hosting cities and urban governors are providing migrants with more social security. In summary, the terminology used by the media to express the identity of migrant children is not permanent but is historically contingent. The changing terminology in media discourse manifests the wider changes in society and culture. In other words, symbolic boundaries between migrant children and dominant local citizens have been drawn and re-drawn from time to time with this influenced by the broader political, economic and cultural context.

Despite the subtle shifts of the terminology referring to migrant children, what remains unchanged is that it is barely shaped by migrants themselves. The various terms that refer to migrant children in media discourse have their origins in political documents, academic publications, and public discourse dominated by local urbanites. In turn, the mass media have disseminated these terms and transformed them into public knowledge. None of the phrases are created by migrants themselves. That is to say, each term is a label attached to migrant children by local citizens and governors of the migrant-hosting cities. Migrant children as well as the general migrant group are granted little power to define themselves in the mass media.

China’s internal migrant children have been rendered specific and are differentiated along the 48

lines of hukou, a sociopolitical system for the purpose of population control and management.

In the Chinese context, the definition of migrant is not simply relying on an individual’s translocal transition, but on the person’s official household registration status. An overwhelming majority of internal migrants have failed to update their hukou status due to the deliberate hindrances set by local governments, and they are thus defined as ‘a floating population’ or ‘outsiders’. However, the resourceful upper-class migrants who are able to obtain a hukou in host cities are regarded as locals and insiders in political and media discourse.

This means that the official household registration status issued by the authorities has become a prop to veil a new class-based social stratification in the management of migrants. In other words, the political power of governments dominates the evaluation and examination of migrant children in media discourse through class discourse. Various terms, with a common underlying ideology around the hukou system, have contributed to producing (or reproducing) unequal power relations between different classes and social groups. The media description of migrant children serves as a means to legitimate an unequal power relationship between migrants and locals, the disadvantaged and the privileged social groups.

Despite the remarkable differences in report genre and political leaning between People’s Daily and Southern Weekly, the two papers have adopted many new terms during the same time period when referring to migrant children (see Table 3.1). This is perhaps because most lexical items stemmed from political discourse, academic writings and urbanite-dominant public discourse; the mass media have been relying on various sources of information to set their own agenda. Nevertheless, it is evident that Southern Weekly has covered a wider range of migrant child groups, such as vagrant children, displaced orphans and the relocated children of incarcerated parents. In addition, the paper has mentioned 59 individual migrant children’s names in 23 reports, accounting for almost a third of the overall texts. By contrast, no more than 5% of the reports in People’s Daily have mentioned a migrant child’s name. Overall, migrant children tend to appear in the press as a homogenous group, rather than as identifiable individuals. In addition, their differences in ethnicity, class, age, gender, and language, have been overwhelmingly overlooked in media discourse.

Table 3.1 New terms employed by the press to refer to migrant children8

Year New term The press

Little blind floaters (xiao mangliu) 1990 Southern Weekly Black children (hei haizi)

Children/Students of outsiders (waidi haizi, waidi xuesheng) Southern Weekly 1995 Sons and daughters of (outside) labourers (wailaigong zinü, dagong zidi) and People’s Daily

Floating children (liudong ertong) Southern Weekly 2003 Sons and daughters of the floating population (liudong renkou zinü) and People’s Daily Sons and daughters of peasant workers (nongmingong zinü)

Southern Weekly New urban residents (xin shimin) 2008 and People’s Daily Children of immigrant families (suiqian zinü) People’s Daily 2012 – –

3.2 Subjects

The terminological analysis in the previous section explains the lexical items chosen by media professionals to name migrant children as a group. In order to develop a thorough understanding of media discourse, it is necessary to consider the overall subject(s) of a text, that is, what events or issues are discussed in relation to migrant children. A subject is a single concept, such as ‘crime’, which stands for a major sociopolitical domain, or a complex issue that induces an infinite number of specific reports (van Dijk, 1991:78). An analysis of the subjects is able to capture the major themes of the media discussion about migrant children, and identify the sociopolitical domains in which the group is placed and evaluated. According to the classic media agenda setting theory, the media have their own agenda to pursue in selecting news and creating particular kinds of emphases (Balnaves, Donald and Shoesmith,

8 The tables inserted in this thesis have included the most important and most frequent categories in the data, but they do not cover all the codes that were used in the process of data collection and analysis. In other words, each table presents a selective list (rather than an exhaustive one) which covers the most salient coding categories.

2009:65).Some topics draw relatively intense media attention and are emphasised in reports, whereas other topics are downplayed or overlooked in the process of news selection. That is to say, the newsworthiness of a subject reflects the underlying ideology of the media sphere in general and the media outlet in particular. The analysis tries to answer the question: ‘what does the Press write, or not write, about migrant children – and why? ’. It then proceeds to answer the question: ‘how does the press write about this issue – and why? ’.

3.2.1 Educational plight of migrant children

The frequencies and percentages for each subject9, as presented in Table 3.2, show the prominence of government responsibility and education, in both the Party-led People’s Daily and the liberal Southern Weekly. The two newspapers demonstrate little difference in evaluating and selecting the most important topics related to migrant children. Both have been paying consistent attention to the education of migrant children from 1995 onwards, suggesting that educational issues pose a significant challenge to the group. More specifically, educational discussion in the press is narrowly focused on the enrolment of migrant children in schools, and little attention is paid to any other educational topics, such as curriculum setting or child performance and development.

The two most prevalent subjects, education and government responsibility, often go hand-in-hand in the press reports, indicating the government’s crucial role in migrant children’s educational issues. In other words, internal migrant children are overwhelmingly discussed in the educational domain that is overwhelmingly influenced by government input and policies. In addition, the discussion of migrant children’s education and the government’s role in that field is often combined with certain other subjects, such as labour migration, equity and justice, and household registration (hukou). A common discursive pattern in both newspapers is as follows: in a news report, the author often addresses the difficulties faced by migrant children in accessing schools, due to their hukou status, then argues for equal citizens’ rights for migrant

9 Each report has been coded with one to six subjects, as mentioned in the methodology chapter.

students and their local peers, and marks the government’s role in creating (or solving) the problems. As the following excerpts read:

When will sons and daughters of peasant workers be granted equal opportunities as their

urban peers for the nine-year compulsory education? The government of Guiyang city is

taking measures to relax the enrolment criteria of public schools and improve the conditions

of private schools. The goal is to ensure that tens of thousands of migrant children in

Guiyang will equally receive the compulsory education in the next 5 years.

– ‘Sons and daughters of peasant workers in Guiyang will equally receive the compulsory

education’, 13 November 2003, People’s Daily (13.11. 2003/PD)

The State Council decided in late 2005 to eliminate the tuition fees for the nine-year

compulsory education in rural China ... and similar regulations were introduced to the cities

by the Education Ministry in 2007 … However, there are doubts about such policies given the

existence of a special group of students, that is, numerous sons and daughters of peasant

workers. … Will they be included in the fee-waiving policies? This is undoubtedly a crucial

question.

– ‘The top ten concerns of the Chinese people in 2008’, 2 January 2008, Southern Weekly

(02.01. 2008/SW)

The educational plight of migrant children is mainly caused by China’s household registration

(hukou) system and other institutional social structures. As discussed earlier in the terminological analysis, migrant children have typically inherited a peasantry hukou status from their parents; that is, they are officially deemed to be peasants although they are living in the cities. Urban governors provide funds only for locally registered students in public schools, and migrant students have to attend inexpensive, poorly-resourced, and unlicensed private schools.

This institutional exclusion is seen as a conscious strategy by local authorities to increase migration costs and preserve social order in the cities (Goodburn, 2009:502). However, the nation’s Compulsory Education Law, together with the Law on the Protection of Minors and a

few other regulations, stipulate explicitly that each and every child must attend school for at least nine years, which should be funded by governments (Cheng, 2010:4). Legally speaking, every child is entitled to equitable education; but in reality, most migrant children, due to their disadvantaged hukou status, have been deprived of these fundamental educational rights

(ibid.). This contradiction has drawn notable attention from the mass media throughout the last few decades.

The analysis in this section shows that several most prominent subjects, including education, government responsibility, labour migration, equity and hukou, are often combined in the press reports. The press is very much concerned about the schooling of migrant children; that is to say, these children are mainly observed and evaluated within the framework of government-backed nine-year compulsory education. They are often regarded as a by-product of the rural–to–urban labour migration in the process of China’s urbanisation and industrialisation. They have been caught up in a biased sociopolitical structure which features the household registration of the urban-rural divide and unequal provision of social services. In other words, China’s sociopolitical system has, in the first place, rendered migrant children a disadvantaged and marginalised group.

3.2.2 Crime and discrimination: stereotyping strategies

The theme of crime has cut across the whole period of 1990–2012, accounting for around 10% and 32% of the reports from People’s Daily and Southern Weekly, respectively. In the press accounts, migrant children are accused of violating the nation’s one-child policy (by their very existence), stealing and robbery, and of posing some kind of unspoken threat to others. Among

Southern Weekly’s 23 reports on crime, 20 are about illegal activities for which migrant children or their parents are blamed (mostly street children), and only four write about criminal behaviour against such children.10 That is to say, crimes by migrant children and the related adult migrants have gained far more press coverage than have criminal offences against them.

10 There is one case in which a few migrant teenagers attacked another migrant child (30.10. 2003/SW).

More importantly, the four cases in which migrant children were victims have been confirmed by the accounts of the police, the court or lawyers, whereas quite a few reports simply presume migrant children and their parents to be (potential) criminals, without citing any evidence to support the argument. As stated in the following paragraphs:

These blind floaters (peasant workers) wander around in the streets and rely on rag-picking

for livelihood. While collecting material for salvage, do some of them also lead away a goat

in passing, steal chickens and puppies,11 possess and sell stolen goods, or do the grubby

business of prostitution and gambling? Well, it is difficult to tell.

– ‘Villages inside the city’, 31 August 1990, Southern Weekly (31.08. 1990/SW)

… If peasant workers continue to be denied access to public housing, and their children’s

educational plight is rarely addressed, then they will unavoidably turn to the mafia. Even if

there is no mafia in a local society right now, it will come into being (sometime in future).

– ‘Public housing and the mafia’, 23 January 2008, Southern Weekly (23.01. 2008/SW)

It is not uncommon for the press to associate internal migrants with criminality. As shown in the excerpts above, such prejudicial discourse is based on the author’s own presupposition, with no sourced or verified information. In some other cases, the reports include authoritative sources of information and appear neutral, but the information has been sieved and manipulated to support a biased opinion, as demonstrated by the following:

Deputy Director of the Police Bureau of Shijiazhuang city, Guo Xinnian, released information

in a recent interview that more than 7000 criminal suspects have been identified as incoming

migrants between 1987 and 1994. Migrants thus account for around 40% of the criminals

caught in the city.

11 ‘Lead away a goat in passing’ (shunshouqianyang 顺手牵羊) and ‘steal chickens and puppies’ (toujimogou 偷鸡摸狗) are Chinese euphemisms to describe the theft of inexpensive items.

– ‘Effective measures taken in Shijiazhuang to regulate temporary residents, set on the track

of legalisation, standardisation, and service-orientation’. 18 December 1995, People’s Daily

(18.12.1995/PD)

The breach of the one-child policy represents a very common phenomenon among labourers.

Some of them migrated simply for the purpose of having more babies. The author (a

gynaecologist) has surveyed the baby delivery in her hospital, and found that 42% of the

mothers who violated the one-child policy are non-locals.

– ‘The concerns of pregnant migrant workers’, 17 March 1995, Southern Weekly (17.

03.1995/SW)

Another typical stereotyping strategy is vagueness or ambiguity which is found in the press coverage of discrimination. As an institutionally marginalised group, migrant children, together with adult migrant workers, are often portrayed as victims of discrimination and exclusion.

However, news reports tend to mitigate the confrontation by leaving out the agents responsible and overlooking the specific forms of discrimination. The 13 reports on discrimination from People’s Daily scarcely specify the agents responsible for the discrimination.

For instance, ‘many (peasant workers) have often received a contemptuous look, been mocked or treated unfairly in public occasions’(17. 11.2003/PD); ‘a great number of urban schools have set out discriminatory rules against sons and daughters of peasant workers’ (08.09.2008/PD); and ‘some people even discriminate against peasant workers, seeing them as second-class citizens’ (29.09.2003/PD). The use of general and vague terms may have a special ideological function: the agents responsible, including local urbanites, governors and organisations, have been concealed (van Dijk, 1991:50).

That said, Southern Weekly is much more outspoken in this respect: it often identifies the particular institutions or social groups who are responsible for the discrimination against migrant children, and describes the confrontational situations in vivid detail. One report tells in the first person a young migrant’s anecdote about discrimination:

My initial impression about local Beijing people is that they disrespect newcomers. Once I

was on a bus and I bought a ticket, but I lost it when the bus conductor would like to check it.

He suspected that I was a free rider, and refused to listen to my explanation. A few locals in

the bus were mumbling: ‘Beijing has been messed up exactly by these floating people’

‘Peasants are all flooding into Beijing, rather than staying in their own villages’. I was upset

by the contemptuous look in their eyes. Anyway, I bought a new ticket.

– ‘Wang Baoqiang: How much tax do I need to pay to become a Beijing resident? ’, 13

November 2008, Southern Weekly (13.11.2008/SW)

3.2.3 Human quality: a new dimension of difference

Although human quality (suzhi) is an insignificant topic in both newspapers, it represents a keyword in China’s state project, and has a marked impact on the discursive construction of migration and migrants (Yan, 2008:119). Therefore, the thesis has selected this topic to explore the particularities of the suzhi discourse when it is deployed to describe migrant children. It finds that internal migrant children are often constructed in the press reports as signifiers of shameful, problematic human quality. This shows that news reports not only convey the meaning of human quality, and distinguish high from low quality, but also assign individuals and groups to different positions in the classificatory system. As one text reads,

Ma Yangyang’s behaviour was humiliating when he firstly came to Hangzhou city from rural

Jiangsu. He was unfamiliar with the traffic rules; he was unaware of taking his shoes off

when visiting someone’s house… Indeed, the disparities in living conditions and the gaps in

cultural quality (between urban and rural population) can often lead to friction and conflict.

– ‘Harmony: Zhejiang residents building together and rejoicing together’, 7 November 2012,

People’s Daily (07.11.2012/PD)

The suzhi discourse arose from the state propaganda campaigns, and has become a common, everyday term in contemporary China due to myriad media dissemination practices (Woronov,

2004:294; Anagnost, 2004:200). In the 1980s, massive propaganda efforts were undertaken to promote the one-child policy, which advocated to improving the quality of the Chinese population by limiting its quantity (Anagnost, 2004:190; Kipnis, 2007:388). Suzhi-oriented education was initiated by the government to replace traditional exam-oriented education, as part of the attempts to enhance Chinese people’s general ability and produce well-rounded and responsible citizens (Kipnis, 2006:298). The meaning of suzhi and the ways to use the word dramatically shifted as a result of the state campaigns. Instead of denoting the natural quality or inborn attributes of an entity (which were more important usages prior to the campaigns), it now refers almost exclusively to the individually embodied, human quality which can be cultivated through education and training (Kipnis, 2006:297). In popular usage, an individual’s suzhi includes educational level, moral behaviour, professional skills and social etiquette (Wallis,

2013:345). Suzhi is not something that is naturally inherent in the individual body but is rather the value, the human capital, built into the body (Anagnost, 2004:192).

The suzhi discourse works ideologically to justify all sorts of social and political hierarchies: those of ‘high’ quality, such as middle-class urban citizens, are seen as deserving more income, power and status than those of ‘low’ quality, such as rural migrant children (Kipnis, 2006:295).

In other words, the suzhi narrative functions as a regime of representation through which individuals recognise their special positions within the larger social order. Some individuals are regarded as having more value than others and therefore are more deserving of the rights of citizenship. For those unsuccessful or marginalised individuals in China’s market economy, including rural migrant children and the general rural migrants, their failure or disadvantage is often explained in official discourse with reference to their low suzhi (Kipnis, 2007:389). The coding of the body of a migrant as being of low quality justifies labour exploitation and legitimates social structural discrimination against migrants (ibid.). In the first place, migrant children and general migrants are facing routine discrimination and exclusion within China’s hukou system and social welfare schemes, but their disadvantaged social status is justified, or de-politicised, by the suzhi discourse, which attempts to reinforce the view that migrants are signifiers of low, problematic quality. Migrants and non-migrants, who have been initially

divided into two different social classes based on their household registration, are further separated along the dimension of human quality.

Furthermore, different news reports have highlighted migrant children’s ‘low’ quality and have worked together to reinforce the image, with only a few challenging the prevalent stereotype.

A couple of reports from Southern Weekly have, to some extent, challenged the consensual ideology of stigmatising migrant-embodied value. One text, with quotes from a Chinese scholar of migration and poverty studies, argues that ‘peasant workers are of quality. Most of them didn’t receive decent education, but this does not mean that their quality is inferior to others’

(07.11.2003/SW). Another report reflects on the stigmatisation of migrants: ‘In many cities, peasant workers have been labelled as being dirty, spitting in the public, stealing, impolite and uncivilized. Such stigmatisation seems natural and legitimate.’ (26.06.2003/SW) However, positive description of migrant human quality is rare in the media accounts, and it does not necessarily replace the dominant negative discourses.

3.2.4 Summary

The study finds that the Chinese mainstream press mainly discusses migrant children in the domain of schooling, and often emphasises government roles in that field. Previous China media research shows that migrant children are often associated with educational topics in a few regional newspapers, and government policy and investment are often highlighted in such reports (Luo, 2011). These topics are also prioritised in China’s most influential nationwide newspapers, People’s Daily and Southern Weekly. Chinese newspapers have without exception selected the themes of education and government responsibility when reporting on migrant children. This is probably because government-led policies and institutional social structures have overwhelmingly affected the group’s life chances and entitlements. China’s urban-rural divide hukou system and social welfare schemes have resulted in routine discrimination against migrant children, denying them access public schools and social resources in host cities. In other words, migrant children have been rendered specific and have been differentiated from local citizens by the state’s sociopolitical systems. Within this context, different news reports

have commonly highlighted government responsibility in migrant children’s educational issues.

After all, media discourse is shaped by the broader sociopolitical context (Fairclough, 1995:34).

With regard to the question ‘how do the media write about the issues of migrant children’, a few stereotyping strategies have been found in the reports. Firstly, the press pays much more attention to illegal activities performed by migrant children than to criminal behaviour against them. Arbitrary links are often drawn between criminality and internal migrants, based on the author’s presupposition without quoting any information source. In other cases, the sourced information has been interpreted out of context to support a biased viewpoint. Secondly, the press accounts tend to mitigate the discrimination and prejudice facing migrant children. In the discourse, the agents responsible for the discriminatory behaviour and attitudes are often left out or mentioned in general vague terms. Thirdly, news reports often employ the suzhi discourse to justify migrant children’s disadvantaged positions in China’s sociopolitical order.

Different texts try to establish and reinforce migrant children as having low-quality bodies, believing them to have less value than their local peers and, therefore, to be less deserving of the rights of citizenship. Overall, media discourse has reinforced – either intentionally or unintentionally – the routine discrimination and prevalent prejudice against migrant children in society. In this respect, media text is shaping the broader sociopolitical context through conveying particular meanings and knowledge (Fairclough, 1995:34; Tuchman, 1978:190).

The two sampled newspapers share much commensurality in terms of prioritising educational topics and stigmatising migrant children, although Southern Weekly occasionally reflects on the ideological presuppositions and slightly challenges the stereotypes. It is also relevant to assess which subjects in relation to migrant children are barely, or not at all, covered in the press. The study finds that child-specific topics, such as physical development, mental health, and children’s dreams and expectations are rarely seen as newsworthy according to the media agenda (see Table 3.2). In addition, the media discussion of child migration is rarely combined with that of ethnic minorities. That is, ethnic issues and migrant children are often discussed in separate sociopolitical domains, and the press usually overlooks the diverse ethnic backgrounds of migrant children. Although a significant number of ethnic minority children 59

participate in population movement (Wang, 2008:45), the press tends to regard internal migrant children as a homogeneous group with little ethnic differences.

Table 3.2 Frequencies of news subjects in press reports

People’s Daily (146 reports in total) Southern Weekly (71 reports in total) N % N % Government responsibility 128 87.7 45 63.40 Education 120 82.2 49 69.00 Equity and justice 71 48.6 22 31.00 Labour migration and urbanisation 48 32.9 23 32.40 Migrants’ rights and interests 45 30.8 16 22.5 Household registration 36 24.7 26 36.6 Social order 19 13.0 6 8.5 Migrant integration 18 12.3 3 4.2 Human quality 16 11.0 4 5.6 Crime 14 9.6 23 32.4 Discrimination 13 8.9 17 23.9 Charity and philanthropy 13 8.9 15 21.1 Accidental death 12 8.2 3 4.2 Children’s health care 12 8.2 7 9.9 Private migrant schools 11 7.5 17 23.9 Children’s separation from parents 11 7.5 7 9.9 One-child policy 11 7.5 6 8.5 Parental responsibilities 10 6.8 10 14.1 Children’s mental health 9 6.2 11 15.5

Income gap 9 6.2 1 2.8 Poverty 8 5.5 22 31.0 National exam for university entrance 7 4.8 5 7.0 Children's safety 6 4.1 11 15.5 Crafts, arts and science activities 6 4.1 14 19.7 Migrant children’s return to home town 5 3.4 10 14.1 Physical development 3 2.1 3 4.2 Puberty 1 0.7 3 4.2 Environmental protection 1 0.7 1 2.8 Ethnicity 1 0.7 3 4.2 Adoption – – 5 7.0 Communication and interaction with parents – – 2 2.8 Children’s dreams and aspirations – – 9 12.7 Adolescent romantic relationships – – 3 4.2 Media censorship – – 1 2.8

3.3 Voices and rhetoric

To this point, the terminology in reference to migrant children and the topics of press discussion have been explored. In these respects, the two sampled papers, People’s Daily and

Southern Weekly, have demonstrated a high degree of similarity. However, even if using the same terminology and addressing the same issue, different media outlets may provide different interpretations, and may construct different social identities and relations for migrant children (Fairclough, 1995:12). Therefore, the research next proceeds to explore the questions:

‘who are appearing in the reports and, more importantly, who are allowed to speak up?’ and

‘what rhetorical strategies are used to describe a person or group? ’. Through the analysis of voices and rhetoric, the study is able to reveal the remarkable differences between People’s

Daily and Southern Weekly, indicating the diversification of Chinese media content and competing voices from different social groups.

3.3.1 Those who appear and speak up in the news

Each news report was coded for a few news actors, including different social organisations and groups who appear in the text. A quick overview of the frequencies reveals who are presented as the most, and least, prominent actors in issues about migrant children. Government agencies are regarded as the most important type of news actor by both People’s Daily and

Southern Weekly (see Table 3.3). This is consistent with the analysis of news subjects which finds that government responsibility is the dominant theme in the press discussion of migrant children. However, disparities between the two papers are obvious: in Southern Weekly, migrant children’s parents appear as frequently as government authorities, but the parents are relegated to a much less important position in People’s Daily. Significant differences are also observed between the two papers with regard to the representation of migrant children’s peers and connections in the news. As shown in Table 3.3, migrant children’s classmates, friends, siblings and relatives are much more frequently mentioned in Southern Weekly than in

People’s Daily. The official Party-led newspaper People’s Daily often portrays migrant children as a general, homogeneous group, the members of which are not included in peer networks.

Their classmates or friends appear merely once in the total 146 sample reports. By contrast,

Southern Weekly locates migrant children in a more complex network which involves not only government and parents but also many other types of social actors. By integrating different types of social actors in the reports, the two papers have set up different identities and relationships for migrant children. In People’s Daily, these children are rendered passive, powerless and less important in an uneven power relationship with government and parents, but their roles are diversified and empowered when associated with such various social groups as friends, classmates and neighbours, as presented in Southern Weekly reports.

Moreover, the research examines which social groups – after having been mentioned in the news – are further presented as speakers to offer opinions and interpretations on migrant children’s issues, how often they are allowed to speak and how prominently, and on which subjects. In particular, the study accounts for quotations from migrant children themselves, namely, their own expressions and concerns mediated by the press. The insertion of quotations from different sources is an ideological process in news production: it indicates the editorial strategy of selection and summarisation as a huge amount of information reaches the newspaper every day (van Dijk, 1991:143). The analysis of quotations is thus useful to unveil the ideological ideas underlying the press reports.

Government agencies and officials are presented as the most prominent speakers in the coverage of migrant children in People’s Daily, accounting for more than half of the overall quotations in the reports (see Table 3.4). Government interpretations and evaluations of migrant children’s events are routinely embedded in the paper’s reports. Among the 146 sample reports published in the last three decades, 126 have included quotations from governments. Moreover, government agencies act as the only speaker in more than one-third of the texts; that is, they are represented as the exclusive source of information and interpretation on migrant children’s issues. Government agencies and spokesmen have their voice heard on a wide range of subjects, such as education, equity, labour migration, household registration, migrant integration, human quality, accidental death, health care, and charity and philanthropy, which cover almost every fundamental aspect of migrant children’s lives. Overall, 63

government authorities have premium ideological access to People’s Daily, and their interpretations and evaluations of migrant children’s issues are routinely embedded in the paper’s discourse. Non-government social groups, including schools, parents, social organisations, experts and commentators, have been relegated to much less prominent places in reports in People’s Daily. This leaves no doubt that the paper’s discourse on migrant children’s issues is overwhelmingly dominated by government voices.

In regard to migrant children’s own voices in People’s Daily, the research finds that only five reports, out of 146, have included a quotation from such children, and they never appear as the only speaker in the news texts but are combined with voices from schools, governments or parents. Topics that seem to invite somewhat more frequent quotations from migrant children are schooling and the national exam for university entrance. In other words, education is the domain where migrant children’s voices are comparatively more prominent. We may expect to hear children’s own expressions especially on such subjects as puberty, discrimination and exclusion, and art and craft activities which are highly relevant to their particular experiences.

However, texts on these topics have never integrated children’s own voices. That is to say, in

People’s Daily, migrant children’s voices are completely overlooked on issues that are directly relevant to them. It should be noted that this quotation pattern is not exclusive to migrant children, but is common in the paper’s coverage of children in general. Serving as the central

Party’s mouthpiece, People’s Daily always gives priority to the voices of political leaders and policy makers, and rarely allows children to speak even on such topics as Children’s Day or education quality (Zhang, 2005:32).

Compared to People’s Daily which is dominated by the voices of government, sources of quotations in Southern Weekly are more diversified and more evenly spread. A particular social group, comprising experts and researchers, are the prominent news actors and speakers in

Southern Weekly. This group consists of scholars, writers, observers and critics in the fields of migration, education, peasantry, law, social work, etc. They are often quoted by Southern

Weekly as important and credible sources of information, offering diversified viewpoints and competing interpretations regarding migrant children’s issues. In addition, Southern Weekly 64

started to include online sources and voices in its reports of migrant children as early as 2003, and it makes reference to different web media outlets to explore diverse viewpoints online, rather than narrowly relying on its own websites or blogs for information gathering. By contrast,

People’s Daily did not make reference to any online expressions and comments until 2012; when the paper eventually started to do so, it solely relied on its own online forums to collect information. It continues to exercise editorial control and censorship by selecting favourable viewpoints, that is, the online comments which applaud the Party-government and support existing policies. Overall, by quoting from different sources and presenting diversified opinions, the market-oriented Southern Weekly demonstrates a much higher degree of journalistic professionalism than its official counterpart.

More importantly, the commercial market-oriented Southern Weekly allows migrant children to speak in the news more often and more extensively than is the case in the central Party’s paper

People’s Daily. In Southern Weekly reports, migrant children appear as speakers in 101 quotations, with nearly the same level of prominence as government actors (see Table 3.5).

Migrant children’s voices are channelled by Southern Weekly across a wide range of news topics, such as child safety, parental responsibility, mental health, education, poverty and their wishes. Moreover, their voices are often promoted in the report’s introduction and even in the headline. This quotation pattern indicates Southern Weekly’s close engagement and frequent interaction with migrant children. News stories thus become vivid, detailed and emotionally appealing to the readership. In many cases, migrant children appear as the main speakers in the reports. For instance, a report once cited a young child’s essay to showcase migrant children’s educational plight. The girl writes after she was rejected by public schools in Beijing and was thus sent back to her rural home town,

I miss Beijing very much … I miss my mum and dad who are working in Beijing. I used to

study at Nanyuan Xingzhi school in Fengtai District of Beijing. My school friends and I helped

each other. Teacher Zhang was very nice to me, and asked me to serve as a team leader … I

am now used to the food and housing in my home town, but I really want to go back to

Beijing. (10.04.2003/SW) 65

To sum up, reports of migrant children’s issues in the official People’s Daily have been overwhelmingly dominated by government speakers throughout the last three decades, but the neoliberal, market-oriented Southern Weekly has presented diverse, competing voices from different social groups, and has channelled migrant children’s own expressions in the reports.

Therefore, it is argued that the commercialisation of Chinese media and the ensuing diversification of media content have facilitated migrant children’s expressions and diversified their images. As discussed in Chapter 1, Chinese media institutions, which were financially dependent on the Party-state and served propaganda purposes during the pre-reform era, have mostly become market-oriented and closely engaged with the target audience. The mass media’s tendency to commercialisation in Western countries has often been regarded as a setback, as it allows individuals to act more as passive consumers than as critical citizens

(Peters, 1993:560). However, this is certainly not the case in the Chinese context. The commercialisation of Chinese media organisations has helped to shift the agenda setting power from the Party-state to average media consumers, thus contributing to relatively open and critical public debates (Liu and McCormick, 2011:107; Qian and Banderski, 2011:44). The study finds that the Party-state’s exclusive power to set the media agenda on migrant children’s issues has been weakened, as the market-oriented press (like Southern Weekly) has been more inclusive of diverse viewpoints from a variety of social groups, such as experts, researchers, ordinary netizens and even migrant children themselves.

3.3.2 Rhetorical strategies

The research finds that only five reports from People’s Daily have described internal migrant children with an adjective or adverb, which accounts for no more than 4% of the overall sampled reports. By contrast, Southern Weekly is much more generous in describing migrant children in detail to flesh out their images, with more than 30% of reports containing adjectives or adverbs. Unlike the very limited vocabulary in People’s Daily, the descriptive words in

Southern Weekly are vivid and colourful, depicting migrant children as complicated, diversified, and heterogonous figures. Specific descriptive words from Southern Weekly include ‘sighing’,

‘heart bleeding’, ‘eyes wet’, ‘frost-bitten’, ‘tousle haired’, ‘with full concentration’, ‘exhausted’, 66

‘alone’, ‘tearing down’, ‘depressed’, ‘happy’, ‘loudly’, ‘lounging around in bed’, ‘delicately pretty’,

‘tiny (in height)’, ‘in haste’, ‘excitedly’, ‘on the sly’, ‘outrageous’, ‘confident’, etc.

Bird-based analogies, such as ‘birds lacking a branch to perch on’, ‘as free-wheeling as a bird’ or

‘lost bird ’ are found in quite a few press reports (see, e.g., 03.11.1995/SW, and 18.12.2012/PD).

This emphasises the status of migrant children as floating and unsettled. On some occasions, the term ‘little migratory birds’ (xiao houniao 小候鸟) is used by journalists to refer to migrant children, because many flock to the cities to visit their migrant worker parents during the school holidays, and disperse once the vacation comes to an end (Informant 8, personal communication, 26 February 2014; 12.04.2012/PD). Thus, migrant children are comparable to migratory birds in the sense of a regular seasonal movement; however, unlike birds, they apparently do not migrate in a flock. Instead, their movement is individual-based, with different points of departure and various destinations. The analogy ‘little migratory birds’ implies that migrant children are displayed and examined from the perspective of urban citizens and governors: wherever the children came from, they simply arrive at the city concurrently and come into ‘our’ sight as a flock. Migrant children are thus defined as a homogeneous group of ‘outsiders’ to spectators. Interestingly, the small number of migrants who have obtained a local household registration and thus have become new members of the

‘insiders’ are compared to golden swallows (jinyan 金燕), that is, birds who are able to settle down and perch peacefully (21.03.2003/PD). Overall, the bird-based analogies serve as a rhetorical strategy to highlight the floating, unstable and unsettled nature of migrant children’s movement.

Table 3.3 Frequencies of social groups mentioned in press reports

People’s Daily (146 reports in total) Southern Weekly (71 reports in total) Number % Number % Government officials 123 84.2 45 63.4 Migrant children’s parents 67 45.9 45 63.4 Local urban citizens 30 20.5 18 12.3 Public schools in migrant-host cities 29 19.9 15 21.1 The needy 25 17.1 10 14.1 Experts, critics and analysts 23 15.8 28 39.4 Enterprises 21 14.4 20 28.2 Left-behind children 19 13.0 3 4.2 Private schools for migrant children 16 11.0 13 18.3 Local children 16 11.0 17 23.9 The disabled 12 8.2 4 5.6 Policemen 11 7.5 16 22.5 Social organisations 10 6.8 10 14.1 The disadvantaged 8 5.5 7 9.6 Public schools in rural China 8 5.5 1 1.4 Universities 7 4.8 12 16.9 Orphans 6 4.1 4 5.6 Netizens 5 3.4 1 1.4 Volunteers 5 3.4 6 8.5 Criminals 4 2.7 2 2.8 Western developed countries 4 2.7 14 19.7 The United Nations 4 2.7 5 7.0 Dropout students 4 2.7 2 2.8 Teachers in migrant schools 3 2.1 4 5.6 Internet media 3 2.1 2 2.8 Illegal entertainment places 3 2.1 2 2.8 The court 2 1.4 – – Migrant children's relatives 2 1.4 12 16.9 Young prostitutes 2 1.4 1 1.4 Migrant children's classmates and friends 1 0.7 10 14.1 Tramps 1 0.7 1 1.4 Migrant children's siblings 1 0.7 9 12.7 Rag pickers – – 5 7.0 Migrant children’s neighbours – – 3 4.2 Celebrities – – 3 4.2

Table 3.4 Quotations in news reports of People's Daily

Number of quotations Category (460 in total) Governments 238 Migrant workers 52 Experts and researchers 36 Migrant children's parents 22 Public schools and universities 22 Netizens 22 Migrant children 6 Enterprises 6 Social organisations 3 Police 2 Private schools 0

Table 3.5 Quotations in news reports of Southern Weekly

Number of quotations Category (633 in total) Governments 126 Migrant children 101 Experts and researchers 88 Migrant workers 72 Migrant children's parents 57 Social organisations 45 Private schools 23 Public schools and universities 20 Police 10 Enterprises 2 Netizens 1

3.4 Summary of the chapter

The research has found that over the last three decades, new lexical items in reference to migrant children have been constantly introduced in media discourse to supplant older words, which indicates subtle ideological shifts over different periods of history. The initial encounter between migrant children and local citizens back in the early 1990s generated blatantly biased representations about such children, as indicated by the terms ‘black children’ and ‘little blind floaters’. These early prejudicial terms emphasised the illegitimacy of the existence of migrant children in host cities and stigmatised their life experiences. However, these terms were soon abandoned by the mass media, given the ongoing population migration and the growing journalistic professionalism. ‘Sons and daughters of peasant workers’ and ‘floating children’ are terms that emerged later in news reports and are now widespread. These terms are no longer explicitly prejudicial, but they still attempt to reinforce the symbolic boundary between local citizens and inflowing migrants, and try to send the boundary transgressors to symbolic exile.

Migrant children’s identity as ‘not belonging’ is constructed and reinforced through various reports. They are overwhelmingly represented as temporary sojourners, even though many were born in host cities and tend to settle there permanently (Loyalka, 2012:94; Duan and Yang,

2008:27). Very recently, terms such as ‘new urban resident’ have appeared in media discourse, indicating a higher degree of inclusiveness and openness towards migrant children.

Unfortunately, these new terms are applied merely to a small number of migrant children whose parents have been able to accumulate sufficient socio-economic points to gain urban residency.

Since most terms have their origins in political discourse or have been circulated through official accounts, it is argued that Chinese media language in reference to migrant children is often politically charged. In other words, the meanings ascribed to a term and the ways in which it is to be used are overwhelmingly influenced by the power of the Party-state. Many scholars of Chinese media have found that the media institutions are regulated by the propaganda apparatus through owner restrictions, licensing, and inspection of content (Volland,

2012:118; Brady, 2012:21; Zhao, 1998:20). Such regulatory measures remain effective in the press coverage of migrant children’s issues, as the newspapers, from time to time, are required to avoid particular news topics or to report an event from a particular angle (see the discussion in the introduction of this chapter). However, in addition to the macro-level mandatory regulations, the research shows that the Party’s control over the media is also manifested at the micro-level of language use. Various lexical terms such as ‘little blind floater’ or ‘floating children’ have been created by the propaganda apparatus, and been injected in media discourse. The terminology typically emphasises the official household registration status of migrant children, and thus works ideologically to justify the state’s institutional social structures which force internal migrants to live as second-class citizens. In summary, the Party’s control of media vocabulary and public language, which peaked during the Cultural Revolution, has been weakened in contemporary China; however, the power of the authorities continues to exert a pervasive influence on the language options that are available for the press to define and evaluate migrant children.

The analysis of news subjects shows that migrant children are mainly discussed within the framework of education, with the government’s role in the sector particularly emphasised. This has confirmed the findings of an earlier study which shows that migrant children are commonly linked to educational topics in the press, and that government influence in the sector is often emphasised in the discourse (Luo, 2011). China’s most influential nationwide newspapers,

People’s Daily and Southern Weekly, are mainly concerned with migrant children’s access to the nine-year compulsory education program, which is a government-funded system involving every citizen of mainland China. That is, the press coverage of migrant children’s education is overwhelmingly focused on their enrolment into schools, and little attention has been paid to other educational topics. This mirrors the reality of the persistent educational barriers that face migrant children who are often denied access to public schools by authorities of host cities. In addition, the research finds that it is not uncommon to see educational topics go hand in hand with discussions of labour migration. By and large, migrant children are defined in media discourse as a by-product of the rural–to–urban labour migration in the process of China’s

industrialisation. In other words, according to journalists and editors, migrant children are not considered as mobile subjects in their own right, but as an (unwanted) attachment to adult migrant workers who are regarded as desirable labourers for the cities’ economic development and yet as an undesirable economic burden of their host cities.

Stereotyping strategies, such as the criminalisation of migrant children, have been found in both sampled newspapers. The press pays far more attention to the illegal activities of migrant children than to criminal behaviour against them. In addition, journalists sometimes make an arbitrary association between criminality and migrant children, and the information source of the news may be deliberately filtered to support a prejudicial opinion. In the media accounts, migrant children have been accused of violating the state’s one-child policy, of stealing and even of posing some kind of unspoken threats to local citizens. However, when migrant children appear as victims of discrimination and prejudice, the news reports often mitigate the confrontation by not reporting the agents responsible or by overlooking the details. The use of general and vague terms in the text may serve an ideological function by concealing the agents responsible for the discriminatory acts, that is, local urbanites, governors and institutions

(Kwong, 2011:873). Another type of stereotyping practice is that the news reports construct, reinforce and fix migrant children as low-quality (suzhi) beings. These children, as well as internal migrants in general, are discursively built up as having bodies of less value, and therefore as deserving of less income, power and status than the privileged middle-class urban citizens. The stereotyping strategies towards China’s internal migrant children are reminiscent of the media stigmatisation of immigrants in other continental entities, such as Europe and

North America. Immigrants in the international arena are overwhelmingly bound up with criminalisation and demonisation in the mass media, and they are often established and reinforced as problem people, that is, people who have problems or cause problems (see, among many others, Young, 1991; Donald and Rattansi, 1992; Hall, 1997; Papastergiadis, 2010;

Gilroy, 2012). It is therefore argued that the stereotyping of China’s internal migrant children is not something unique in the Chinese sociopolitical context; rather, it adds to the evidence of the general stigmatisation of migrants in the international arena.

The Party-led People’s Daily and the market-oriented Southern Weekly demonstrate a high level of commensurality in employing lexical items, selecting news topics and exercising stereotyping strategies; yet the two papers are markedly different with regard to the voices they channel and the viewpoints they mediate. While quotations from government officials are pervasive in

People’s Daily, this information source has been combined with competing voices and divergent opinions from non-government social actors in Southern Weekly. Moreover, the commercial audience-oriented Southern Weekly allows migrant children to speak more often and more extensively; as a result, this constructs vivid individual images and delivers popular news stories. It is therefore argued that the commercialisation of Chinese media, and the ensuing diversification of media content and growth in journalistic professionalism, have facilitated migrant children’s expression and diversified their images.

The transformation of the Chinese media industry is an ongoing process, and the sector has been further diversified and has become more complicated due to the diffusion of

Internet-based media and the emergence of online space for public debate. The following chapter proceeds to explore a relatively new phenomenon in China’s Internet culture, the micro-blogosphere (weibo), in order to understand whether the diffusion of web-based media has given rise to new images of migrant children, and to examine how online texts interplay with offline reports.

Chapter 4

Weibo portrayal of migrant children and comparison with press description

The previous chapter has shown that China’s internal migrant children have been severely stereotyped in the mainstream press during the last three decades. Migrant children are usually constructed as a homogenous, disadvantaged group of outsiders, and are mainly associated with topics such as educational issues and government investments. This chapter focuses on the portrayal of migrant children in China’s vibrant micro-blogosphere (weibo), and draws a consistent comparison with the press texts which were analysed in the previous chapter. However, before any specific analytical themes are discussed, a story has to be introduced to demonstrate the ethos of weibo discussions on the subject of migrant children and to showcase the relationship between digital media and traditional media in China.

The dead bodies of five street children, aged between 9 and 13, were found in a rubbish bin on a chilly winter morning of 2012 in Bijie, a city in southwest China (Phillips, 2012). The children had accidentally poisoned themselves after lighting a charcoal fire inside the bin to fend off the cold. They were later identified as unaccompanied migrants from a poor, mountainous village.

The tragedy was firstly disclosed on the Internet by a former journalist, and it immediately triggered an outpouring of grief on Chinese social media, particularly on weibo (ibid.). As a response to online outrage, many professional journalists followed up on the news and offered detailed, in-depth reports. At the same time, speculation was spread on weibo that Li Yuanlong, who first released the story, had been taken into custody (iFeng News, 2012). While this topic remained taboo in the conventional media outlets due to rigorous censorship, numerous tweets were posted, re-posted and discussed on weibo which interestingly provided a certain degree of protection to professional news workers. A few days later, Li was able to post again on weibo: he had returned home safe and sound after his detainment and extended special thanks to Internet users.

This story is meaningful in three respects: the extraordinary influence of weibo, the

multifaceted interplay between traditional and digital media, and the Party’s attempts to control public opinion (by arresting and threatening news workers and commentators). These aspects will each be explained in turn. Firstly, weibo has become a most influential channel for public discussions on sociopolitical issues (China Internet Network Information Centre, 2013), including the subject of migrant children. As explained in Chapter 1, weibo is a relatively new form of ICT, which emerged in late 2009 and has since then exploded in popularity. While

Twitter is cut off from the Chinese Internet, the leading micro-blog service provider Sina Weibo has now gained over 300 million users (ibid.). The primary users of weibo are well-educated, young professionals in the cities (Fu and Chau, 2013:1). Different types of Internet media, including weibo, have significantly expanded the space for free expression (Sullivan, 2012:773).

Unlike conventional media which merely allow a few key figures to speak and thus facilitate censorship, weibo has brought about a different type of communication which is de-centralised, multi-directional and in real time. Although the Chinese Government places strict controls on the Internet, the communication of many to many and the sheer number of weibo users make it almost impossible to monitor everybody (Donald and Keane, 2002:7; Hu, 2002:194; Sullivan,

2012:775). Although the most trending topics on weibo are usually related to popular culture, political insight and social crisis, the subject of migrant children does appear in many postings and comments, as illustrated in the Bijie incident.

Secondly, the relationship between traditional and digital media is complicated in the context of China, and this has influenced the news agenda pertaining to the subject of migrant children.

The research aim and scope, as outlined in Chapter 1, have offered a detailed account of the interplay between the conventional press and weibo. To recap briefly, the failure or inefficiency of the conventional news agencies has lent credibility to weibo as well as to other types of

Internet media (Tang and Sampson, 2012:468). China’s print media institutions often fail to offer timely reports or to convey reliable information due to the Party’s heavy-handed control.

As China media experts Qian Gang and David Bandurski (2011:61) put it, news ‘now routinely bubbles up through the web and makes its way into print and broadcast media’. The 12 journalists and editors interviewed by the researcher (details presented in the methodology

chapter), without exception, survey weibo content on a regular basis to collect stories and gather information. As shown in the media coverage of the Bijie incident, a news story was initially generated from Internet postings and was followed up by professional journalists whose reports, in turn, stirred up more online discussion and commentary.

Thirdly, the subject of migrant children is, to some extent, politically sensitive in China (see the introduction of Chapter 3 for more details), and the Party-state control over pertinent discussions has expanded from the sector of conventional media to the Internet. According to the Party leaders, positive propaganda is an essential tool for maintaining Chinese citizens’ confidence in their political and economic system (Brady, 2012:21). Negative news, such as the deaths of five migrant children, is only allowed to be reported very selectively, as it risks tarnishing the government’s image and undermining public faith in the system. In such cases, unruly writers may lose their weibo accounts and be detained by the police (Fu et al., 2013:43).

The leading micro-blog service provider, Sina Weibo, has employed thousands of human censors to identify sensitive words and remove relevant postings (ibid.). In addition, myriad propaganda organs, Party-affiliated institutions and official media institutions have become active users of weibo in order to convey positive messages and influence public opinion (China

Labs and Centre for Internet and Society [CIS], 2013:3). On weibo, we see three forces – the propaganda apparatus, ordinary users of Internet media, and news workers in conventional media institutions – are working together to set the public agenda on topics pertaining to migrant child. The acknowledgement of these three (competing) forces is helpful for gaining an understanding of specific weibo postings and commentaries on the subject of migrant children.

This chapter is based on 458 tweets in relation to migrant children, which were collected from around 13 million postings published in the course of 2012 (see the methodology chapter for the data collection details). This is a small corpus compared to the mass of content on weibo.

Moreover, the authors of the posts have all been rendered with pseudonyms, due to the use of

Weiboscope database; that is, contextual information which would add to the analysis is

missing. However, the researcher was able to identify many authors by searching the content of a particular post on Sina Weibo website (www.weibo.com)12. It turns out that many authors of the tweets sampled are traditional media institutions and journalists, government agencies and government-sponsored NGOs, as well as ordinary individual users. This contextual information helped to qualify some of the research findings.

The analytical themes in this chapter are almost the same as those in the study of the press reports in Chapter 3, including the special terms used when referring to migrant children, the lexical and sentence styles, the social groups who are mentioned and quoted in the tweets, and the overall subjects of the discussions. These themes, however, are combined and presented in a different way in this chapter to build up a solid argument.

In the first section, the chapter discusses the terminology used by micro-bloggers to refer to migrant children. It finds that the weibo tweets mainly draw upon the vocabulary of the conventional media to define migrant children. The Internet media have given rise to a new term shamate (杀马特, a literal translation of the English word ‘smart’) which was created by young migrants to refer to themselves (Lu, 2013; Archer, 2014). However, this word has been reshaped and twisted by the dominant non-migrant social groups to convey prejudicial meanings. In addition to the terminology, other dimensions of specific language use are also examined, including the verbs, adjectives and adverbs, as well as rhetorical strategies that are employed to describe migrant children. As shown in the second section of the chapter, millions of migrant children have been reduced to a few simple characteristics: poor, passive, rootless and school-aged. They are typically represented by micro-bloggers as problem people who either have problems or cause problems (van Dijk, 1991:14). Following the analysis of detailed language used in the tweets, the third section of the chapter proceeds to examine different social groups who appear and speak in the tweets, and the discussion attempts to unveil

12 It is almost impossible to collect the contextual information of every author, not only because this task is labour-intensive, but also that many weibo users do not have a verified profile available on the website.

whose voices are channelled and whose are overlooked. It suggests that migrant children are occasionally quoted in weibo writings and are discursively constructed as ‘the other’.

Finally, the discussion of subjects serves as a way to summarise the detailed analyses of terminology, language style, and social actors in earlier sections of the chapter. This section finds that, on weibo, the most important subject in relation to migrant children is charity and philanthropy. These charitable activities are usually initiated by grassroots netizens, and are often small in scale and unofficial in nature (Yu, 2014; Shieh and Deng, 2011:181). Ordinary micro-bloggers are setting their own agendas to select topics for discussion and to create particular emphases in their writing, with these subjects and themes possibly overlooked or marginalised in the conventional media. In conclusion, with regard to discussions of migrant children’s issues, weibo has helped to shift the power of agenda setting from the propaganda apparatus and professional news workers to ordinary netizens, but not necessarily to migrant children or general migrants. The weibo discourse has reinforced, rather than challenged, the existing stereotypes of migrant children in print media.

4.1 Politics of naming: ‘floating children’ or ‘smart people’?

The analysis of press reports in the previous chapter found that various terms were invented in the last few decades to refer to migrant children. To recap, in the early 1990s when migrant children first emerged in the cities, they were defined as illegal transients and dangerous wanderers, that is, ‘black children’ and ‘little blind floaters’. These prejudicial terms were soon abandoned by media professionals. Since the mid-1990s, migrant children have been generally seen as the (inevitable) by-product of China’s ongoing rural–to–urban labour migration, that is,

‘sons and daughters of peasant workers’, and ‘children of (outside) labourers’. Having officially been labelled as descendants of peasants, migrant children are legitimately prohibited from accessing welfare services in host cities, including education, health care, and housing. In the new millennium, migrant children as a group have been addressed with alternative terms, such as 'floating children’ and ‘new urban residents’. The phrase ‘floating children’ demonstrates a certain degree of awareness regarding the referent child-being; however, it constructs a

collective image of itinerant, unstable, aimless wanderers, despite the fact that many migrant children tend to settle permanently in host cities (Duan and Yang, 2008:27). The most recent term ‘new urban resident’ seems more inclusive and unbiased than any previous phrases, but it only designates upper-class migrant children whose parents are able to accumulate sufficient points and are thus granted local residency status. Overall, all the different terms used in reference to migrant children have their origins in political documents, academic publications, or urbanite public discourse. Migrant children, as well as migrants in general, have little cultural power to define themselves in China’s mainstream press.

As weibo emerged very recently, a study of terminological evolution in its history is practically impossible, but the current research has found that micro-bloggers mainly draw upon the vocabulary of the conventional media to refer to migrant children. Various terms co-exist in the virtual space, having commonly shown up in earlier press reports. Among the 458 sample tweets, ‘sons and daughters of peasant workers’ is the term that appears to be the most frequently used to refer to migrant child, with 127 occurrences (see Table 4.1). Terms such as

‘floating children’, ‘children of outsiders or labourers’, which have become widespread through the conventional media, continue to be employed by micro-bloggers in their writing. This spells out the continuity between weibo discourses and press reports. Online tweets have drawn upon the wording and phrases, the knowledge and opinions provided by the conventional media to portray migrant children. This is understandable because a concrete text has to draw on the elements or discourses of earlier texts to build on established meanings (what Norman

Fairclough termed as ‘inter-textuality’, see Jorgenson and Philips, 2002:7). By appropriating the migrant children terminology from earlier conventional media discourse, weibo postings and commentaries have reproduced the already established discursive pattern whereby few new elements are introduced. Various labels designating migrant children as a group, which were circulated by earlier press reports, are now reproduced and further distributed through the channel of weibo.

Despite the overwhelming reproduction of conventional media vocabulary in the virtual space, since 2008, the Internet has also given rise to a new term to define young ‘wannabe’-urbanite 79

rural migrants: shamate. A transliteration of the English word ‘smart’, shamate represents a virtual and informal group of China’s young rural migrants, who are usually distinguished by a spiky hairstyle, body piercing, heavy make-up and cool cheap clothes (Archer, 2014; Tao and

Donald, 2015). Shamate members typically work in low-paying jobs in the cities, use off-brand cell phones to take unconventional selfies, and distribute their photos and films on the Internet

(ibid.). Ironically, this type of self-representation by young rural migrants has been ruthlessly mocked and bitterly criticised by the dominant non-migrant groups. The term shamate has been manipulated and twisted by educated, privileged urban citizens. Rather than conveying the original meaning of smartness, the word is now widely used to describe unsophisticated clothing styles and to mock ignorant country bumpkins (Archer, 2014). As a consequence, most shamate members have retreated from publicly open social media sites, such as weibo, and have turned to more private stranger-blocked online spaces (Tao and Donald, 2015).

The shamate subculture implies a new trend in terminological development: young migrants are able to appropriate digital media to represent themselves in their own terms (see Wallis,

2013; Tao and Donald, 2015). This type of migrant self-representation is markedly different from the portrayal by other social groups. Professional news workers and educated urban micro-bloggers have used various terms, such as ‘floating children’ and ‘sons and daughters of peasant workers’, to emphasise the inferior social status of migrant children and legitimatise the privileges of local urban citizens. By contrast, in migrant-created language, such as shamate, migrants do not define themselves along the lines of rural and urban, or outsider and local.

This unconventional self-representation via digital media has highlighted the stereotypical nature of the dominant media discourse. Nevertheless, the eradication of the shamate group from China’s most influential online space, weibo, shows that Internet media have been dominated by the majority non-migrant groups, whose representational practices about migrant children tend to reinforce the existing class biases. Due to punitive attitudes and actions by the dominant urban citizens, migrant children may be further marginalised and deprived of access to even minimal sociocultural power (Donald, 2010:5). Their struggle for self-representation is rendered private and hidden from the public mediasphere.

On weibo, migrant children are often identified as a collective sign, rather than by their individual names, and this discursive pattern is similar to that used by the Chinese press. In the total 458 records, only 22 children’s names were mentioned13. One example is the fatal incident in Bijie which took the lives of five vagrant children. In the heated discussion on weibo, the victims’ names were completely overlooked by online writers and commentators. The tragedy functioned as valuable material for micro-bloggers to criticise government accountability and to initiate charitable campaigns, but the children themselves who were at the centre of the incident seem unworthy of being identified by names. As shown in the previous chapter, migrant children are often constructed in the press as a homogenous group, rather than as identifiable individuals; their differences in ethnicity, class, age, gender and language have been overwhelmingly overlooked. This discursive pattern in Chinese newspapers has been perpetuated in weibo discourse. By drawing upon the generic terminology from the official documents and conventional media texts, weibo writings have reproduced the existing knowledge and ideology about migrant children, attempting to fix them as a homogenous, generic group of outsiders and second-class citizens.

13 For ethical reasons, the 22 children’s names are pseudonyms created by weibo users.

Table 4.1 Terms employed by weibo users to refer to migrant children

Term Occurrence (458 tweets in total)

Vagrant children (liulang er, liulang ertong)14 162 Sons and daughters of peasant workers (nongmingong zinü) 127 Sons and daughters of (outside) labourers (wailaigong zinü, dagong zidi) 69 Floating children (liudong ertong) 27 Individual names 22 Little migratory birds (xiao houniao) 18 Children/Students of outsiders (waidi haizi, waidi xuesheng) 6 Children of immigrant families (suiqian zinü) 1 New urban residents (xin shimin) 1

4.2 Language style and rhetorical strategies

In addition to the terminology, the thesis also considers other dimensions of specific language use, including the verbs, adjectives and adverbs and rhetorical strategies used to describe migrant children. Specific words and phrases are chosen by weibo writers to emphasise particular characteristics of migrant children, and thus to construct particular images about them as a group. The language style is never neutral; rather, it signals the author’s emotions, attitudes, and opinions, and thus has ideological implications (van Dijk, 1991:53). In the coding process, words with similar meanings have been coded as one node; that is, they are grouped together in order to tease out the main themes of the language style. For instance, different verbs ‘die’ (si 死), ‘perish’ (wang 亡), ‘pass away’ (shishi 逝世) are coded as one node: ‘die’.

Therefore, the processed word ‘die’ stands for a category of synonyms. However, a few exceptional words and phrases have been coded verbatim, such as ‘eliminate’ (xiaochu 消除) or ‘produce’ (zhizao 制造) in order to convey the original meaning and demonstrate the style.

14 The prevalent use of the term ‘vagrant children’ in the tweets is related to the deaths of five street children that occurred during the sample period, which is discussed at the beginning of the chapter. However, it should be noted that the term does not describe the majority of China’s internal migrant children who mostly move along with their parents from rural to urban areas. Therefore, ‘vagrant children’ was not taken as a key term for further analysis.

4.2.1 Verbs15: to rescue, aid and help migrant children

When migrant children appear as the subject in the active voice, they perform an action expressed by verbs; however, the study finds that such actions tend to be generic and collective, rather than specific and childish. The word ‘die’ and its synonyms occur in 28 sentences which, without exception, refer to the tragic death of five vagrant children in a trash bin (see the introduction of this chapter). Apart from the word ‘die’, the most frequent verbs are: ‘return’ (to the place of origin), ‘go’ (to school), and ‘receive’ (something) (ranging in frequency from high to low, see Table 4.2). As a result, migrant children are presented as a group of minors who frequently flow between host cities and their rural home towns and who do not settle down; they are regarded as school-aged children; and they are believed to receive enormous amounts of donation and service from the majority non-migrant social groups.

The words ‘possess’ (yongyou 拥有) and ‘lack’ (queshao 缺少) appear equally frequently in the micro-blogging texts when migrant children present as active agents. These words emphasise the things that are available or unavailable to migrant children. The word ‘buy’ (mai

买) is used twice in the sampled texts, but, in both cases, it is highlighting the poverty of migrant children. One micro-blogger describes that a few impoverished migrant children ‘are unwilling to buy socks for themselves’ in the winter (27.11.2012/1.WB), and another author suspects that ‘sons and daughters of peasant workers won’t buy underwear for themselves’ given the rising prices of everyday products (18.06.2012/WB).

It is interesting to trace the actions which are common among ordinary children, such as ‘run’,

‘cry’, ‘scream’, ‘quarrel’, ‘sound cute’ or ‘worship pop stars’. Each of these verbs was used no more than twice in the entire 458 texts. Indeed, these normal, ordinary and childish actions by migrant children are rarely newsworthy according to the agenda of micro-bloggers. As a

15 All the verbs in weibo tweets have been collected and categorized. Because each text is within 140 characters, it is viable to code every sentence. However, a press report is usually much longer than a tweet, and verbs are used much more frequently. Given the limited time frame, the researcher did not trace the verbs in the press texts, and this dimension of analysis was omitted from the thesis.

success for citizen journalism, the micro-blogosphere always gives prominence to sensational social events, fundamental governance issues and grass-root pop culture (Suvillian, 2012:775;

Wei and Hu, 2014:49). Nevertheless, the absence of colourful, specific and childish actions in the discourse indicates that migrant children are displayed and observed by spectators from a distance. They are presented as a marginalised group that is significantly different from the majority of urban children. Migrant children have astonishingly died in trash bins; they return to their place of origin every now and then; and they rarely sound cute, swear or yell, as

‘normal’ children do.

When migrant children appear as the object of the action in the weibo discourse, a particular sentence structure prevails: ‘do something for the children’ (wei/gei haizi zuo 为/给孩子做).

The structure has 46 occurrences in the sampled tweets (see Table 4.3). Another important type of action is to ‘rescue and aid’ (jiuzhu 救助) and ‘help’ (bangzhu 帮助) such children, with 44 and 19 occurrences, respectively. By contrast, the same word ‘help’, when migrant children appear as the performer of the action, is used only once. It is employed by a micro-blogger to scorn a businessman’s dubious charitable activity towards migrant children:

‘Can these kids help him become famous?’ the author questioned in an ironic tone

(27.11.2012/2.WB). Overall, such prevalent verbs as ‘do (something) for (the children)’ and

‘rescue, help and aid’ work together to reinforce the image of migrant children as a disadvantaged group who passively receive intense support from the majority social groups.

‘See/encounter’ (Kanjian/Yujian 看见/遇见) is an interesting verb category in the micro-blogging discourse, as it describes the direct encounter between the majority actors and migrant children. As one post reads,

… If you see a begging child on the street, please take a photo or a video. You can post it on

weibo, and note down the time and location (of your encounter with the child) ... Your tweet

may change the fate of a family! A miracle created by you! (23.06.2012/WB)

It suggests that if ‘we’, urbanites in the majority, are confronted with a migrant child, we are

supposed to do something for them immediately without their consent16. In some extreme occasions, violent verbs such as ‘produce’ and ‘eliminate’ have been applied to migrant children. ‘Who have produced vagrant children?’ an author asks in a tweet (29.11.2012/1.WB).

And another author claims: ‘To eliminate vagrant children in the streets, a systematic program is required’ (30.11.2012/WB). These words indicate that migrant children’s own subjectivity is overwhelmingly overlooked by the micro-bloggers. This is reminiscent of a general issue in the media portrayal of children who are in unfavourable conditions. As the United Nations

Children’s Fund finds it, children living in poverty or in developing countries lose their individuality and humanity in media discourse, as they are overwhelmingly portrayed as helpless sufferers, who are unable to act, think or speak for themselves (UNICEF, 2007).

4.2.2 Adjectives and adverbs: poor but happy

Among the 458 sampled texts, 86 adjectives and adverbs have been used to define such children or their actions. A most prominent theme in describing migrant children and their behaviour is poverty (see Table 4.4). Specific words include: ‘bare’ (feet), ‘impoverished’, ‘light’

(clothing in winter), and ‘underdeveloped’ (physical bodies), etc. Meanwhile, words used in the description of migrant children’s happiness and excitement are equally prominent. At first glance, the two categories of words referring to poverty and happiness seem to be in conflict with each other. In fact, they work together to support a particular discursive pattern that stresses a ‘before and after’ effect: while migrant children are believed to suffer from severe poverty issues, charitable and philanthropic activities conducted by the micro-bloggers have helped them out and made them happy. As a tweet reads,

Sons and daughters of peasant workers are thrilled after they put on the scarves. On 29th

16 This post was released by Yuqi tongxue, an official of a NGO (weibo.com/yuqitongxue). It is related to the campaign of ‘Random Street Snapshots to Rescue Child Beggars’, which urged people to take photos of child beggars/street children whenever and wherever the encounter was, and upload the photos onto weibo sites (Yu, 2014). Although the campaign is not specially targeting rural migrant children, child beggars/street children fall into the general category of migrant children. Therefore the post by Yuqi tongxue was quoted and analysed.

November, the Youth Leagues of the Communist Party … brought warmness to impoverished

children. 336 pupils in Zihong Elementary School received gloves and scarves worth ¥5000.

Sons and daughters of peasant workers account for an excess of 90% of the students in the

school. (01.12.2012/WB)

The overall descriptions of migrant children tend to be negative and pitying. Occasionally, there are positive descriptions about some migrant children. However, the positive images do not necessarily undermine the prevailing negative stereotypes. Instead, positive messages are conveyed as an exception which reassures that the majority of migrant children remain in their appointed places – that is, as an impoverished, passive, disadvantaged and inferior group – within the established social cultural order (Hall, 1997:236). The following tweet, while speaking highly of exceptional performances by a few migrant children, has indirectly emphasised the ‘problems’ of the whole social group:

The activity centre is designed to demonstrate middle-class family culture. Here all the sons

and daughters of peasant workers are polite, smart and couth, to an extent no less than that

of well-educated urban children. They are even remarkably different from their lower-class

parents who are taking hard manual labour jobs in the grand Shanghai city. (01.04.2012/WB)

The author of this tweet has presumed that rural migrant children should be inferior to their urban peers. It has employed a strategy of presupposition: rather than explicitly stating the

‘problems’ about migrant children, the author simply presumes that this is true and takes it as common knowledge shared by the writer and the reader. Presupposition is found in quite a few tweets. On some occasions, micro-bloggers are seeking contact details of migrant schools to make a donation, and they simply assume that children in such schools are impoverished and will be thrilled to receive any types of help. As a posting reads,

Does anyone know a school for sons and daughters of peasant workers in Xi’an? I’d like to

buy some snacks for the kids, play with them, and take some photos before the Spring

Festival … (04.01.2012/WB)

The emphasis on migrant children’s impoverishment and ‘problems’ speaks to a broader discursive paradigm towards China’s rural children — regardless of whether or not they have migrated into the cities or not. As discussed in the previous chapter, most migrant children are officially fixed as rural residents within China’s household registration system, and are routinely denied access to fundamental social services in host cities. Within such institutional social structures, migrant children in the cities, together with their left-behind peers in rural areas, are often portrayed in the media ‘not as equivalent members of the national project, but as a catachresis of the inequalities inherent in accelerated development’ (Donald,

2008:307).Peasant children are often forced to carry the symbolic burden of poverty, backwardness and lack of modernity – overall, the few unfavourable characteristics that the state is keen to see disappear (Woronov, 2004:294; Wallis, 2013:346). The stigmatisation of peasant children in the media is reminiscent of the character, Runtu, a peasant kid portrayed by the classic Chinese writer Lu Xun prior to Liberation in 1949 (Donald, 2008:307). In contemporary China, Runtu continues to be referred to and compared to as an unpleasant figure standing for backwardness and ignorance17.

In summary, through the appropriation of particular verbs, adjectives and adverbs, as well as rhetorical strategies, migrant children are usually represented by micro-bloggers as problematic people. The language style in the description of migrant children tends to be negative and sympathetic, and is sometimes aggressive and even violent. Despite their marked disparities in age, class, gender, language, ethnicity and migration pattern, millions of migrant children are reduced to a few simple characteristics: poor, passive, rootless and school-aged. In other words, they are deprived of the opportunity to act as round, colourful and dynamic characters in the weibo sphere. In this sense, the weibo discourse has reinforced the existing stereotypes perpetuated by the conventional media which have persistently depicted migrant children as a homogenous and disadvantaged group (Luo, 2011; Wang and Gao, 2010:51; also see the

17 To give an example, a Chinese pop singer, Zhang Jie, has been widely referred to as Runtu, due to his unfashionable dressing and uncouth behaviour in the eyes of online commentators. See more at http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%97%B0%E5%9C%9F

analysis of press reports in Chapter 3).

Table 4.2 Verbs with migrant children as subject of an action in weibo discourse

Category Occurrence (458 tweets in total) Die 28 Return (to home town) 22 Go (to school) 17 Receive 15 Possess 14 Leave (home or school) 9 Lack 9 Learn 7 Enjoy 4 Smile 4 Steal 3 Buy 2 Eat 2 Sleep 2 Go astray 2 Run 1 Perform (on the stage) 1 Dance 1 Worship pop stars 1 Cry 1 Yell 1 Sound cute 1 Quarrel 1

Table 4.3 Verbs with migrant children as object of an action in weibo discourse

Category Occurrence (458 tweets in total) Do (something) for (the children) 46 Rescue and aid 44 See and encounter 29 Take care of 28 Pay attention to 21 Make (the children) to do (something) 20 Help 19 Take (the children to somewhere) 14 Give 11 Ask 2 Carry (a child) on the back 2 Produce 1 Eliminate 1

Table 4.4 Adjectives and adverbs in the description of migrant children in weibo discourse

Category Occurrence

(458 tweets in total) Excited or happy 20 Impoverished 19 Free of charge (for migrant children) 7 Naughty 2 Safe 1 Calm 1 Unsupervised 1

4. 3 Those who appear and speak up in the weibo sphere

Having examined the special terms in reference to migrant children and the specific words in the description of such children, the chapter next proceeds to explore different social groups and their roles as represented in the weibo discourse. A variety of social groups have been mentioned and even quoted in the weibo discussion of migrant children; that is, various groups have been represented as relevant social actors who play a role in migrant children’s issues.

This section tries to spell out which social groups are regarded as most (or least) important in relation to migrant children, what roles are played by a group, and whose voices are channelled by weibo. In particular, the section traces the quotations from migrant children in the sampled tweets, in order to understand whether or not the Internet media have facilitated these children’s expression.

According to micro-bloggers, the most important social groups pertinent to migrant children are government agencies, private migrant schools, parents and the conventional media (ranged in frequency from high to low, see Table 4.5). More specifically, government agencies are overwhelmingly presented in the tweets as active agents who perform actions towards migrant children. On most occasions, they appear as policy makers, coordinators of social services and initiators of charitable activities. However, the second most prominent actor, private migrant schools, usually appear as passive patients, functioning as a premises where urban citizens and government officials showcase their charitable actions or policies towards migrant children.

Conventional mainstream media, including the press, TV, and radio, typically appear in the tweets as reliable sources of information or active participants in the giving of charity. The emphasis on government roles and conventional media influence is probably because these two types of social actors are regular writers on weibo; that is, they are circulating their own voices and emphasising their own roles in the micro-blogosphere.18 As the following tweet reads,

… our newspaper, together with the undergraduates who volunteer to teach in Bijie of the

Guizhou province this summer and corporate representatives, have initiated a philanthropic

program entitled ‘I’m a rural kid’. We will consistently support the impoverished students in

18 It is difficult to find out exactly how many authors of the sampled tweets are government agencies or conventional media institutions, because the source Weiboscope Database has replaced the micro-bloggers’ usernames with pseudo IDs (Fu et al., 2013:46). However, previous China media studies have found that government agencies, as well as conventional media organisations and news workers, are active and important users of weibo (Chen, 2012:76; China Labs and Centre for Internet and Society [CIS], 2013; Yu, 2014). By searching the content of a sampled post on Sina Weibo website, the researcher has also found that many tweets in the data set were published by government agencies, traditional media institutions and journalists.

the west and in Dalian. (27.11.2012/3.WB)

In addition, the ordinary micro-bloggers are frequently mentioned in the weibo discourse as a collective ‘us’ – as in phrases like ‘everyone’ (dajia 大家), ‘we’ (women 我们), ‘friends’

(pengyoumen 朋友们) – who are good Samaritans or potential volunteers with a helpful hand ready for migrant children. Inevitably, migrant children are identified as the needy ‘other’ and

‘them’. A symbolic and seemingly uncontestable boundary is drawn between the giving ‘us’ and the receiving ‘them’. As a micro-blogger19 bitterly confessed in a tweet: ‘How can the élite – those working at splendid metropolitan offices – understand the feelings of vagrant children staying in a trash bin of a remote town?’ (29.11.2012/2.WB). As part of the ‘othering’ process, migrant children are often associated by weibo users with various disadvantaged and marginalised groups, such as the needy, the disabled, criminals, orphans, hospital patients, the unemployed, etc. (see Table 4.5). Various disadvantaged actors make 65 occurrences in total, accounting for 14.2% of the entire sampled posts. In other words, migrant children are usually aligned with marginalised, impoverished and problematic social groups. Ordinary and normal social actors in relation to migrant children, such as their relatives, siblings or classmates, are typically overlooked or downplayed in the discourse. As a result, simplistic, inferior and subordinate identities are discursively established for migrant children.

Given a word limit of 140 characters and the free-wheeling nature of online writing, the weibo postings typically express the authors’ own viewpoints and rarely insert quotations from other sources. In the overall 458 sampled postings, there are only 15 quotes from migrant children, as well as 32 quotes from other social groups, such as government or volunteers. This quotation pattern suggests that migrant children’s own voices and expressions are rarely heard on weibo. Instead, it is a public sphere dominated by ordinary, urban and educated netizens, as well as government agencies and conventional media organisations. In particular, many weibo

19 The author of the post is Chen Laoyu, Deputy Chairman of China Association of Employment Promotion, and Head of China Institute for Occupation Research at Peking University (weibo.com/chenlaoyu?nick=陈老宇)

tweets have emphasised the roles played by ordinary micro-bloggers in migrant children’s events, while this theme is rendered as insignificant in press reports.

Table 4.5 Frequencies of social groups mentioned in weibo discourse

Category Occurrence

(458 tweets in total) Government officials 141 Private schools for migrant children 129 Migrant children’s parents 69 Conventional media 63 General micro-bloggers 62 Social organisations 54 The needy 14 Local children in the cities 11 The disabled 10 The elderly 10 Tramps 10 Beggars 9 Criminals 5 Children in unfavourable conditions 5 Migrant children’s relatives 5 Migrant children’s classmates and friends 4 Orphans 4 Hospital patients 3 Dropout students 2 The unemployed 1 Those in ignorance of the law 1 Rag pickers 1 Young prostitutes 1

4.4 Subjects

This section summarises the general subjects of weibo discussions, which brings together the different themes presented in the early parts of the chapter. The research finds that, although micro-bloggers have drawn on the vocabulary of the conventional media to define migrant children, they set their own agendas in selecting topics for discussion and creating particular emphases in the postings. Charity and philanthropy towards migrant children represent the most important subject on weibo, while this topic has been relegated to an insignificant position in press reports. Such charitable activities in the weibo sphere are usually small-scale and are led by ordinary netizens, which are thus termed ‘micro-philanthropy’ (wei gongyi 微公

益) in contrast to grand official programs (Shieh and Deng, 2011:181; Liu, 2011:85; Yu, 2014).

However, the prevalent charity online discourse demonstrates the giver’s top-down, paternalistic perspective to the evaluation of migrant children, and the philanthropic activities are usually giver-centred (rather than receiver-centred). It is also observed that a genuine recognition of migrant children’s equal rights is largely absent in the weibo discussions. Many weibo users, who are mostly privileged non-migrant citizens, have expressed blatant discrimination against and exclusion of migrant children when discussing the topic of students’ equal access to universities (see the details in Section 4.4.2). Overall, it is argued that weibo, together with other types of Internet media, has contributed to shifting the power of agenda setting from the Party-state and news workers to ordinary educated urban citizens (Tang,

2013:10; Yu, 2006:304). Particular themes and topics are selected and prioritised by weibo users, but the discourse has generally reinforced, rather than undermined, the existing stereotypes of migrant children.

4.4.1 The boom in charity and philanthropy

Charity and philanthropy are the most prominent weibo topic pertinent to migrant children, accounting for more than 40% of the entire 458 records (see Table 4.6). Under this topic, only a

quarter of the tweets are pertinent to the direct donations of money or goods, and the rest postings have described various forms of voluntary services, such as the organisation of art and craft activities, support for child health care, skill training for future employment and the promotion of environmental awareness. Small acts of kindness can warm the hearts of millions, as exemplified by a micro-blogger who stewed four chickens for the young migrant workers in the local community, tweeted this and called for others to ‘home cook for migrants and bring them warmness in a chilly winter’ (27.11.2012/4.WB).

Unlike grand and official projects initiated by the Chinese Government and established non-governmental organisations (NGOs), micro-philanthropy is often small-scale, localised, specifically themed and sometimes even private and unplanned. In the past, China’s charity sector was monopolised by government-sponsored NGOs (GONGOs, see Shieh and Deng,

2011:183). Grand projects were typically mobilised by the authorities in a top-down approach, and ordinary citizens were discouraged from making any input other than giving their own money. These official programs often demonstrated unsatisfactory, if not appalling, transparency and accountability (Shieh and Deng, 2011:193). However, in 2008, a grass-roots movement broke out in the wake of a catastrophic earthquake, with ordinary volunteers and civic organisations widely participating in the relief and reconstruction work (ibid.). This type of unofficial, grassroots philanthropy, that is, micro-philanthropy, has been markedly fostered by weibo and other social media (Yu, 2014). Ordinary netizens and opinion leaders on weibo are able to take a leading role in initiating and coordinating charitable activities; government departments and their affiliated associations remain active online, but they have lost the power to monopolise the charity sector (Chen, 2012:75). Weibo also plays a crucial role in maintaining the transparency of micro-philanthropic activities: donation information is posted in real time, and fund receivers often publish their expense reports online (Shieh and Deng,

2011:190). For instance, in 2011, the ‘Free Lunch for Children’ charity campaign was initiated on weibo by Deng Fei, a newspaper journalist, but also an influential micro-blogger (Yu, 2014).

The project aimed to raise money online to offer free meals to poverty-stricken rural children, and it turned out to be a huge success. Within eight months, it raised $4 million from 900,000

online donors, and 25,000 children in rural China were offered free lunches (Lim, 2012).

As shown by the ‘Free Lunch for Children’ campaign, micro-philanthropy in China is typically led by educated urban residents, and the charity discourse online represents the ethos of the urban portrayal of rural children – whether or not such children have moved to the cities. The study of descriptive words in the second section of this chapter has shown that media accounts always portray rural children as signifiers of poverty, backwardness, ignorance and lack of modernity. The pervasive charity discourse on weibo represents a new attempt, facilitated by the so-called new media, to inscribe rural children as ‘valuable strangers within self-confident urban modernities’ (Donald, 2008:307). Micro-bloggers often adopt a top-down and paternalistic perspective in their evaluation of rural children, and try to establish a

‘giver—receiver’ relationship between themselves and such children. In some cases, the weibo discourse explicitly illustrates the selfish nature of urban charity towards the rural, the marginalised and the poor: it is for the donor’s benefit, namely, what s/he feels good about and what makes s/he feel good, rather than considering the long-term benefit of the receivers.

As the following post reads,

Does anyone know a poor-conditioned school for sons and daughters of peasant workers! Or

a welfare house. (It should be) Inside the Guangdong province! We’d like to donate as

Christmas is around the corner! Contact details needed. Hurry up! (27.11.2012/5.WB)

4.4.2 Little recognition of equal rights

Following charity and philanthropy, the second largest subject in the weibo discussion is government responsibility, with 107 records accounting for 23.4% of the overall sample posts.

There are basically two types of writing regarding the role of the Party-state which are in stark contrast to each other: one is the publicity of the government input in supporting migrant children, and the other the criticism of its performance in that field. This discursive pattern seems contradictory; however, it actually reflects the reality of the complex policy settings. On the one hand, the National Congress (2012) has pledged to ‘actively boost equal educational

opportunities for internal migrant children’ which has been widely quoted in the tweets. On the other hand, a few local governments, including Beijing, continue to forcefully close down the private schools for migrant children and to deter these students from accessing public schools (Goodburn, 2009:496). The demolition of migrant children’s schools can be seen as a conscious strategy of prohibiting rural migrants from settling in host cities (Solinger, 1999:16).

Within a very strong state-oriented system, it is not surprising that the government is regarded by micro-bloggers as the most important actor in dealing with migrant children’s issues. As shown in the earlier analysis of social actors, government agencies are more frequently mentioned than any other groups or organisations in weibo debates on migrant children’s issues.

Education is another important theme in the online debates about internal migrant children.

This category covers a few topics, such as schooling, the demolition of migrant children’s schools, teachers’ well-being in these schools and the national exam for university entrance.

These topics fall into the general category of education, as education is not only about what children learn, but also about where and how they learn, and from and with whom they learn.

As migrant children lack local permanent residency status, they are often denied access to public schools unless they pay expensive fees (Xiao, 2011:12; Cheng, 2010:26). Moreover, even if they successfully enrol in a public school and complete 12 years of education, they are prohibited from sitting the national exam for university entrance in their host city and are forced to return to their place of origin to attend it (The Economist, 2014). Given the significant regional disparities in educational resources and enrolment requirements, this forced return can be devastating for migrant students (ibid.).

Many micro-bloggers, who are mostly privileged local urban citizens, may agree with providing educational opportunities to migrant children, and may participate in charitable activities to help the group, but they do not necessarily recognise these children’s equal rights. Currently, locally registered students in big cities (such as Beijing and Shanghai) are offered many more seats in universities than their non-local peers. When proposals have been made to provide equal rights to migrant students in the university entrance exam, messages of exclusion and 96

discrimination are expressed on weibo in blatant terms. For instance, Aqing, a legal resident of

Beijing, warned migrants to ‘respond smartly’ to the proposals (02.12.2012/WB). She believed that such a reform would only benefit some upper-class migrants, and the general migrant group must not support it. In a survey initiated on Sina Weibo, around 85% of participants protested against migrant students attending the university entrance exam in Beijing; that is, the overwhelming majority of voters believed migrant children should be sent back to their own home towns (22.06.2012/WB). Many micro-bloggers may agree with the principle of equal rights and may demonstrate an ambivalent attitude towards migrant children, but ‘as soon as real or imaginary competition, interests or conflicts are at stake, the actions of the dominant group may no longer be ambivalent at all’ (van Dijk, 1991:8). As shown in the discussion of uneven access to universities, weibo writers and readers scarcely challenge the urbanite consensus on the ‘inferiority’ of rural migrants, or the unequal power relations between migrant children and urban children.

4.4.3 Comparison with the press reports

On weibo, charity and philanthropy represent the most prominent topic pertinent to migrant children, but the subject has been downplayed in the press: it accounts for less than 10% of

People’s Daily reports, and around 20% of Southern Weekly texts (see Table 3.2 in the previous chapter). According to the news agenda of the Chinese mainstream press, charitable activities for migrant children invite much less attention, and are thus less newsworthy, than controversy and conflict in relation to the group (Informants 2 and 6, personal communication, 19 and 24

February 2014, respectively). The editorial role is notable in the process of selecting news and creating emphasis. As stated by a journalist:

Donations are made every now and then to migrant children. Our readers want something

new. I once wrote about a camp run by a NGO, which was specially designed for migrant kids.

My editors showed no interest in the story. They are looking for breaking, sensational stories

to blow the readers. (Informant 7, personal communication, 25 February 2014)

Compared to mainstream journalism, weibo does not have any news agenda setting mechanism, and it has facilitated grassroots mobilisation and participation in charity and philanthropy. Government agencies, GONGOs and enterprises are usually portrayed in the press as initiators of charitable activities, but ordinary netizens are now taking a leading role in the field, and are able to achieve wide participation via social media.

Subjects such as government responsibility and education are made prominent in both the press and the micro-blogosphere. That is to say, regardless of the type of media, migrant children are often observed and evaluated in the framework of education, and the government is seen as a most important player in migrant children’s issues. This discursive pattern has been embedded in a particular sociopolitical context in which the urban-rural divide hukou system and other regulations of migration control have posed routine discrimination against migrant children (Han et al., 2011:206). Unsurprisingly, the press reports often engage in in-depth analysis of migrant children’s issues, with reference to the hukou system, labour migration and government policies. This in-depth analysis has been replaced with sentimental, emotional or satirical remarks in the micro-blogosphere, due to the strict word limit of 140 characters and the grassroots nature of online writing. However, criticism of governments and discontent with policies are relatively common on weibo, and these negative viewpoints are often suffocated in mainstream news reports due to strict censorship. The divergent remarks online suggest that weibo as a communication tool is especially meaningful in China, as it offers ordinary (urban and educated) citizens an opportunity for relatively free public self-expression.

Child-specific topics, such as physical development, puberty, dreams and expectations, have been ignored in the press coverage of migrant children, and they also receive little attention from the myriad micro-bloggers (see Table 4.6). With regard to the subject of discrimination faced by migrant children, press reports often use normalisation or vague terms to conceal the agents responsible, namely, local urban citizens and governors. This subject also seems unpleasant on weibo and was mentioned in only two tweets out of 458 items. Although migrant children are exposed to severe exclusion and routine discrimination in their mundane daily life (see Xiao, 2011; Cheng, 2010; Goodburn, 2009; Kwong, 2011), related discussions are 98

markedly downplayed on weibo. The phenomenon of ignoring or avoiding a few particular subjects in both Chinese mainstream press and the vibrant weibo sphere may suggest a consensus among the dominant legal urban citizens and groups. Child migrants, mostly with a rural place of origin and a disadvantaged social status, have been constructed as valuable strangers in China’s media-sphere that is dominated by privileged urban residents and organasations.

Table 4.6 Frequencies of subjects in weibo discourse

Subject Frequency

(458 tweets in total) Charity and philanthropy 192 Government responsibility 107 Education 69 Accidental death 59 Crafts, arts and science activities 40 Equity and justice 40 Migrant children’s return to home town 37 Children’s safety 28 Poverty 22 Labour migration and urbanisation 16 National exam for university entrance 10 Media censorship 9 Children’s mental health 5 Crime 5 Household registration 4 Discrimination 2 Puberty 1

4.5 Summary of the chapter

This chapter has found that the weibo texts typically employ the terminology in earlier conventional media reports to refer to migrant children: such terms include ‘floating children’,

‘sons and daughters of peasant workers’, ‘children of outsiders’, etc. By drawing on older lexical items, weibo writers and commentators have reproduced the ideology of previous media discourse. In other words, in both the mainstream press and the vibrant weibo sphere, migrant

children are persistently defined as a floating, rootless group on the basis of their non-local household registration (see Chapter 1 for the analysis of the hukou status and the particular meaning of being a migrant within China’s institutional social structures). With regard to specific verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the texts, this chapter has shown that weibo writers tend to emphasise migrant children’s impoverishment, disadvantage and inferiority – in other words, their ‘problems’. Moreover, weibo writers and readers have reached a consensus about migrant children’s ‘problems’, with this ideological idea often implied in the text, rather than being explicitly stated. Overall, the weibo language style in the description of migrant children is typically negative and pitying.

By tracing the social actors in the text and the topics of discussion, the study shows that the weibo discourse has particularly emphasised the roles played by ordinary micro-bloggers in migrant children’s issues, and has prioritised the subject of charity and philanthropy. The charitable activities represented on weibo are often initiated by grassroots micro-bloggers, and are small in scale and unofficial in nature. This indicates the emergence of micro-philanthropy which is significantly different from the traditional government-led, grand charitable programs

(see Yu, 2014; Shieh and Deng, 2011). While the forms of philanthropy have diversified and ordinary weibo users have now become active givers, it should be noted that migrant children continue to be constructed as passive recipients, whose subjectivity is overwhelmingly overlooked and whose voices are rarely heard.

Overall, it is argued that weibo has contributed to shifting the power of agenda setting from the Party-state and professional news agencies to ordinary netizens – who are choosing particular topics and making special emphasis in discussions of migrant children. However, migrant children continue to be portrayed as a passive, subordinate and disadvantaged group.

Migrants who want to break out of the stereotypes and choose different ways of portraying themselves, as the example of shamate shows, are likely to become an object of scorn and ridicule. Weibo, as the most popular and influential online sphere in mainland China, has reinforced the stereotypes of migrant children in the mainstream press, serving as a new channel for messages of prejudice and discrimination against the group. Again, the analysis is 100

based on a small data set, and different representational practices may be found in a wider range of weibo writings. Due to the temporal and corpus limitations, there is only so much insight that we can gather from traditional content analysis and discourse analysis applied to the diverse and unwieldy content of weibo.

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Chapter 5

Conclusion

This thesis has investigated the representation of internal migrant children in Chinese newspapers during the last three decades, and the portrayal of such children in the micro-blogosphere in 2012. Chapter 1 offers the necessary background information in relation to migrant children, a social group that has emerged since 1990 as a result of China’s economic reforms and rural–to–urban labour migration. The chapter also discusses the research aims, scope and significance. Chapter 2 discusses the research strategy. It lays out the data collection, coding and analysis process. Chapter 3 analyses 217 strategically selected press reports from

People’s Daily and Southern Weekly, and compares the similarities and differences in the representation of migrant children in Chinese mainstream press between 1990 and 2012.

Chapter 4 proceeds to investigate the image of migrant children in the weibo sphere, and argues that weibo has perpetuated the stereotypes of migrant children in the mainstream press. This is despite the fact that weibo works to shift agenda setting from the Party-state and professional news agencies to ordinary netizens particularly in the area of charity and philanthropy.

The concluding chapter summarises the key themes that run through the print and digital texts examined, and problematises the underlying ideologies in the media discourse discussed in the thesis. It explores the specificities of Chinese media discourse and cultural politics on migrant issues, in comparison with those in other countries or regions. This chapter returns to a reconsideration of the initial research objective, that is, to understand the ways in which the media produce particular knowledge and opinions about a particular social group. The chapter ends with a general discussion of the research implications and areas for future research.

5.1 Research findings and contribution to existing literature

This section is divided into three parts. The first part offers an overview of the specific

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stigmatising strategies that emerge from the sampled media texts, including the usage of special terminology, the insertion of quotes from certain social groups and the selection of particular news topics. The second part goes deeper to explore the underlying ideologies. It argues that hukou (official household registration) and suzhi (human quality) are the two most salient ideological themes underlying the media descriptions of migrant children. The third part focuses on the differences and variations within a consistent discursive paradigm. It argues that the media language in descriptions of migrant children has become less prejudicial and less discriminatory over the last three decades, and that the commercialisation of Chinese media has facilitated such children’s expressions and diversified their images.

5.1.1 Forms and modes of the stigmatisation

This research has found that the media texts use special terms and rhetoric to describe migrant children, associate such children with different social actors, channel the voices of particular social groups and emphasise selective topics for public discussion. Special lexical items are employed to refer to migrant children as a group, including ‘sons and daughters of peasant workers’, ‘floating children’, ‘little blind floaters’ and ‘children of outsiders’. These terms commonly highlight the floating, unsettled and unstable nature of migrant children’s movement, despite the fact that many were brought up in host cities and tend to settle there permanently (Duan and Yang, 2008:27). While general lexical items are widely used in media discourse to refer to the entire group, migrant children are rarely identified by individual names.

That is to say, media texts usually construct migrant children as a homogenous group of outsiders and floaters, and typically overlook their obvious differences in ethnicity, age, gender and language.

In addition to the terminology, the research has examined other dimensions of specific language use, including verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and analogies in descriptions of migrant children. It finds that various texts have constructed and reinforced a few particular characteristics about the group, such as being impoverished, rootless, passive and school-aged.

The language style in descriptions of migrant children is often negative, sometimes aggressive

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and even violent, with an overall pitying tone.

Particular social groups are mentioned and emphasised in media discourse, which thus establishes special identities and social relationships for migrant children. Urban governors and citizens are often portrayed as crucial and active players in migrant children’s issues, and the children themselves are usually designated passive, powerless and subordinate roles in media accounts. In addition, migrant children are often placed in a parallel position with various disadvantaged groups, such as the needy, the disabled and the aged as well as hospital patients.

As a result, media texts have emphasised many migrant children’s disadvantaged social status, and have generalised this characteristic to the entire group. Moreover, expressions and viewpoints of different social groups are unevenly and selectively inserted in the media narrative. The voices of government officials, analysts and experts, and educated urban citizens are dominating the media discussions on migrant children. These particular groups have regular and frequent access to the media platforms to offer their interpretations and evaluations on migrant children’s issues. However, migrant children, as well as their migrant worker parents, are quoted much less frequently and less extensively.

The study of the overall subjects reported shows that schooling, government policies and investments in the educational sector, and charity and philanthropy represent the three most prominent topics in media discussions in relation to migrant children. In other words, these children are often discussed and evaluated in the frameworks of education and charity. On the other hand, child-specific topics, such as physical development, puberty, and dreams and expectations have been largely ignored in the general media sphere, regardless of specific media platforms. In summary, millions of internal migrant children have been reduced to a few simple and fixed characteristics: passive, subordinate, and inferior school-aged minors. Such stereotypes have been established and perpetuated through the employment of specific words and the selection of general topics, through the promotion of some social groups’ voices and the downgrading of others’ expressions, through what is said and what is left out.

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5.1.2 Underlying ideologies

The dimension of hukou (official household registration) underpins almost every terminology that defines migrant children as a group, and cuts across a wide range of topics and themes in media discussions. As an institutional social structure perpetuated by governments at different levels, the hukou system plays an essential role in migrant children’s lives (Solinger, 1999:16;

Goodburn, 2009:502). It is used (or abused) by local governors and citizens to differentiate migrants as a group, to deny their access to fundamental entitlements, and to permanently fix their disadvantaged social-class status (Xiong, 2012:49). Most migrant children have been officially identified as peasants because their parents hold a rural household registration, even through the child may have been born and brought up in a city. Particularly, peasant

(agricultural rural resident) represents an inferior class status in contrast to worker

(nonagricultural urban resident) within China’s urban-rural divide social structure (Han et al.,

2011:206). Legal urban residents continue to receive fundamental welfare privileges in housing, health care, education and the pension, which are largely unavailable to peasant workers and their children (ibid.). In the media sphere, a great number of texts have marked out or alluded to the crucial role that hukou plays in issues around migrant children, and have thus manifested or reaffirmed the group’s disadvantaged and marginalised status in the established sociopolitical order.

Having initially been differentiated by their hukou peasantry status, migrant children are further separated from their privileged urban peers along the lines of suzhi, that is, human quality (see the explanation of the term in Chapter 3). In other words, the notion of suzhi represents another prominent ideology underlying the media descriptions of migrant children.

The political and media discourse not only convey the meaning of human quality, distinguish high from low quality, but also assign different social groups to different positions in the classificatory system. On the one hand, the body of the rural migrant child has been built up to exemplify suzhi in its apparent absence or inadequacy. That is, rural migrant children have been discursively constructed as signifiers of low, problematic and insufficient human quality. On the other hand, the body of migrant children’s privileged peers in the cities, that is, the body of the 105

urban middle-class child, has been built up as the site of higher or superior human quality

(Anagnost, 2004:190). The suzhi discourse is therefore able to justify the social and political hierarchies in contemporary China: those of ‘high’ quality, such as middle-class urban citizens, are seen as deserving more income, power and status than those of ‘low’ quality, such as rural migrants (Kipnis, 2006:295). Many of the sampled media texts have attempted to establish migrant children as having low-quality bodies, who are thus believed to have less value than legal urban citizens and are less deserving of the rights of citizenship.

At a broader level, the ideologies of stigmatising migrant children’s hukou status and suzhi quality are rooted in a national rhetoric that tends to degrade all rural residents – regardless of whether or not they have moved to the cities. While China is ideologically re-mapping itself as a modern nation dependent on industrial, hi-technology development, rural peasants have been established as signifiers of the state’s backwardness and underdevelopment (Donald,

2008:307; Wallis, 2013:346). Rural migrants entering the burgeoning cities carry with them ‘all of the ideological baggage’ that has been thrust upon China’s underdeveloped rural areas

(Woronov, 2004:294). In their bodily form, these migrants signify the nation’s weakness, backwardness, low quality and lack of modernity. Indeed, the prevalent stereotypes of migrant children revealed in this thesis are also found in the media portrayal of rural left-behind children (Zhang, 2013). In other words, children with a rural place of origin – whether they are living in the city or left behind in rural areas – are commonly constructed as passive, subordinate and inferior subjects in China’s mass media. Overall, rural children in mainland

China are often portrayed not as equivalent members of the national project but as valuable and inferior strangers in the self-confident urbanite public sphere (Donald, 2008:307).

5.1.3 Continuity and change in media discourse

This thesis has conducted a comparative analysis of media discourse between different periods of history, between two different types of newspapers, and between press reports and weibo tweets. The comparison between different periods of time has found that, while the terminology in reference to migrant children has become less prejudicial and less

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discriminatory during the last three decades, the media have continued to ‘other’ the group from the dominant legal urban citizens. In the early 1990s when migrant children began to appear in press reports, they were labelled with blatantly prejudicial terms, such as ‘little blind floaters’ and ‘black children’. However, these terms have been eradicated from the media vocabulary since the mid-1990s, as they were believed to underpin offensive attitudes. New terms have constantly been invented, such as ‘children of outsiders’, ‘sons and daughters of peasant workers’ and ‘floating children’. Recently, newer terms such as ‘new urban residents’ and ‘children of immigrant families’ have indicated a high degree of inclusiveness, but they are used to refer exclusively to resourceful, upper-class migrants. Despite the terminological development over the last three decades, what remains unchanged is that the terms have commonly been innovated by urban citizens and governors, and these words have consistently highlighted the identity of migrant children as ‘not-belonging’.

The comparison between different types of newspapers has shown that the commercialisation of Chinese media institutions and the ensuing diversification of media content in the last three decades have facilitated the expression of migrant children and diversified their images, despite the prevalent stereotyping practices at the same time. In the pre-reform era, the media sector was tightly controlled and financially sponsored by the Party-state, but, since the early

1990s, most media institutions have been commercialised and have become audience-oriented

(Liu and McCormick, 2011:102; Volland, 2012:114). Southern Weekly represents one of the most successful examples that sprang up in the course of China’s media commercialisation, as it often spices up official news with consumer-relevant lifestyle articles, investigative reports, entertainment and sports coverage (Qian and Bandurski, 2011:41). When reporting on migrant children’s issues, the Party-led People’s Daily has consistently given prominence to the voices of government officials, but this type of information source has been combined with competing voices and divergent opinions from non-government social actors in Southern Weekly.

Moreover, Southern Weekly allows migrant children to speak more often and more extensively which, as a result, constructs vivid individual images and delivers popular news stories. It is therefore argued that the commercialisation of Chinese media, the ensuing diversification of

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media content and the growth in journalistic professionalism have helped to channel migrant children’s voices and to diversify their public images.

In addition to the shifts over time and the disparities between different papers, the research has examined another dimension of change in the discursive pattern which is between the mainstream press and the Internet media. This shows that conventional media and web-based media interplay in many ways with regard to discussions of migrant children’s issues. On the one hand, the two most influential nationwide newspapers, People’s Daily and Southern

Weekly, have started to insert online expressions in news reports, indicating the increasing influence of Internet media on the agenda setting of conventional media. In fact, Chinese professional journalists and editors access weibo and other web-based media on a routine basis to collect information, find news topics and explore public opinion (Yu, 2011:383). News now routinely bubbles up through the Internet and makes its way to the mainstream print and broadcast media (Qian and Bandurski, 2011:61). As shown in the analysis of the Bijie incident in

Chapter 4, news of the devastating deaths of five unaccompanied migrant children was firstly disclosed online, sparking an enormous number of comments on weibo, and was then followed up by investigative reports by professional journalists (Phillips, 2012). Without the outpouring of grief and heated debates on the Internet, the story might have been suppressed by the propaganda apparatus and have thus been overlooked by news workers. In other words, the

Internet media are not only able to amplify the play and influence of major news, but are also able to play a key role in helping reporters and editors to counter the propaganda apparatus and achieve professional journalism.

On the other hand, the research finds that weibo, as the most influential and vibrant sphere for public discussion online in mainland China, has mainly drawn upon the vocabulary of the conventional media to define migrant children. Conventional media institutions are quoted frequently by weibo users as a reliable source of information and as a significant player in charitable activities for migrant children. Having said that, weibo users are choosing their own agendas in the discussion of migrant children and related issues. In other words, micro-bloggers are selecting special topics for discussion and creating particular emphases in 108

their writing. Charity and philanthropy, with the practice often initiated by ordinary weibo users, are made the most prominent subject on weibo, but this topic has been largely overlooked or downplayed in the mainstream press. In summary, weibo has helped to shift the power of agenda setting from the propaganda apparatus and professional news workers to ordinary micro-bloggers in discussions of migrant children’s issues. Despite this power shift, migrant children are continuously portrayed as a passive, inferior and homogenous group in either online forums or offline media discourses.

5.1.4 Summary

Overall, we have seen a consistent representational pattern over the last three decades and across different media platforms, in which migrant children appear as a homogeneous, passive, subordinate and inferior group whose voices are rarely heard. Tens of millions of migrant children have been reduced to a few, simple characteristics, that is, a disadvantaged, underclass group of children who are caught up in their schooling plight, impoverishment or other ‘problems’. Consequently, the basic dimensions of their humanity have been distorted in media accounts. The stereotyping of migrant children is related to a broader discursive paradigm which tends to stigmatise all rural children in mainland China. As most migrant children have a rural place of origin and are permanently fixed as peasants, they have to carry the symbolic baggage that has been assigned by the national ideology to rural residents, acting as signifiers of low quality, underdevelopment and backwardness.

Beneath this dominant representational paradigm, there are indeed occasional challenges or variations. A few news reports and online postings have reflected on the ideology that regards rural migrants as low-quality subjects, or have constructed positive images about migrant children – such as descriptions of their confidence and sophistication in contrast to the popular abject and ignorant images. However, adding positive images to the largely negative repertoire of representation does not necessarily undermine the existing stereotypes. Instead, it may serve as a strategy which reassures that the majority of migrant children continue to stay in their appointed place, that is, as a marginalised passive low-quality group within the

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established sociocultural order. The occasional positive descriptions of migrant children in the media do not necessarily undermine the dominant negative images, but may reinforce the existing stereotypes.

This thesis makes its contribution to the studies of media, migration and childhood in contemporary China in the way it has offered a historical account of migrant children’s images in the mainstream press and has provided a reappraisal of the influence of weibo. The research outcome has not only confirmed previous research findings about the media stigmatisation of migrant children (Luo, 2011; Wang and Gao, 2010) but, more importantly, it has traced the evolution of such images over time, the changes between conventional media and Internet media, and the ideologies underlying media texts. The thesis has also reappraised the extent to which weibo facilitates public debates. Technically, it is possible for migrant children to appropriate the means of the Internet media to represent themselves in their own terms. In reality, however, the most dynamic and influential online platform, weibo, has been dominated by urban, educated and privileged citizens, who tend to reinforce the existing class bias and impede the expressions of such marginalised social groups as inflowing migrant children. As discussed in Chapter 4, when some rebellious young migrants tagged themselves as shamate

(which literally means ‘smart’) and expressed themselves on weibo, they were ruthlessly mocked and discriminated against by the dominating micro-bloggers (Tao and Donald, 2015).

The word shamate was then reshaped and controlled by the dominant Internet users to carry negative and prejudicial meanings. This example suggests that weibo may have been manipulated by urban, educated, middle-class citizens, which would exert a negative influence on the expressions of disadvantaged and marginalised social groups via the platform.

The research also speaks to international studies of minority representation in other continental entities, such as Europe and North America, as typical stereotyping strategies have been found in Chinese media texts and in the media discourse of other countries. Indeed, there are specificities regarding the media portrayal of internal migrant children in the Chinese context. This thesis has shown that child migrants are often differentiated from those in the majority, namely, the legal urban citizens, along the lines of their rural household registration, 110

their ‘low’ quality, impoverishment, educational plight and other ‘problems’. By contrast, according to studies of media representation in other immigrant-receiving countries, transnational immigrants are often rendered specific and are stigmatised based on their race or ethnicity (see Donald and Rattansi, 1992; Gilroy, 1992; Hall, 1997; Back, 2002; Hermanin et al.,

2012). Nonetheless, there is a common process of ‘othering’ in the media of Chinese cities that receive rural migrants and in the media of other countries that host transnational ethnic minorities. Inflowing migrants, either rural-to-urban ones or transnational ethnic groups, are commonly represented and fixed as the ‘other’ who are in binary opposition to ‘us’, that is, the dominant local legal citizens (Hall, 1997:230). Media discourse often reduces numerous immigrants to a few, simple, essential characteristics, and tends to assign identical characteristics to the whole group regardless of individual variations (Hall, 1997:257; Rattansi,

1992:25). Immigrants’ ‘differences’, that is, the characteristics that distinguish them from the majority social group members, are emphasised and repeated from text to text, as if such differences are natural and uncontestable. Overall, racial and ethnic differences are usually fore-grounded in the media representation of transnational immigrants, but stereotyping strategies have been equally employed by China’s urban-centred media to stigmatise rural migrants.

5.2 Research implications and recommendations for future study

Having summarised the most significant findings of the thesis, this section next discusses the implications of the research with regard to China’s transforming digital media and the political influence on media discourse. It also identifies certain areas towards which more work could be directed in future, such as the usage of digital media by young rural migrants in China.

This thesis has noted the influence of the Party-state on the media language and vocabulary. A cluster of terms in reference to migrant children have originated from government documents, with them later injected into press reports and further reproduced via digital media channels.

The meanings ascribed to a term, such as ‘floating children’, and the ways in which it is to be used, are overwhelmingly influenced by political power. This kind of linguistic manipulation by

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the Party-state was pervasive in China during the pre-reform era, particularly in the course of the 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution (Ji, 2004:3). In contemporary China, the Party’s control of media language has indeed been diminished, but it should be noted that many words in media discourse remain politically charged (Schoenhals, 1994:1). While the Party-state continues to control the media sector through macro-level mandatory measures, such as owner restrictions, licensing and inspection of content (Volland, 2012:118; Brady, 2012:21; Zhao, 1998:20), the political influence on media discourse is also manifested at a detailed, micro-level of specific language use. A study of key lexical items in the media text, that is, considering the origins of a term and its terminological development, can offer some insight into the political influence on media discourse, and can also throw much light on the broader media–power relationship.

In addition to the Party-state’s influence on media language use, another implication of the thesis lies in the discursive changes that new ICTs may bring about. It has never been an easy task for the media to represent a minority or marginalised social group in a fair, realistic and coherent manner: this applied equally to the digital media (Georgiou, 2012:796). Therefore, an empirical and comparative approach is often needed to evaluate whether a particular new form of media has given rise to any discursive change, or if it has simply reproduced already existing discourse without introducing any new elements (Jorgensen and Philips, 2002:7). The diffusion of digital media, such as weibo, may convey alternative knowledge, opinion and ideology, which have been overlooked or downplayed in the conventional media discourse.

However, digital media may also serve as a new channel for messages of prejudice and discrimination, and may reinforce the existing class biases of the media and further stigmatise disadvantaged and marginalised social groups (Zhao, 2008:92). This point has been further confirmed through the analysis of weibo in Chapter 4.

This thesis shows that weibo users are enthusiastic about organising small-scale, unofficial charity for migrant children, but they barely recognise such children’s equal rights, and often demonstrate a punitive attitude and approach to young unruly migrants who attempt to express themselves in their own terms via weibo. This kind of classism is comparable to racism at the international level. Digital technologies have given rise to new patterns of racist culture 112

within trans-local and international coordinates (Back, 2002:630). New types of racist culture are made possible in cyberspace, such as racist harassment through ‘mail bombs’ and simulated games expressing racial violence (Back, 2002:632). Future research is needed on the combination of racism and classism in the digital world in its representation of young migrants of different ethnic backgrounds.

Given the ongoing and dramatic media transformation in contemporary China, data from emergent online platforms, such as wechat (weixin 微信, Chinese equivalent of WhatsApp), need to be collected and analysed in future studies to capture the most recent trends in the field. Weibo had its heyday from 2009–2012 and has recently slowed down its expansion

(China Internet Network Information Centre, 2013). However, the analysis of the thesis is important as it has spelled out the continuity and change between online discourse and conventional media reports, and this establishes preliminary results for future studies of

China’s transforming digital media. What has been said about weibo can equally be applied to the analysis of other online media platforms. The approach of critical discourse analysis (CDA) employed by this thesis helps to provide a framework for future analyses of other media forms and their interplay with existing media platforms.

This thesis is limited by the size and scope required in a Master’s thesis. Out of necessity, the study has not been able to analyse a larger pool of data that includes more diversified media sources over an extended period of time. In addition, it has not considered migrant children’s own usage of digital media or the heterogeneous backgrounds and experiences of young rural migrants in China. Pioneering research by scholars in the field of media, migration and childhood studies has started to emerge. Scholars have explored the usage of mobile phones and the Internet by rural young migrants in China, unveiling the characteristics of their new media practices and the implications for their social identity and relationships (see Cartier et al.,

2005; Qiu, 2008; Wallis, 2008, 2013; Tao and Donald, 2015; Wang, 2014). Further research is needed to explore young migrants’ discourse and self-representational genres on digital media platforms, and to compare this self-representation content with the ‘othered’ representations in both traditional and digital media space. Engagement with young migrants’ own expressions 113

and the comparison with earlier media discourse will address questions on how the discursive paradigm shifts alongside the changing digital landscape, and how such a shift will restructure migrant children’s subjectivity and identity.

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Appendices

Glossary

Term Page index

Black children Hei haizi 黑孩子 39-40

Children of immigrant families Suiqian zinü 随迁子女 46

Children/Students of outsiders Waidi haizi/xuesheng 外地孩子/学生 42

Floating children Liudong ertong 流动儿童 5, 44

Golden swallows Jinyan 金燕 67

Hukou Household registration 户口 5-6

ICT Information and Communications 8 Technology

Little blind floaters Xiao mangliu 小盲流 39-40

Little migratory birds Xiao houniao 小候鸟 67

Micro-philanthropy Wei gongyi 微公益 93-95

Netizens Citizens on the Internet 14

New urban residents Xin shimin 新市民 46-47

Peasant workers Nongmin gong 农民工 43

Peasants Nongmin 农民 43

People’s Daily Renmin ribao 人民日报 24, 36

Shamate Smart 杀马特 77, 80

Sina Weibo Sina micro-blogging website 新浪微博 26

Sons and daughters of labourers Dagong zidi 打工子弟 42

Sons and daughters of outside Wailaigong zinü 外来工子女 42 labourers

Sons and daughters of peasant Nongmingong zinü 农民工子女 42-43 workers

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Term Page index

Sons and daughters of the Liudong renkou zinü 流动人口子女 50 floating population

Southern Weekly Nanfang zhoumo 南方周末 24, 36

Suzhi Human quality 素质 56-58

Vagrant children Liulang er(tong) 流浪儿（童） 82

Weibo Micro-blogging 微博 13, 75

Wechat Weixin 微信 113

Workers Gongren 工人 43

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Guide to the interviews with Chinese journalists and editors

The following questions were discussed in the researcher’s interviews with 12 Chinese journalists and editors. Each interview was open-ended and did not follow a strict structure.

The participants had been encouraged to raise any questions that they thought were important or interesting.

1. What words or phrases are available for you to refer to China’s internal migrant children?

Which term do you prefer to use in your writing? And why? Do you know the origin of a particular term, such as government documents or academic publications?

对国内流动儿童的称呼有哪些？您倾向于使用哪一个，为什么？您知道某个特定的称呼是

怎么来的吗，比如来自政府文件或学术文献？

2. Is there any instruction or order from the propaganda department with regard to the media’s coverage of internal migrant children?

在报道流动儿童方面，有没有来自宣传部门的指示或精神？

3. Have you found any differences between newspaper reports and weibo tweets in terms of the way they represent migrant children?

在对这些儿童的呈现方式上，您是否注意到报纸报道与微博有什么不同？

4. Do you use weibo? If yes, have you ever drawn upon any element of professional news reports when tweeting on weibo? Vice versa, do you collect stories or gather information from weibo when writing news reports?

您使用微博吗？您在网上发表言论时，会借鉴传统新闻报道的元素吗？同样，您在撰写媒

体报道时，会上微博寻找素材或搜集信息吗？

5. Weibo tweets are sometimes removed by the censors. What politico-cultural factors do you consider when you tweet about migrant children?

微博有时会被审查员删除。您发表关于流动儿童的微博时，会考虑哪些政治文化因素？

6. Are you satisfied with the media’s coverage of migrant children? Is there any issue that you think needs to be addressed regarding the media representation of the children?

您对国内流动儿童的媒体报道满意吗？您认为有没有什么问题需要引起注意？

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