Social categorization of Chinese ethnic groups

An examination of the social categorization of Chinese ethnic groups and its influence on intergroup relations in Australia

54th Annual Conference of International Communication Association,

May 27-31, 2004, New Orleans

Abstract

A content analysis of a purposive sample of 857 articles from four Australian newspapers was conducted to examine the social categorization of Chinese ethnic groups in Australian and non-Australian contexts, as well as the possible social influence of those identified categories. Results indicate that Chinese were primarily portrayed as “illegal immigrants” representing ordinary people and “authoritarian leaders” representing the government. While issues such as politics, business, moral/legal matters received significant coverage, issues relating to multiculturalism and interethnic co-existence received scant attention. The possible effects of exposure to these categories are reinforcement of differences between ethnic majorities and ethnic minorities rather than the promotion of interethnic co-existence. These findings enrich the existing research on the effects of media portrayal of ethnic minorities on intergroup relations and point out a few directions for further study.

Key words:

Categorization, ethnic minorities, ingroup, outgroup, stereotypes

In Australia Anglo-Australians have reportedly held stereotypes of Asian immigrants since their first contact with Chinese laborers in the 1870s (McKay & Pittam, 1993). Ethnocentrism, which refers to judging other cultures as inferior to one’s own culture, held a central position in the dominant value system at that time: Whites were held to be superior to Asians, Aborigines, and other non-Europeans (Gallois, Callan, & Parskiw, 1982). In Markus’s study (as cited in McKay & Pittam, 1993), Asians in the early 1980s were portrayed as gamblers and drug addicts and were condemned for their immoral behaviour and their unhealthy living conditions. Although current policies on immigration have moved away from Anglo-conformist ones of the past decades towards a tolerance of cultural diversity, a number of studies conducted in the 1980s and 1990s suggest that attitudes towards Asian immigrants continued to be prejudiced or hostile (Morris & Heaven, 1986; Pittam & McKay, 1993). The current Australian contemporary philosophy of multiculturalism implies encouraging newspapers to truly reflect the cultural plurality of the society. In this sense, given that the Chinese ethnic groups rank the second largest in linguistic and ethnic composition of Australia’s immigrant population from Southeast Asia (Over fifty years, 2003), an examination of the nature of their portrayal in Australian mainstream newspapers has profound social and cultural significance.

A considerable literature concerning the press coverage of ethnic minorities and racial relations has emerged since the 1970s. Some of the studies examined stereotypes in media’s portrayal of ethnic minorities (Allen & Hatchett, 1986; Mastro & Greenberg, 2000; Pittam & McKay, 1993); others explored the roles of the ethnic media in cultural assimilation (Viswanath & Arora, 2000) and in cultural identity formation (Khan, Abbasi, Mahsud, Zafar, & Kaltikhel, 1999). The dominant theoretical approach taken by those studies was the social constructionist paradigm; very few studies utilized social categorization theory to investigate the media portrayal and its social influence. The present study attempts to fill this gap by extending the boundaries of theorizing to the theory of social categorization and intergroup relations to examine the social categorization functions of the print media. Specifically, by analysing and evaluating four Australian newspapers’ portrayal of Chinese ethnic groups, it intends to contribute to the existing literature by: 1) adopting a combined perspective of social psychology and discourse analysis, rather than a single perspective in examining print media; 2) evaluating the newspaper coverage of Chinese in the host culture (Australian context) and overseas (non-Australian context), rather than looking at media portrayal of ethnic minorities in the host culture only, as was predominantly the case in past studies; and 3) applying a software program, Leximancer, in conducting content analysis in place of manual coding techniques that have dominated past content analysis studies. The overarching questions that guide this study are: What are the major concepts that Australian newspapers frequently employ to socially categorize Chinese ethnic groups? What potential social impacts could these categories have on the ethnic minorities (Chinese communities in Australia) and the ethnic majorities (Anglo-Australians)?

The social categorization functions of mass media and their social influence

Categorization is defined as the process of ordering the environment through grouping persons, objects and events as being similar or equivalent to one another in their relevance to an individual’s actions, intentions or attitudes (Tajfel & Forgas, 1981). Like any object category, a person’s representation of a social group approximates the actual organization of the environment (Wilder, 1986). Once categorization of people occurs, collective traits and intentions are attributed to the individual or group of people in question (Tajfel & Forgas, 1981). The fact that membership categories can be associated with specific features and activities provides people with a powerful resource for making sense of their social world, allowing them to make discursive connections to the category membership of the actors (Porter & Wetherell, 1987). An extensive literature indicates that the categories, once established, have a biasing and filtering effect on our perceptions and the mere categorization of persons into ingroups and outgroups is sufficient to foster bias (Tajfel, 1978). We are what we are because they are not what we are (Tajfel, 1982). As our cognitive categories are not mere reflections of the natural patterns surrounding us, but rather active constructions imposed on the environment which affect our perception and interpretation of incoming information, categorization is a social practice, the process of which is impregnated by values, culture and social representations (Tajfel & Forgas, 1981).

As an institution of culture and an influential shaper of cultural thought (McLuhan & Fiore, 1967), mass media influence the common consciousness of a large heterogeneous public through the symbolic environment they create and sustain (Goonasekera, 1999). When an ethnic group is categorised in the media, that categorization becomes the commonsense equivalence class utilized by the general community to identify members of that ethnic group (Potter & Reicher, 1987). Due to this “naturalizing” effect on the materials they present (Pittam & McKay, 1993), the mass media’s portrayal of ethnic minorities has been conceptualized as a potential contributor to perpetuating or diminishing racial stereotypes (Mastro & Greenberg, 2000). Stereotypes may be defined as an oversimplified mental image of some category of person, institution or event which is shared by large numbers of people (Tajfel & Forgas, 1981). When negative stereotypes are perceived to be real, prejudice is a likely outcome (Berg, 1990).

As language is employed both as a means of self-categorization and as a way of constructing social categories for others (Potter & Reicher, 1987), the concepts newspapers employ to socially categorize ethnic minorities can be a powerful influence on both ethnic minorities and ethnic majorities. Past research evidence in the area of ethnicity, with particular interest in the intergroup processes underlying interethnic communication and relations, suggests that the mass media shape knowledge and beliefs of the majority about minority groups and, in turn, influence minority responses to the majority (Faber, O’Guinn, & Meyer, 1987). For instance, results from presidential commissioned investigation of the impact of television on perceptions of minorities suggest that infrequent and stereotypical portrayals of African Americans influenced the way in which both Whites and non-Whites perceived minorities (Mastro & Greenberg, 2000). This role of the media in defining the consensus that people have of themselves and of other groups is particularly significant when the general public either have very little direct experience in these events or lack other sources of verification, such as the case of portrayal of ethnic minorities (Khan et al., 1999). This study is an attempt to address this issue in the Australian context.

Method

Sample

Four types of mainstream newspapers over a period of 12 months (1 January 2002-31 December 2002) were selected as sampling population: The Australian, The Age, The Daily Telegraph, and The Courier-Mail. These four newspapers are on the top of the list of newspapers with large circulations (Audit Bureau of Circulation, 2002). The Australian is circulated nation-wide as a quality newspaper in Australia. The Age, a recognized broadsheet, is published in the city of Melbourne that has a large immigrant population. The Daily Telegraph, a tabloid, is published in Sydney which is also a city with a large immigrant population. The Courier Mail, the only metropolitan newspaper of Queensland, is published in Brisbane. These three cities (Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane) represent the primary metropolitan areas in Australia. The decision on the time span (12 months coverage) was based on the fact that the amount of ethnic coverage may vary at different times of the year due to ethnic cultural holidays, and hence, a whole year’s coverage would ensure reasonable representativeness of the patterns of coverage.

Data were obtained from lexis.com website which contains electronic copy of full-length major newspapers world-wide published to date. Purposive sampling technique was employed to include coverage involving one or more characters with Chinese ethnic background. Specifically, all published articles (news items, features, editorial/opinions, letters to editors) that contained the word “China” or “Chinese” were downloaded. However, the sections of Iraq war coverage, Finance, and Sports were excluded as the characteristics of each of them warrant a separate study. After removing the irrelevant articles based on initial scanning, the data set subject to analysis consisted of 857 articles, 411 (48%) of them were concerned with Chinese in Australian context, and 446 (52%) articles were concerned with Chinese in non-Australian context including Chinese in China. The decision to separately treat coverage on Chinese in Australia and Chinese in non-Australian context was based on the assumption that media effect on reader perception may vary depending on the degree of remoteness of the events concerned. Table 1 summarizes the source of data.

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Instrument

Content analysis was performed by a software system named Leximancer, developed by the Key Centre for Human Factors and Applied Cognitive Psychology at the University of Queensland. This software was designed as a tool for tagging, mapping, and mining conceptual information from large text collections by providing both automatic analysis and customized content analysis using seeded concept classifiers (Smith, Greth, & Horberry, 2002). Concepts in Leximancer are collections of words relating to a central theme. For example, a concept such as “racism” could be represented by words such as “discrimination” and/or “ethnocentrism.” For each concept in Leximancer, a thesaurus is extracted indicating instances of the concept in the text. As some words may be more indicative of the presence of a concept, the items are weighted so that their presence provides an appropriate contribution to the accumulated evidence. In other words, a sentence (or group of sentences) is only tagged as containing a concept if the accumulated evidence (the sum of the weights of the key words found) is above a set threshold (Leximancer User Manual, 2003). In addition to extracting concepts, Leximancer can discover co-occurrence of concepts in similar contexts to reveal strength of associations between concepts. Since its first development in 2001, Leximancer has been upgraded several times; and through applications to various textual analysis, it has proved to be an efficient and effective tool for content analysis.

Analysis

As the focus of this study was to discover the major concepts that constitute the categories to represent Chinese ethnic groups, analysis was conducted at two levels: frequency of occurrence of the major concepts related to Chinese, and strength of association between those major concepts within the text. First, Leximancer was run to identify the main concepts utilized to categorize Chinese in Australia and overseas to gain an initial insight into the content of the data set. This exploratory mapping provided the domain of the categories (content). Next, after the initial extraction, 20 top-ranked concepts were examined in terms of their relationship to one another (co-ocurrence) to determine the centrality of a concept, which is defined in terms of the number of times a concept co-occurs with other defined concepts. The information on the occurrence and co-occurrence of the 20 top-ranked concepts was used to construct the categories the selected newspapers utilized to portray Chinese ethnic groups. In addition, words frequently occurring in the context where each concept or each cluster of concepts was located was identified to further define the frame of reference for a particular concept or cluster of concepts. The focus of the content analysis was to examine the major roles of the Chinese characters and to identify major aspects of concern in terms of the issues being covered.

Results

Categories for portraying Chinese in Australian context

The most prominent role in which Chinese people in Australia were portrayed was “illegal immigrants.” Concepts frequently co-occurring with “immigrants” were Chinese nationals, visa, illegal, sexual favor, authorities, and community. One proper name that most frequently occurred in this context was Andrew Thoephanous, a former Member of Parliament, who was charged for helping a Chinese woman to obtain immigrant status in exchange for sexual favor. Quite a few stories reported that some Chinese workers who overstayed their visa were found working illegally on some construction site and were kept at some detention center to be deported to China. Other stories described the illegal entry of some Chinese people into Australia either using forged passports or with the help of smugglers. Words frequently found in this context, such as “bribes” and “detention,” suggest that the issue of illegal immigrants was salient among Chinese community in Australia. Table 2 presents the results.

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Another main role in which Chinese in the Australian context were portrayed could be broadly defined as “authoritarian leaders” representing the Chinese government. The most representative concepts in this category were “leader” and “authorities.” Words frequently occurring in this context were “visit,” “party,” “detained,” “security,” “Hong Kong” and “Dalai Lama.” These words were related to leaders performing political functions for the party and/or the government such as conducting diplomatic visits to other countries or resolving issues between mainland China and Hong Kong, or resolving conflicts between the central government and Tibet. The concepts frequently co-occurring with “leaders” and “authorities” were “Tiananmen Square,” the site that reminded people of the June 4th student movement in China, and “diplomatic relations” defining the major role of the Chinese leadership. By and large, the Chinese “leaders” were described as authoritarian, even relentless. Their task was to establish diplomatic relations with other countries and resolve political conflicts, and very little connection could be drawn between the government and the wellbeing of the ordinary people.

The major aspects of concern covered could be grouped into four categories: political, business, legal/moral, and culture/life. Major concepts in the category of politics were similar to those identified in the portrayal of “leaders.” Again, Tiananmen Square was among the salient concepts and words such as “massacre,” “protest,” “student movement,” and “human rights” painted a negative picture of the Chinese leaders representing the government. Major co-occurring concepts were “diplomatic relations” (e.g. exchange official visits to other countries) or “business ties” (e.g. the billion-dollar liquid gas deal). The visit of Dalai Lama to Australia and the conflict between Chinese central government and Taiwan also received substantial coverage as well.

Similar to the portrayal of Chinese as immigrants, concepts falling into the category of legal/moral issues were dominated by illegal immigration, especially the case of Andrew Theophanous. On the other hand, the liquid gas deal between China and Australia was the focus of “business” related coverage. Although “community” and “culture” appeared among the major concepts, further examination of the co-occurring concepts illustrated that issues closely related to Chinese communities were crime, extortion of restaurants in Chinatown or in Asian stores. The frame of reference of Chinese culture was confined to medicine, food, and art. Insufficient emphasis was given to their positive contribution of cultural diversity to life in Australia.

Categories for portraying Chinese in non-Australian context

As the degree of remoteness of the events increased, the frame of reference for “Chinese” was shifted towards the government rather than the community or ordinary people. This was revealed by the concepts identified to portray Chinese in the non-Australian context. Chinese were then portrayed as “authorities” and “consulate” whose major roles involved international exchange visit (e.g. former Premier Li Peng’s visit to Australia), resolving internal conflicts (e.g. Dalai Lama in Tibet, Taiwan independence) and external conflicts (e.g. War on terrorism, North Korean asylum seekers, and missiles). Consequently, the frame of reference was more oriented towards political and legal/moral issues. Significant amount of coverage was devoted to the incidents regarding a group of North Koreans’ entry into the Japanese embassy in Beijing in search of political asylum. The handling of this political issue involved conflicts, disagreements, and negotiations between countries. Another aspect of political concern related to Chinese in non-Australian context was “terrorism” signified by a few Uighurs in Xinjiang province of mainland China, who were regarded as political separatists by the Chinese government.

In the non-Australian context, the political issues overlapped with business issues as similar concepts found in political coverage could also be found in the business section, and the concept “economic” was closely related to concepts such as “military,” “Communist,” and “political.” Once again, culture did not receive prominent attention from the newspapers. Even when the issue of culture was discussed, the topics were still restricted to traditional medicine, food or art (See Table 3).