Audiences of distant suffering in authoritarian regimes: Denial mechanisms and acts of moral justification

Abstract

The study of the audiences of distant suffering in authoritarian regimes has received relatively little scholarly attention. This article begins to ameliorate this gap in knowledge by examining how Chinese audiences legitimise their unresponsiveness to mediated victims of global disasters. Drawing upon data from semi-structured interviews and focus groups with participants (N = 81), the study discusses the dominant regimes of justification which inform audience inactivity, the associated argumentation strategies and patterns of reasoning, and their sociocultural and ideological underpinnings. We find that decision-making about the moral justification for inactivity is influenced by state-propaganda media narratives, preferences for ideologies, perceptions of national identity and global responsibility, and geopolitical imaginations. These findings have implications for expanding the ontological horizons of distant suffering studies that are currently embedded in Western spatial and ideological dimensions, particularly in a world of crises spawned by globalisation and mediatisation.

Keywords

Audiences authoritarianism cosmopolitan dispositions distant suffering humanitarian communication global crises

Introduction

Today’s interconnected and highly mediated societies are brimming with imagery and descriptions of faraway others’ catastrophes, from climate catastrophe to virulent pandemics, from armed conflict to world poverty, from economic risk to forced migrations, and from poverty to human rights violations (Cottle, 2014). In these contexts, as part of a moral-ethical turn in media scholarship, an emerging field of ‘distant suffering studies’ explores the mediation of human vulnerability as a cause for action in contexts of need and risk (Chouliaraki, 2015: 708).

Much of the existing scholarly work has been based on epistemological debates and textual analysis and focuses on the aesthetic properties and power constellations of media portrayals of distant others’ suffering and vulnerability (Chouliaraki, 2006, 2013; Silverstone, 2006). This rich and coherent cluster of research recognises certain regimes of Foucauldian meanings in media texts, and diagrams representational behaviours that constitute recommendations for audiences to interact with and commit (or not) to mitigate the suffering and alleviate its sources (Orgad and Seu, 2014). Lately, informed by a post-positivist deductive-nomological or post-structuralist inductive-critical stance, we have witnessed a rise in substantial and rigorous audience-centred empirical efforts with a focus on the validation of assumed spectatorship. These empirical studies have predominantly studied audiences’ reactions to and interpretations of mediated suffering through the news (Huiberts and Joye, 2019; Kyriakidou, 2017; Scott, 2014; Weikmann and Powell, 2019), and, less often, through PR materials distributed by humanitarian campaigns and development mediators (Seu, 2016; Seu and Orgad, 2017). Given the proliferation of modern technology in the contemporary polymedia milieu, and with the emergence of algorithmically infused platform societies (Van Dijck et al., 2018), a thin but growing body of studies has investigated audience engagement with humanitarian communication through online campaigns and novel medium such as virtual reality (Xu and Zhang, 2022).

Essential to all these studies is the quest to empirically evaluate whether mediated suffering can deepen our sense of cosmopolitan responsibility in the sense of making people more tolerant, hospitable, and reflexive in relation to the distant others (Chouliaraki, 2006), contributing to the processes of cosmopolitan socialisation arising from the global crises of a world risk society (Beck, 2009). Some ‘optimistic’ findings have illustrated the existence of empathetic connections and action at a distance or a strong sense of agency towards mediated human vulnerability (Huiberts and Joye, 2019; Kyriakidou, 2015). Still, more appreciably, scholars have stressed the idiosyncrasy and plurality of people’s engagement with distant suffering using quantitative k-means clustering techniques (Huiberts and Joye, 2019; Weikmann and Powell, 2019) and qualitative taxonomies (Kyriakidou, 2015). They have detected various types of passive spectatorship in audiences’ banal lifeworld, such as voyeurism, involving contemplation in awe, and apathy due to the inability to act (Scott, 2014; Seu, 2010).

Of particular concern is that these contributions carefully map a prototypical Western spectatorship, with an a priori assumption that humanitarian disasters occur in the Global South and are outside the direct experience of the majority of the public in the affluent West (Ong, 2015). Scholars have argued that the existing Western gaze on the subject is not to be understood as a mere reflection of Western-centred academia but as the result of a field developed out of an explicit critique of Western media practices and stereotypes of mediating the other (e.g. collectivisation, homogenisation, anonymisation, marketisation, and dehumanisation) (Joye, 2013). Moving beyond the paradigmatic context of the audience of suffering as embedded in Western spatial and ideological dimensions (Kyriakidou, 2021), we can invite the field to reflect upon the ‘broad conditions of intellectual production, and propose an epistemic shift’ (Waisbord and Mellado, 2014: 361), thus increasing the diversity of analytical variables and frameworks. This ‘de-Westernisation’ (Joye, 2013: 118) of the field is exemplified by Ong’s (2015) ethnography of media audiences in the highly classified society of the Philippines. By investigating the lay moralities of national audiences and power relations between different socio-economic classes, Ong (2015) demonstrates that power also traverses viewing relationships within the Global Southern sphere, between the suffering working class and the wealthy middle classes. This ethnographic study in a non-Western context concludes that the proximal and internal sufferers remain others beyond reach and forces scholarship to re-evaluate key sociological categories, such as compassion fatigue, otherness and proper distance (see also Chouliaraki, 2015).

However, unfortunately, the study of the audiences of distant suffering in authoritarian regimes characterised by different social realities and political phenomena has received almost no scholarly attention. Of all the non-Western authoritarian countries, China represents a prime example for two reasons. First, China represents a distinct sociocultural and geopolitical context, with a most quintessential form of government-controlled media parallelism (Zhao, 2012). Perhaps more than any other country globally, China’s state control over information is deep and far-reaching, and the dominant ideology of authoritarianism has permeated civil society (Cantoni et al., 2017). Second, as the most rapidly growing global power and a rapidly industrialising economy, China’s occupation of positions in the international scene and its emerging roles in global politics echo a realist idea of a global power shift from West to East prompted by economic facts. It undoubtedly poses the most significant challenge to Westernised assumptions and conceptualisations about the mediation of distant suffering.

The article takes a step towards ameliorating this gap in knowledge by examining Chinese audiences’ responses to mediated distant suffering and their own everyday morality. In particular, to shed light on the dilemmas inherent within cosmopolitan socialisation processes in authoritarian regimes, the article concentrates on how Chinese audiences legitimise their unresponsiveness to mediated victims of global disasters. The literature review section begins by reviewing the existing studies of audiences’ passivity in the face of mediated distant suffering and identifies Seu’s (2010, 2016) social psychology research as offering a useful means of investigating the ways in which audiences routinely neutralise appeals to act on distant suffering. We then reiterate the importance of the national socio-historical context and specific sociocultural embedding within audience reception of humanitarian communication. Methodologically, we conducted a large-scale audience study involving semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 81 participants in total. By analysing qualitative data thematically and discursively, the results section discusses the dominant regimes of justification which inform audience inactivity, the associated argumentation strategies and patterns of reasoning, and their sociocultural and ideological underpinnings. In doing so, through the lens of a non-Western authoritarian context, the article provides much-needed empirical insights into audience decision-making about their moral justification for inactivity, adding to the body of studies on the mediation of distant suffering. It thus expands the ontological horizons of distant suffering studies as embedded in Western spatial and ideological dimensions, particularly in a world of global crises spawned by globalisation and mediatisation.

The audience of distant suffering

Passivity and denial mechanisms in the face of mediated suffering

For many years, through visual and verbal/multimodal text analysis and general impressionistic analysis, much research on the production of (media) representations has attempted to explain the long-debated issues of why most audiences remain passive in response to mediated suffering and why there is society-wide desensitisation and indifference. Illustrative of such assumed spectatorship is Moeller’s (1999) concept of ‘compassion fatigue’ and the vicious cycle in which the public spirals into stable passivity, apathy, and cynicism due to the repetition, routinisation, and naturalisation of news coverage. Chouliaraki (2006) argues that audiences’ lack of agency is mediated through representational repertoires in the news, which are often dehumanised and biased in their construction of the hierarchies of life that define whose misfortune matters. Although these assumptions seem tenable, the fundamental problem is that they often fail to sustain the distinction between media representations and audience receptions (Kyriakidou, 2021; Orgad and Seu, 2014).

Essential to subsequent empirical audience-centric research is the quest to seek sociological and psychological causes of audience passivity in their everyday lifeworld (Schieferdecker, 2021). Specifically, in psychological and behavioural sciences, the realm of the attitude-action gap has listed various psychological traits that might interfere with audiences’ prosociality and morally cognitive responses to humanitarian misfortune, such as psychophysical numbness to a large number of losses and victims, and the lack of a strong social dominance orientation and strong beliefs in a just world (Halabi et al., 2008). However, these studies were carried out under controlled conditions and with high internal validity in laboratory settings, potentially neglecting the real-life complexity of audiences’ moral decision-making processes when consuming mediated events (Seu and Orgad, 2017).

In this context, Seu’s (2010, 2016) work on the social psychology of audiences’ denial strategies and moral justifications towards international NGOs campaigns has been a particularly productive intellectual resource for clarifying plural, complex, and contentious conceptual and empirical issues. Drawing on Cohen’s (2001: 194) general sociology of ‘denial and bystanding’, Seu (2010) explored a variety of forms of implicatory denial or modes of avoidance that audiences use to discursively legitimise their inaction to human rights appeals. The way to legitimise is usually packaged with ‘a plausible, acceptable story about an action’ (Seu, 2010: 441) and a technique of moral accounting for the storyteller, such as the psychological techniques of rationalisation, the defence mechanism, and disavowal, as well as the sociological forms of apologies, normalisation, and neutralisation (Cohen, 2001).

Seu (2010) states that the modes of avoidance can be understood as ‘interpretative repertoires’ (Potter and Wetherell, 1995: 89), which refer to systems of sense-making available in society or collectively available social resources available to all who share a language and culture, which are used by the audiences for their justification and rationalisation (see also Seu, 2016). Each interpretative repertoire contains ‘argumentative topoi’, a system of public knowledge or a socially shared belief, in which the audience may find arguments for sustaining a conclusion. By adopting analytical techniques from psychology, psychoanalysis, and rhetoric, Seu (2010: 443) identified three repertoires for moral neutralisation: (1) the ‘medium is the message’ repertoire, in which respondents’ unresponsiveness is justified by presenting oneself as being resentful of and resistant to manipulative and formulaic marketing campaigns; (2) the ‘shoot the messenger’ repertoire, which attacks and distrusts the sender of the humanitarian appeal; (3) the ‘babies and bathwater’ repertoire, which questions the validity of the action suggested in the appeal in a variety of ways.

Such analytical frameworks and findings certainly provide signposts for analysing how responses to mediated suffering may, in fact, be coated as justifications. Inspired by Seu’s (2010) work, Scott (2015) found two ways of justification for passivity that audiences draw upon vis-à-vis distant suffering online. On some occasions, netizens’ inaction is justified by a cyber-sceptical claim that they always get ‘lost’ in the vast quantity of poorly disorganised online information. On more occasions, netizens position themselves as digital savvy with apparent media literacy, critically demonstrating the untrustworthiness of the material they encountered to justify their unresponsiveness.

Overall, the examination of interpretative repertoires and their argumentative topoi is crucial to our research, enabling us to uncover the culturally available accounts of legitimisation that form the moral passivity in different research contexts (e.g. stimuli, communication medium, media system). The focus of this article is to investigate the authoritarian audience in the face of the Chinese party-state media that is described as an effective tool for authoritarian regimes to shape public opinion (Repnikova, 2017; Zhao, 2012). The first research question for this study is therefore as follows:

RQ1: What are the dominant repertoires of denial evoked in authoritarian audiences by party-state news media?

Context dependency in audience studies of distant suffering

In humanitarian communication, Kyriakidou (2021) argues that some empirical findings are often isolated from the wider national sociopolitical and sociocultural context within which they are embedded, which is a potential blind spot in audience research. Mediation is emphasised by Silverstone (2006) as a dialectical process of communication that is socially, institutionally and technologically driven and embedded, emphasising not only the technological context involving the medium evolution, the forces of capitalism and modernity, and the processes of production and representation, but also the psychosocial and sociocultural context of media reception (Couldry and Hepp, 2013). As a result, audiences must be perceived to be situated within distinct societal settings with broader political and public discourses that frame audiences’ understanding of distant events and the social reality, ‘in which the media constitute an indispensable but not an exclusive or even major part of this environment’ (Kyriakidou, 2021: 98).

In a more recent study, Schieferdecker (2021) emphasised the importance of societal factors and variables in his integrated model explaining behavioural (non-)response. By fostering cross-fertilisation amongst a plethora of empirical experiences in the field of humanitarian communication and theories and models of media psychology, cognitive psychology and experimental psychology, Schieferdecker (2021) synthesises a complicated model that combines interpretative audience reception studies with traditional media effects research. This model helps to explain why people remain passive after being deeply moved by media exposure to distant suffering. Apart from the micro level of intra-individual cognitions and emotions, the integrated model presents the meso level of user dispositions and communicative networks (such as psychological traits, social integration and socio-economic position), and the social and societal macro level, involving the public sociopolitical discourse of power and culturally shared meta-narratives and available schemata (Cohen, 2001; Kyriakidou, 2015).

Likewise, some empirical findings have emphasised the importance of social context in mediating suffering. By anthropologically investigating lay moralities in Filipino society, for example, Ong (2015) demonstrates how affective detachment between the Filipino poor and the middle classes informs audience encounters with the proximal suffering of Philippine compatriots. The ways in which these causes for enacting detachment are intertwined relate to the Philippines’ classified and overly low-class populated society and the media ecology. Similarly, in Kyriakidou’s (2020) study on Greek audiences, respondents’ perceived lack of agency and their construction of hierarchies of hospitality for migrants can be linked to the particularities of Greek civic culture and society, including mistrust in institutions, political cynicism and hegemonic ideas. These scholarly accounts remind us that audience reception of humanitarian communication can be approached as a problem of civic culture as much as a problem of mediation (Kyriakidou, 2021). Otherwise, as Seu (2016: 751) argues, decontextualised research can ‘provide only a limited and fragmented picture of what is happening and overlooks the broader patterns and dynamics influencing people’s responses to humanitarian crises’.

A plethora of China-focused political communication studies have demonstrated that when Chinese audiences decode mediated events, the societal variables – termed by Kyriakidou (2017: 11) as ‘national and local frameworks’ – can affect their beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions around the issue. For example, Chinese audiences’ reception and perception of world politics is profoundly influenced by the intricate interweaving of domestic politics and geopolitical imaginaries, which can readily generate right-wing populist xenophobia, nativism, and anti-hegemonic hegemonies (Zhang, 2020). When audiences respond to the securitisation of terrorism (Guan and Liu, 2020) and transnational conflicts/disputes (Weiss and Dafoe, 2019), China’s nationalistic discourse often re-utilises a nationalist frame of past humiliation to mobilise a politico-historical memory and geopolitical hostility amongst the public, thus rejuvenating a historically inscribed hatred of ‘Western imperialism’ that has persisted in Chinese political culture since the end of the Cold War (Callahan, 2010). These findings suggest that sociopolitical contexts and frames may highly or even fully paralyse any potential for civic and political engagement and generate exclusive, antagonistic, and xenophobic public sentiment. Therefore, a second research question is proposed, focused on the role of the sociocultural and ideological landscape in authoritarian public responses to mediated distant suffering.

RQ2: How are the repertoires of denial that audiences draw upon informed by their societal contexts?

Methods and data

Design and participants

To explore how authoritarian audiences legitimise their inactivity and unresponsiveness to mediated distant suffering, the format of this study was adapted from Seu and Orgad’s (2017) interdisciplinary work on mediated humanitarian knowledge. The study involved focus groups and individual semi-structured interviews, all involving the same cohort of respondents. Compared to deductive-nomological quantitative methods based on large-N samples, inductive qualitative methods do not aim to quantify the prevalence of modes of avoidance in audiences at large or deduce more general principles from the given case. Still, the goal of this explorative study is not to look for generalised trends amongst a broader sample of the Chinese audience, but rather to discover the more dominant modes of discourse and singularities amongst audiences. Research with an exploratory and idiosyncratic nature, setting out to take a first step towards understanding a new research agenda, is considered to benefit more from qualitative than from quantitative data (David and Sutton, 2011).

The snowball sampling technique was utilised to recruit focus group respondents. We recruited a few initial seeds who fit the research criteria through informal networks of community organisations. Sampling is a cyclic process that continues until no new themes are found during data collection. The final sample comprised 18 groups with a total of 81 respondents. The respondents varied in terms of gender (53.1% female, 46.9% male), educational level (60.5% bachelor’s degree or higher, 39.5% some high school education), and age (20–4, 35–49, 50–70; M = 33.9, SD = 11.2), and were a geographically diverse group from urban and rural areas of China.

We structured group conversations around relatively similar age groupings with an even gender mix to encourage positive group dynamics and deliberately avoided both the youngest and oldest media users, as these have demonstrably different media habits (Fletcher and Nielsen, 2019) and cosmopolitan dispositions (Scott, 2015). Regarding sociodemographic variables related to geographical locales and educational level, we kept the homogeneity within the focus groups but achieved eventual diversity across the focus groups. Such group settings may facilitate the interaction of discussion so that common-sense discourses are more vividly negotiated and illustrated, which may encourage respondents to dwell on ideas, argue with their peers and challenge others’ opinions, which may result in collecting more realistic discourses and utterances that reflect what respondents truly think.

However, data generated in one-off group discussions can be contrived as respondents may simply rehearse the dominant discourses of global compassion or humanitarian solidarity, in which the voices that tend to deviate from the norm may be silenced in fear of repercussions from their group peers (Scott, 2014). Furthermore, focus group respondents may be more inclined to express culturally expected views, such as politically correct answers or inconsistent answers, particularly in China’s communication sphere of highly restricted free speech, which precisely creates the divide between a whisper in the mind and verbal or public speech (Boltanski, 1999). For these reasons, the semi-structured face-to-face interview may allow respondents to speak freely about their mediated experiences of distant suffering (Seu and Orgad, 2017), thereby complementing the current study and minimising potentially distorted data. Nineteen respondents were selected from the initial focus groups, on the basis that they formed a representative sample and had volunteered to participate in the follow-up study.

Stimuli and procedure

In the focus group study, we conducted 18 group meetings between June and July 2021 with the support of research assistants. Participants were invited first to talk about humanitarian issues in general, for example, knowledge about and interest in the global crisis and international development. After we measured the predispositions and antecedents, participants were asked to watch two 20-minute television news segments.

The news segments were retrieved from China Central Television (CCTV), the country’s predominant public broadcaster. Television – in traditional and online streaming forms – remains one of the most powerful forms of government-controlled media available to authoritarian regimes despite the increasing complexity of media ecosystems and fragmentation of audiences, certainly driving the consciousness of news and events amongst the biggest domestic audience in China.

One of the news segments focuses on the Australian bushfires of 2019–2020 that caused substantial economic damage and human misery. The other news segment is about the 2015 European migration ‘crisis’ and its aftermath up to 2020, in which millions of people from Syria and Afghanistan are being forced to flee their homes due to war, oppression, or disastrous economic circumstances, while European societies are mired in the alarming danger of terrorism. Both stories are deeply emblematic of the global interdependency crisis and are directly tied to questions of injustice and inequality (Cottle, 2014). Moreover, according to Doboš (2019), different spatial contexts and imaginative geographies may contain different predispositions to induce politics of pity. For this reason, the multiple locations of the disaster sites in the news segments allow for investigation of the multivalences of mediated relations between the Chinese public and others. After stimulus exposure, respondents were asked what they thought about these two specific examples, such as the perceived message, and their thoughts and emotions, sense of personal responsibility, and ability to help.

The follow-up individual interviews with 19 participants were conducted in September and October 2021. Each interview procedure consists of two stages. The first stage followed the biographical narrative interviewing method and asked for a story from the participant’s life related to caring for people (Seu and Orgad, 2017). The second stage, informed by the above biographical information and the data gathered in focus groups, followed a semi-structured interview, designed to explore individuals’ experiences of mediated suffering and their pro-social behaviour and attitude towards humanitarian and international development issues.

Data analysis

Data were analysed thematically and discursively. The analysis is data driven, and the coding is a recursive process using NVivo 11. Both the author and a research assistant are native Chinese speakers, and both were involved in the coding. Thematic analysis was used to sketch the broad themes and preliminary patterns that emerged from the focus groups and interviews using the ‘scissor-and-sort’ technique (Stewart and Shemdasani, 2015). Discursive analysis followed the discursive strategy pattern introduced by Reisigl and Wodak (2009) and Seu (2010, 2016) (see Table 1). The analysis pattern was intended to generate typologies of the public discourse, socioculturally laden repertoires, and moral scripts informing audiences’ responses. Data analysis was conducted by the author to ensure consistency, and regular meetings were held to discuss any equivocal results with a research assistant.

Table 1.

A summary of the principal questions to be asked in applying the discursive analysis of audience denial.

Discursive strategy	Purpose	Principal questions
Nomination	Discursive construction of objects, phenomena, processes and actions.	How are suffering and actors (sufferers, benefactors, persecutors, and spectators) referred to linguistically?
Predication	Discursive qualification of objects, phenomena, processes and actions.	What characteristics or qualities are attributed to suffering and actors?
Perspectivation	Positioning the respondent’s or writer’s point of view and expressing involvement or distance.	From what perspective are these labels and attributions expressed?
Argumentation	Persuading addressees of the validity of specific claims of truth and normative rightness.	By means of which strategies and argumentation schemes do respondents try to provide the validity of specific denial claims?

Results

Preoccupied with savvy consumption

The analysis finds that the first major obstacle which appeared to prevent participants from morally engaging with distant suffering was a strong distrustfulness and disapprobation towards much of the authoritarian rhetoric and propaganda that they encountered. The following extract is illustrative of the way in which information from the party-state media was denied by many participants for being ideological and prejudicial. After watching a news segment about the bushfires in Australia, the participant positions himself as a reflexive and critical assessor who evaluates and judges the actions of party-state media in generating national identity and safeguarding regime legitimacy.

This is the most typical form of propaganda . . . The party-state media is very good at exploiting the political failures of others and in turn proving the superiority of our political system . . . I’ve always been suspicious of their political manipulation! (M, 32, FG12).

Similar scepticism was expressed regarding the news segment about the displacement crisis worldwide. Participants justified their suspicions using definite analytical methods (e.g. fact-checking). For example, in the following response, the participant demonstrated that the party-state media often appropriate texts from foreign sources to ‘fake an aura of legitimacy and authority’ (Zou, 2021: 527) to produce maliciously crafted disinformation and mistranslation.

I checked the original statement Guterres published at UNHCR. This is a complete misinterpretation. Condemning and criticising the West is the real purpose of this news (F, 33, interview 3).

The data suggest that although such denial accounts were more commonly presented in interviews than in the focus groups (being subject to social desirability bias), in both research settings they clearly indicated a stronger scepticism towards the authoritarian messenger – Chinese party-state media at large. As scholars have found (Scott, 2015; Seu, 2010), participants sought to legitimise their unresponsiveness by drawing attention to the unreliability and untrustworthiness of the messenger. In the case of Amnesty International appeals, the international humanitarian agency was positioned as a liar and a ‘manipulative and self-serving’ messenger by audiences (Seu, 2010: 449). Audiences positioned themselves as victims of a manipulative, messenger-curated consumerist campaign and in need of protection, preoccupied with their own mediated narcissistic self-pity (Chouliaraki, 2013). By contrast, in the context of searching for information about international development online, Scott (2015) found that digital audiences constructed themselves not as manipulated victims in need of protection but as active media-literate users demonstrating the untrustworthiness of the material they encountered.

In the authoritarian mediated sphere, the messenger repertoire closely corresponds with Scott’s (2015) findings. Participants positioned themselves as critical and discerning activists, who were politically savvy and socially astute, rather than victims. During their reception, they developed ‘preferences for political liberalism’ (Pan and Xu, 2018: 268), thereby displaying opposition to authoritarian ideologies. In other words, they signalled an ability to recognise the intent of the authoritarian rhetoric and propaganda. These participants are generally younger, better educated, and have access to news content at odds with the singular domestic state-propaganda media narratives that are the habitual norm. However, problematically, during their reception participants overly invested their attentiveness and cognitive resources (Schieferdecker, 2021) on their social reflexivity to counter authoritarianism, rather than on the mediated suffering of people forcibly displaced by wars and climate change. For example, we find that by placing the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes and party-state media at the centre of conversations about the plight of distant others, the distant sufferer is either diffused in the audiences’ hectic dissident expressions or completely erased from their responses.

Interestingly, on many occasions where forcibly displaced people in the Global South were discussed, participants not only rejected the authoritarian messenger but further proposed solutions to its communicative strategies in order to exemplify a disposition of feeling good about oneself. For example, as a group participant suggested, ‘the emotional stories of individual women who are often accompanied by children and the humanitarian appeals delivered by high-profile influencers and celebrities are very important for capturing audiences’ attention’ (M, 28, FG11). Innocent and vulnerable-looking women and children were identified as ‘ideal victims’ (Höijer, 2004), while celebrities were identified as financially successful humanitarian mediators and actors. Such neoliberal discourses based on an ironic post-humanitarian solidarity without moral and emotional weight, which values individual and personal gratification (Chouliaraki, 2013), effectively serves as a technique of neutralisation. Audiences tend to act based on an individualist reflection and a solidarity by slacktivism that skirts over the political factors and socio-economic mechanisms underpinning these crises.

In summary, by turning the complex political problems and global inequalities behind the suffering into problems about the authoritarian messenger and its communication scheme, audiences excused their spectatorish inertia and restored a positive self-image. The main storyline is not one of cosmopolitan responsibility and empathy but one of assessment of the moral responsibilities and social values of the authoritarian messenger.

Deflecting global responsibility away from themselves

The second repertoire of responses relate to disclaimers associated with a backlash against international responsibility-sharing for proliferating and interpenetrating global crises. The analysis shows that audiences mobilised two patterns of reasoning to safeguard themselves from responsibility for the catastrophe of distant others.

‘We are a poor developing country’. We find that there is a widely developed mismatch in respondents’ perceptions between global phenomena (threats and risks) and regional realities. Participants moved away from looking at vulnerable sufferers and their plight. Instead, they focused on creating the image of China as not only globally responsible but also domestically fragile and poverty-stricken. The following striking example is illustrative of this repertoire and was made in the focus group that exposes respondents to the despairing iconography of forcibly displaced people in the developing Global South.

We are a poor developing country that has done an enormous amount . . . However, there are many domestic issues that must be addressed first . . . We have far too many people living in poverty (F, 28, FG3).

While details appeared in a variety of different forms, the general statement that expressed ‘we are a poor developing country’ appeared in most discussions and interviews and was the most agreed upon. Participants explicitly claimed that Chinese nationals who were struggling with poverty should be the first priority for sympathy; hence they cannot bear a greater sharing of global obligations. Notably, as the above example shows, the sociopolitical discourse of ‘too many people’ was mobilised as a fundamental source of national identity and as a legitimate discursive strategy to defend their moral passivity. The perception of such national identity is a propagandised result of the population politics in China’s past history, fuelled by the scarcity of resources and degradation of the environment (Greenhalgh, 2010). This denial strategy perfectly captures audiences’ preference and priority for news about close-by suffering events, demonstrating the existence of a communitarian culture and insurmountable sociocultural distances. Subtly different from other studies (e.g. Huiberts, 2020), the national identity of population politics plays a vital role in constructing family first sympathy and a communitarian culture in the Chinese authoritarian context.

The perception of the national identity is also gained through demarcation from the mediated other. We find that participants perceived China as part of the developing Global South in the face of the news coverage of climate-related hazards in the developed Global North.

As ordinary people in developing countries, we provide aid to people in developed countries to help with their emergency preparedness? I won’t. It doesn’t make any sense (M, 32, Interview 11).

The participant was at his most explicit in using two discursive moves of interpretive denial. First, by intimating that there remains a considerable socio-economic vulnerability gap to climate-related hazards between the developing Global South and developed Global North (Formetta and Feyen, 2019), the participant obfuscated his specific mandate of caring in crisis. Second, by humanising the Australian victims as having ‘sovereign agency’ to feel, reflect, and act on their fate (Chouliaraki, 2006), with stronger self-sufficiency and self-dependence (Seu, 2016), the participant undermined the force of the moral engagement. Seu (2016) suggests that British audiences expand their humanitarian concerns beyond the West to Japan instead of Haiti because of Japanese self-efficacy and the cultural mirroring and identification of tenacity and civilisation. Interestingly, we observe the opposite reaction in the Chinese authoritarian context, where the beneficiaries’ characteristics and behaviour regarding their effectiveness and self-efficacy are not conditions of prosociality, but provide an excuse and moral justification for passivity.

‘The West should pay reparations for most of the misfortunes around the world’. In general, participants also chose to attribute the suffering to a cause that is impossible for them to change. Examples of this type of response included: ‘Putting a little bandage on refugees’ wounds has no precise effect. Our help is at the risk of being pointless because we cannot change global capitalism and hegemony’ (M, 28, FG11); ‘They’ve been at war for far too long . . . what will my money and sympathy fulfil? Nothing’ (M, 32, FG9). In extreme and recurring situations, participants tend to deflect responsibility to the political actors in Western liberal-democratic states. This response is exemplified by the following example, in which the participant perceived the West as the initiator and promoter of the displacement crisis worldwide, after watching the iconic story of Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi’s drowning.

I think the studio anchor made it very clear. This was the result of a game played by Western politicians . . . We have no obligation to assist or accept refugees because we have never invaded these countries . . . don’t forget that we have been victims throughout history (M, 31, Interview 4).

The speaker uncritically accepted and re-contextualised state-propaganda media narratives that delegalize Western politics, followed by a statement that China is not obligated to share international responsibility. Most importantly, he finally constructed a dichotomous view of the international order characterised by Western hegemony and other victimhood, reiterating a political identity that positions a hegemonic Western other against the Chinese public (Zhang, 2020). In this sense, the long-held and reactive victimhood complex resulting from a ‘politico-historical memory’ (Guan and Liu, 2020) of national humiliation is transformed into a collectively available excuse for deflecting global responsibility away from themselves.

In summary, on the basis of evidence we argue that the (mis)understanding and messy interpretation of global responsibility and national identity play significant roles in the perception and reception of the catastrophic aftermath of global crises. In particular, state-propaganda media narratives were used as the source and script to support the respondents’ moral reasoning.

Restoring a just-world perception

In the final repertoire, the respondents would mostly construct themselves as ‘detached’ (Kyriakidou, 2015: 226) voyeurs, reconstructing the distant crisis they witnessed as a story devoid of any moral imperative. The following description of the European refugee crisis is indicative of this denial approach. In discussions, forcibly displaced people were identified with the existential threat of terrorism, as the term ‘refugee’ was used interchangeably with that of ‘terrorist’.

I was probably more attentive to the news that they were terrorists. This point impressed me the most. Most clearly, they have brought chaos to European life . . . You’re not sure where their bottom line is . . . You never know what outrageous things they can do. That’s why I keep my distance from them (M, 24, FG1).

Moreover, there was substantial evidence to suggest that forcibly displaced people were a priori labelled (in gendered ways) as young men with dark skin whose physical presence and dispositions pose an alleged threat to women, and who therefore tend to be seen as illegitimate and undeserving of pity (Kyriakidou, 2020; Vollmer and Karakayali, 2018). Such nominations and interpretations of the racialized masculine threat became typical resources for the respondents’ discourses of victim-blaming.

I can’t forget about the alleged sexual assaults in Cologne. I wouldn’t sympathize with these people . . . such pitiful people by nature must have an inherent flaw to sink to their low state . . . They have endless needs! This is their nature (F, 28, FG3).

The claim that ‘such pitiful people by nature must have an inherent flaw to sink to their low state’ proved extremely popular and appeared consistently, even though only a few examples are given here. Narrating and judging the forcibly displaced people from the developing Global South as belonging to a generalised category of self-inflicted helplessness and inferiority, devoid of any specificity, seems to result in a failure to establish appropriate emotional and psychological distance. As a result, respondents justify their lack of emotional engagement by emphasising victims’ nefarious and insatiable ‘nature’. In fact, by devaluing or attributing culpability to the victims, participants provided an unsophisticated form of immanent justice reasoning or the cognitive account of belief in a just world (Seu, 2016). This happens because there is a convergence between the belief that good things happen to good people and their behaviours while bad things happen to bad people and their behaviours in the end. As found in studies in Western contexts (e.g. Seu, 2016), in this case, forcibly displaced people’s bad behaviour is not merely characterised as the evil-doing threat but also as perennially demanding and eternally taking. Not giving is therefore justified as reasonable, and in the extreme case of even being potentially commendable, because audiences are working to restore their beliefs in a just world.

In particular, the distinctiveness arising from the categorisation between us, the ‘good ones’, and them, the ‘bad ones’, represents the typical format of the geopolitical imagination in the Chinese public sphere, based on exclusive opposites of us versus ethnic others (Zhang, 2020). This idea is a contemporary mutation of the globally imagined racial hierarchies that are unique to Sinocentric cosmopolitanism, producing a cultural specificity that becomes apparent in a distinction between civilisation and barbarism (Rofel, 2012). As Callahan (2015: 220) argues, ‘the civilisation/barbarian distinction that informed Chinese domestic and foreign policy in imperial times is making a comeback today as a model for domestic politics and international affairs’. In this sense, respondents’ legitimate claim of inaction was informed by long-standing geopolitical imaginings and cultural stereotypes.

Conclusion

The study identifies three dominant regimes of justification that inform Chinese audience inactivity towards victims of global disasters. We find that (1) audiences may over-invest in their attentiveness towards their own narcissistic savvy consumption; (2) audiences may choose to deflect global responsibility away from themselves by constructing their national identity and delegitimating the Western actors; (3) audiences may try to restore their beliefs in a just world in the act of motivated reasoning by labelling and imagining the victims as ‘others’.

Albeit non-exhaustive or mutually exclusive, the three patterns of denial have implications for our understanding of how audiences engage with mediated suffering and the complexities of their discursive schemas and acts of mental gymnastics. On the one hand, we find that the complexities and plurality of audience reception are contingent upon audiences’ relations with the authoritarian media in general and state-propaganda media narratives. As others argue (Scott, 2015; Seu, 2010), the moral horizons of audiences are generated within a broader media context and are permeated by wider relationships with the media. On the other hand, these examples demonstrated how moral justification is situated in a complex local and geopolitical context, mediated discursively by authoritarian ideology, and constructed utilising cultural resources (Kyriakidou, 2020, 2021; Schieferdecker, 2021; Seu, 2016). In particular, the analysis presented here corroborates and confirms that an ideology of political liberalism, perceptions of national identity and global responsibility, and geopolitical imaginations of otherness play important roles in decision-making about the moral justification for inactivity.

There are a number of important limitations to bear in mind. First, despite efforts to move participants beyond the social desirability bias often associated with one-off focus groups, the multi-stage study design would still have influenced the nature of responses. Due to the recruitment method, a certain degree of self-selection was unavoidable (with an over-representation of educated participants). Second, this qualitative study has not yet sufficiently investigated the audience passivity of distant suffering by considering multi-structural variables, such as cognitive and emotional (psychological) processes, interpersonal networks, structural constraints, and discursively shared scripts (Schieferdecker, 2021).

Nevertheless, this empirical effort has begun to answer the calls for a move beyond the paradigmatic conceptualisation of the spectator of suffering as embedded in the default West, both in spatial and ideological terms (Joye, 2013; Kyriakidou, 2021). It is essential to increase the diversity of formulas of spectatorship in the shifting, complex, and ambivalent sociocultural landscape of this globalised and mediatised world, where events of the West and the non-West are mingled. The study compels us to identify commonalities and differences within existing findings about audience engagement across different media systems, especially given the acute differences between the authoritarian media system and the Western media systems of the developed capitalist democracies. For example, compared to participants in Western audience studies (Seu, 2016), we found that while Chinese participants adopted different sociocultural scripts that constitute communitarianism and post-humanitarianism, they uniformly maintained a clear but highly problematic negative/positive dichotomy between themselves and mediated sufferers (see also Xu and Zhang, 2022). Future scholars are thus encouraged to de-homogenise the research agenda so that contextual and systematic differences are untangled from wider commonalities, such as media trust. The field of distant suffering can further benefit from more wide-scale, cross-national comparative research.

Overall, however, we see this research as an important first step in examining the audience of distant suffering in authoritarian contexts. This empirical study sheds light on our understanding of the limitations and dilemmas of the process of ‘enforced cosmopolitanism’ (Beck, 2009) in authoritarian regimes. We have empirically demonstrated that the cosmopolitan disposition is constructed as limited and fragmented, heavily squeezed by ideology and cultural beliefs under authoritarianism. According to Lindell (2015), the ‘mediapolis’ risks becoming an Atlantis of contemporary media scholarship – a theoretical/epistemological utopia never to be empirically discovered. However, this does not mean that empirical research on the conditions for the formation of cosmopolitanism through audience studies is futile. Instead, if we acknowledge that audiences are powerful political actors and media agenda setters in catalysing social change and that the suffering provide the framework for political engagement, research on the audiences of suffering remains a vast and fertile undertaking requiring substantial empirical effort.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The article has benefited from helpful comments by Martin Scott, Stefan Kramer, Mengrong Zhang, Stijn Joye, David Schieferdecker, Louise Duckling, Peter Ludes, conference participants at ICA and ECREA, anonymous reviewers, and editors. My thanks to Mengrong Zhang for her assistance with the research.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Zhe Xu

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