“Re-stratifying” women: female images in China’s state media from the perspective of social stratification (2011

Abstract

In the 2010s, feminism thrived in China amid a transformation in social stratification and a rise in women’s social status. The focus of this study is on the representation of the images of women of various social strata in national news reports. Taking Xinwen Lianbo, a national news program produced by China Central Television, as an example, we analyzed visual representations of 360 female figures from 2011 to 2020. The findings revealed that, rather than reflecting China’s Tǔ-shaped stratification structure, the program depicted an “olive-shaped” pseudo-society in which women of what we term the “middle” stratum constituted the largest portion and served as multifaceted role models, women of the “prominent” stratum served as bellwethers of socioeconomic development, and women of the “ordinary” stratum did not participate in social development. The program’s imagery also created a double standard for domestic duties: Women of the prominent stratum were depicted as disembedded from the social role of housewife and breaking through the career “glass ceiling,” though not achieving equality with men in terms of their positions in society or politics, while women of the ordinary stratum as bearing the ideological reshuffle of conservative gender values. This study suggests a fresh perspective on the great disparities in the representation of women in different strata, which differs from the status of gender and stratum in real society.

Keywords

female image feminism gender media representation social stratification state media

Introduction

From 2011 to 2020, the personal capabilities and social values of Chinese women were on full display as a key component of China’s economic globalization and social modernization. Female workers in this period constituted nearly half of the country’s labor force, and more women than men pursued advanced education. In government, the proportions of female deputies in the National People’s Congress and female members of the National Committee of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference were both the largest up to that time (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2021).

Meanwhile, China’s stratification structure transformed from what could be described as an inverted T-shape, with the overwhelming majority of the population at the bottom, to a shape like the Chinese character ±, pronounced tǔ, with a much larger portion of the population in the middle (Li, 2005, 2021). As a result of this transformation, first, the population of groups with low socioeconomic status remains the largest; second, those who are in less populous strata differ significantly from each other and are distributed in a “vertical column shape”; and third, within such groups, the middle stratum has gradually expanded to become especially noticeable. Since the latest official document, the Outline for the Development of Women in China (2011–2020), showed no significant difference in the incidence of poverty among men and women (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2021), the social stratification of women appears likewise to be tǔ-shaped. This tǔ-shaped stratification became clearer: while well-paid and well-educated women ascended to the middle stratum, many others remained poorly educated and continued to earn low incomes. These two groups, then, constitute the largest in China’s tǔ-shaped social structure.

Feminism in China, however, has increasingly favored the rights of wealthy young urban residents, who constitute only a small portion of Chinese women – that is, the upper, narrow part of the tǔ-shaped social structure – while ignoring other female groups, especially the underprivileged. Studies of media images of Chinese women, nevertheless, have shown a tendency to depict them as a monolith, often opposing or antagonistic to men. Thus, there is a gap in the literature regarding differences in media representations of women, including across social strata.

Also in the period from 2011 to 2020, feminism in China flourished as never before, being fueled especially by social media (Wang and Driscoll, 2019). Thus, cyberspace has provided a subcultural arena for grassroots presumes of media to resist stereotypical and insulting representations of women collectively (Mao, 2020). However, feminist activism has little influence unless activists can attract mainstream interest (Han, 2018). In China, mainstream space is still controlled by state media outlets, which have the largest domestic audiences and reflect the power of mainstream ideology. Through news reports and other means of shaping public opinion about women and gender issues, state media construct women’s social identity, consolidate the social implications of gender values, and thus exercise moral discipline over women (Chang and Zeng, 2020).

While women have opened up “a room of their own” (Woolf, 1977: 7) in cyber subculture, our interest here is in the mainstream space that state media provide for women in terms of presenting images, and constructing identities. Accordingly, we analyzed the presentation of Chinese women in China’s state media from 2011 to 2020. We considered in particular (1) variations in the representations of female figures in state media based on their social strata, (2) the social implications of the images of women in the various social strata, and (3) the factors that influenced mainstream representations of women in these strata.

Literature review

Media representation of women: a Chinese perspective

The image and representation of women in the mass media have long been a subject of concern and, at times, heated debate for academics. Thus, numerous studies have explored gender-differentiated media coverage, concentrating particularly on the under-representation and gendered stereotypes of female politicians (Van der Pas and Aaldering, 2020). Over the past decade, several scholars have pointed to signs of change in media representation of women in politics across numerous nations and regions (Alkan, 2016; Goodyear-Grant, 2013; Lachover, 2017), including in sports journalism (Ponterotto, 2014; Muñoz-Muñoz and Salido-Fernández, 2022), and from the perspective of intersectionality (Carter et al., 2013; Galy-Badenas and Gray, 2020). This literature has not, however, established whether these changes and trends have taken place also in China, where the influence of state media on political, discursive, and social norms, as well as gender culture, is especially strong, with the result that Chinese women have not been able to establish less hegemonic cultural norms that would promote what they perceive to be the positive gendered images as Western women have (Lachover, 2017).

Several phases can be distinguished in the literature on media representations of Chinese women. Early on, from the 1950s to the 1970s, state media focused on working-class women as representative of the modernity of the time, depicting them as “iron girls” who devoted themselves to revolutionary struggle (Honig, 2000: 97–110). These female role models were described as “socialist-minded” (红, hóng), diligent (勤, qín), frugal (俭, jiǎn), and skillful (巧, qiǎo), with these characteristics constituting the ideal to which typical women aspired (Chen, 2006: 396–402). Notably, a key part of the rhetoric of this early stage in China’s socialist construction, reflecting the commitment to Marxism and the need for industrial development, was President Mao Zedong’s comment that working-class women in China were “holding up half of the sky.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, Chinese state media outlets tended to concentrate on women who took the lead in embracing new knowledge and modern trends. As a result, female images became increasingly diverse, showing more women exploring their ideals in contexts outside the mainstream discourse (Chen, 2008). Media reports also expressed concern about women in non-elite positions who endured the dual constraints of professional and domestic responsibilities imposed by the simultaneous transformation of the country’s social structure and economic system (Sun and Chen, 2015). Economic marketization led not only to the devaluation of women in the labor market, reflected in a widening gender gap in wages, but also to the social stratification of women, which played an equally important role in the social changes in China.

In the present century, however, the literature on female images in the media has devoted less attention to the issue of social stratification. For one thing, influenced by Euro-American white, middle-class feminism, Chinese feminism has likewise focused on upper-class and urban women (Chen, 2016; Huang, 2016). Thus, recent studies of female images in the media have concentrated on women who are young, affluent, and urban as research subjects, the reasoning apparently being that, since they appear more frequently than women who are older, less affluent, and live outside of cities in mass media, such women are representative of the female population as a whole. In addition to overlooking social stratification and structural inequality, most of these studies lack a comprehensive theoretical framework and criteria for categorizing women beyond simply urban and rural.

Thus, the Chinese women represented in state media were usually viewed by researchers as a whole with no socially significant differences beyond this dichotomy. The general picture of women given in, for example, People’s Daily, was of a self-conscious group ready to accomplish its members’ goals in Chinese society (Zhang, 2017). Other researchers have noted the under-representation and gendered stereotypes of women (Wu and Dong, 2019) in Chinese media, though, again, without addressing their experiences from the perspective of social status. The present study, accordingly, was designed to assess the connection between gender and social stratification by revisiting media representations of women with attention to their relative positions in China’s social structure. Our analysis thus contributes to the literature by investigating the influence of class or social stratification on the images of women in Chinese state media outlets over the past decade.

The social stratification of women in media representations

The research on the representation of women in the media worldwide has tended to focus on specific groups without reference to social status. Thus, for example, the images of female politicians in print and videos have been intensively discussed to the point of forming a subfield characterized by vigorous debate. Researchers have noted a greater emphasis on women’s appearance and personal life than their achievements, ability, strength of vision, or competence in the political arena in comparison with male politicians (Pedersen, 2018; Sazali and Basit, 2020). Some researchers have argued that women in prominent leadership roles have succeeded in part by cultivating an image that defies the stereotypical gendered portrayal in the media while less successful female politicians have tended to be more subject to traditional “patterns of sidelining” (Lachover, 2017: 446; cf. Walsh, 2015).

Female scientists also as a group typically enjoy extensive representation in popular culture, being portrayed in popular films as competent, diligent, and accomplished in their fields, often being cast as stereotypical lonely heroines (Kool et al., 2022). In the news press, however, female scientists are underrepresented compared with male scientists, who are more often portrayed as the protagonists of reports about technology and medicine whereas their female colleagues tend to appear more in images and to be quoted less often (Gonzalez et al., 2017). The press coverage of female scientists has also devoted more attention to efforts to juggle family and career responsibilities than has been the case for male scientists, a tendency that extends across most professions (Mitchell and McKinnon, 2019). Likewise, studies have demonstrated the unequal coverage of women’s sports and a lack of respect for female athletes (O’Neill and Mulready, 2015; Sherry et al., 2016), with even those who are highly accomplished often being “infantilized” by sports commentators’ descriptions of them as “girls” or “young ladies” (Fink, 2015: 334).

On the other hand, researchers have shown that women of minority groups have especially been marginalized in society and media representations over time. Thus, for example, stories in the U.S. press have often characterized black female victims as “bad people,” specifically as bad mothers, or wives or generally deviant (Slakoff and Brennan, 2019: 3). Negative and stereotypical portrayals of minority women and girls can even reinforce racist beliefs (Slakoff, 2020).

In many countries, female politicians and scientists are considered to occupy the upper strata of society, and female athletes occupy the upper and middle strata. Compared with these and other women in the upper strata, those in the lower and middle strata have received much less attention in the media representation literature. Since the previous research on the representation of women in the media has given scant consideration to their social status, we conducted the study described here to document how women in various social strata were represented in the Chinese state news media and explore variations in this representation.

The social stratification theory: development and sinicization

In modern Western capitalist societies based on private ownership, class conflict and class struggle are deeply embedded. Weber’s (2010) stratification model, one of the foundational theories of social stratification, takes into account property as well as prestige and power. Thus, a socially recognized evaluation system determines prestige status based on such factors as lifestyle, consumption, and family. Power status is based on the extent to which an individual can influence other people and is often associated with political parties. Weber’s model expanded the dimensions of stratification from politics to include the economy, society, and culture. With industrialization and the accumulation of social material wealth, the impact of property on social stratification has diminished (Clark and Lipset, 1991), and researchers have attached increasing importance to such value indexes as the mentality of values, social prestige, power status, and lifestyle.

In reform-era China, the rapid transformation of ownership and economic development have intensified social inequality. Chinese scholars use the term “social stratum” rather than the Western term “class” to describe social distinction (Liang, 1997) to distinguish the concept from the Maoist concept of class. Unlike the Maoist class, the social stratum weakens the sense of contradiction, opposition, and rebellion between different classes. Reform-era China has developed a new form of cultural nationalism distinct from that of Mao’s era that has served to legitimize inequality and stratification by defining inequality in terms of cultural differences within the country’s hierarchy (Anagnost, 2008). In the present century, occupation, education, and income are generally regarded as the three major criteria for social stratification in China, with occupation being the most significant indicator of an individual’s social status, not only determining income but also indicating educational background and prestige status (Li and Wang, 2014).

In this study, we distinguished three strata within the tǔ-shaped structure based on individuals’ occupations, education, prestige, lifestyles, and income. Focusing on the portrayal of women in the Chinese news media, we termed the strata “prominent,” “middle,” and “ordinary” to avoid the association of “up” with “superior” and “down” with “inferior,” as Table 1 shows.

Table 1.

Typical portrayal of women in the Chinese news media by stratum.

Social stratum	Prominent stratum	Middle stratum	Ordinary stratum
Occupation	Political leaders, entrepreneurs, top managers, top professionals, etc.	Middle- and lower-level staff in enterprises and institutions, self-employed workers, stably-hired workers, well-off farmers, etc.	Workers, farmers, the unemployed, etc.
Education	University degree or above	Middle school to university	Less than middle school
Prestige	Outstanding prestige	Good or normal prestige	Normal prestige
Lifestyle	Modern lifestyle with fine material conditions and high mental needs	Modern lifestyle with high material conditions and mental needs	Traditional lifestyle with poor material conditions and few mental needs
Personal annual income	>800 000 RMB	60 000–800 000 RMB	<60 000 RMB

Methodology

We sampled the coverage of women on Xinwen Lianbo, a national news program on China Central Television (CCTV). As China’s most authoritative, wide-ranging, and influential TV news program, Xinwen Lianbo exerts considerable influence on audiences across the strata of the Chinese population irrespective of gender, age, or education, and its representation of public opinion regarding women and gender issues reflects the official ideology (Chang and Bian, 2012; Ding, 2021).

We selected audio-visual content featuring Chinese women in the news on Xinwen Lianbo over the period from 2011 to 2020 and conducted content and textual analysis of our sample. First, assuming that the month-to-month variation would be negligible,¹ we chose 1 month randomly from each of the 10 years. We then selected all of the complete audio-visual descriptions of women in the news that allowed us to distinguish their social strata. Each complete description was a sample. Specifically, when the same woman appeared in multiple segments in one news story, we counted this appearance as one sample, and, when the same woman appeared in several stories, we counted the appearances as multiple samples. In total, we obtained 360 valid samples of female figures, as Table 2 shows.

Table 2.

Sampling of Xinwen Lianbo from 2011 to 2020.

Year	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	Total
Month	Jan.	Sept.	Nov.	Jan.	Oct.	Apr.	Aug.	Jun.	Nov.	Jul.	/
Sample size	26	36	29	37	36	33	41	27	41	54	360

We constructed the behavior chains of these women completely using six categories: (1) a woman’s occupation, (2) the main scene in which she appeared, (3) the topic of the news story, (4) her appellation (i.e. how she was referred to), (5) her behavior, and (6) the source of the information for the news report. We based these categories in part on the framework of Li (2015a) and added the categories of “scene” for our analysis of the video information and “information source tier” for investigating the roles of the female figures in the stories. We considered the information in the titles, leads, actual sounds, narrations, column sections, and so on and assessed the interceder reliability regularly, as Table 3 shows.

Table 3.

Category construction and intercoder reliability.

Category	Subcategory	Intercoder reliability (krippendorff’s alpha)
Stratum	Prominent, middle, ordinary	0.851
Occupation	Civil servants, athletes, teachers, medical staff, scientific researchers, service staff, self-employed, artists, enterprise managers, enterprise employees, journalists, workers, farmers, soldiers, retirees, unemployed, others	0.938
Scene	Politics and public affairs, society, family	1
Topic	Nation and politics, social security and well-being, economy, disaster, education, medical treatment, culture, sports, good deeds, science and technology, opinion polling, environmental protection	0.918
Appellation	None, kinship terminology, appellation to strangers (dà’mā, dà’jiě, etc.), pregnant women, etc.	1
Behavior(s) (multiple options)	Professional behaviors, participating in politics, supporting others, engaging in cultural entertainment, entrepreneurship and innovation, receiving honors or awards, safeguarding legal rights, taking care of the family, hospitalization, giving birth, suffering impairment of body or rights, receiving help or benefits	The alpha values for “participating in politics” and “supporting others” were 0.894 and 0.844, respectively, and the other alpha values were 1
Information source tier	Primary, secondary	0.825

Findings

Overall composition and variation

Our analysis demonstrates that Xinwen Lianbo presented its coverage of women in, not a realistic tǔ-shaped society, but an ideal olive-shaped society (see Figure 1). Among the 360 samples of women depicted in Xinwen Lianbo, those in the middle stratum accounted for 61.4%, those in the prominent stratum for 26.7%, and those in the ordinary stratum for 11.9%. Thus, the coverage on the news program misrepresented the number of ordinary-stratum women, who constitute the largest proportion in the real-world tǔ-shaped society, by paying the most attention to middle-stratum women and disproportionate attention to prominent-stratum women as well.

Figure 1.

Western olive-shaped social structure, Chinese tǔ-shaped structure, and olive-shaped pseudo-structure in Xinwen Lianbo.

Our analysis of the frequency of the coverage of women in the three strata over the 2010s, shown in Figure 2, yielded three main findings.

(1) The coverage invariably showed a preference for middle-stratum women. Amid variations such as a surge in 2012 and a plunge in 2013, the representation of these women increased overall. This trend corresponded to the transformation of social stratification in China from the inverted T-shape to the tǔ-shape.

(2) Ordinary-stratum women were least represented in the coverage for every year except 2020, which is further evidence of the under-reporting of these women.

(3) From 2013 to 2020, the trend lines for the ordinary-stratum women and prominent-stratum women were nearly horizontally symmetrical. The appearances of women in these two strata seem to have been mutually exclusive.

Figure 2.

Variation in the frequency of women in the three strata from 2011 to 2020.

Characteristics of the women in the three strata

The coverage of women in the prominent stratum included senior political officials (48.9%), distinguished scientists (14.6%), and successful entrepreneurs (12.5%). Accordingly, they were significantly associated with the politics and public affairs scene (χ² = 52.7, p ⩽ 0.001), appearing often concerning the topic of national affairs and politics (χ² = 22.8, p ⩽ 0.001), and engaging in the behavior of participating in politics (χ² = 15.0, p ⩽ 0.001). The numerous high-ranking female politicians who appeared in Xinwen Lianbo included the senior cadres of national and provincial government-affiliated institutions. The prominent-stratum women, unsurprisingly, were the most conspicuous concerning the topic of science and technology (P_p: 6.3%, P_m: 0.5%, P_o: 0.0%²), with the coverage emphasizing their scientific abilities and outstanding achievements in fields such as aerospace science and technology and clinical medicine and pharmacy as well as their willpower. Xinwen Lianbo also featured a few female chief executives of large domestic or multinational companies. Conversely, the coverage rarely depicted prominent-stratum women in family settings (P_p: 2.1%, P_m: 14.0%, P_o: 34.9%), as relatives of men, performing housework, caring for the infirm, getting injured, or childbearing across the samples.

The images of the women in the middle stratum showed them as (1) gender-neutral workers, (2) active in politics to a limited extent, (3) wealthy peasants joining the middle stratum, (4) enjoying cultural events while at leisure, (5) warm-hearted people willing to help others, and (6) housewives.

The middle-stratum women were most often civil servants (24.0%), acting as secondary information sources (P_m: 27.1%, P_p: 31.7%, P_o: 14.0%). They frequently appeared as official expert sources who contributed reliable and professional information to news reports. Their work units, positions, and names were clear in these reports while mention was rarely made of their gender. They showed themselves to be professional, affirmative, competent, and well-acquainted with the issues in the interviews. Most of these political officials were members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) with a high level of political knowledge, and public awareness. Most middle– and prominent-stratum women, 70.3%, were shown at work. The program emphasized scientific research and leadership competence, as Table 4 shows. However, in terms of gender, the women in these strata were still a minority of the political officials that Xinwen Lianbo covered. Thus, the show presented 53 female political officials and 98 female civil servants in total over the research period, whereas the single sampling month of July 2020 included coverage of more than 118 male political officials.

Table 4.

High-frequency occupations for women in the prominent and middle strata by year.

Year	High-frequency occupations
2011	Athletes, medical staff, and service staff
2012	Teachers and civil servants
2013	Civil servants and scientific researchers
2014	Civil servants and journalists
2015	Civil servants and scientific researchers
2016	Civil servants and business managers
2017	Civil servants and business managers
2018	Civil servants and scientific researchers
2019	Civil servants and business managers
2020	Civil servants and the self-employed

The second-most-common context for the coverage of middle-stratum women was the topic of social security and well-being, which accounted for 19.0% of their appearances on Xinwen Lianbo. Those shown receiving assistance or benefits accounted for 14.0% of the women covered in this stratum, making this the second-most-common behavior depicted. The news stories described how, with support from the government, these women greatly increased their income, advancing from manual laborers to self-employed business owners, and came to enjoy a modern lifestyle. The news reports also emphasized their courage, persistence, and industriousness. The middle-stratum women appeared more often on the topic of culture than the women of the other strata (P_m: 6.8%, P_p: 6.3%, P_o: 3.3%), with the highest percentage of their behaviors involving cultural entertainment (P_m: 5.9%, P_p: 0.0%, P_o: 0.0%). The coverage of 9.0% of the middle-stratum women described efforts to help others in reports that often contrasted “feminine weakness” with the great difficulties or dangers that they faced, thus dramatizing their dedication to helping others. Lastly, 14.0% of middle-stratum women appeared in the family. This figure is higher than that of prominent- or ordinary-stratum women. Most of the middle-stratum women involved in family activities were housewives involved in housework about whom no other occupational information was provided. Approximately one-third of these women were presented telling positive stories about their husbands, fathers, or sons.

The ordinary-stratum women, by contrast, were tied more closely to their families (P_o: 34.9%, P_p: 2.1%, P_m: 14.0%) and never depicted in the context of politics, being therefore strongly associated with the behavior of caregiving (χ² = 22.0, p ⩽ 0.001). These women were significantly associated with the topic of social security and well-being (χ² = 50.0, p ⩽ 0.001), including poverty alleviation and housing security (44.2% for these subtopics combined), and the behaviors of receiving help and benefits (χ² = 67.1, p ⩽ 0.001), and suffering impairment of body or rights (χ² = 23.1, p ⩽ 0.001). A few ordinary-stratum women appeared as spokespersons for their families even in the presence of their husbands to discuss their experiences escaping poverty, suggesting that they had mastered the power of discourse. Details in the coverage, though, indicated that the men remained the owners of the family property and its main representatives (see Figures 3 and 4). Some ordinary-stratum women also described taking part-time jobs near home to “earn money, raise a family, and take care of the children” (as described on the Xinwen Lianbo program broadcast on July 19, 2020).

Figure 3.

The husband’s name signed on the poverty-alleviation certificate of honor for Chen Shulian’s family (Xinwen Lianbo, July 2, 2020).

Figure 4.

The husband’s name signed on the shareholder certificate for Wu Yunling’s family (Xinwen Lianbo, September 4, 2012).

Discussion

Gaps in social roles in the olive-shaped pseudo-society

The decision by Xinwen Lianbo to impose an inaccurate olive shape on Chinese society no doubt reflects the common belief in contemporary China that this type of stratification is stable. From this perspective, the prominent group has great power in leading national economic and political development, the ordinary group may be a source of social instability, and the middle group is sufficiently large to smooth over the social contradictions between the rich and the poor and maintain social order (Li, 2015b; Zhao, 2000). So it was that President Jinping (2021) recently reasserted the need to form an olive-shaped distribution structure, thereby reinforcing a general policy that has received repeated emphasis over the past decade. One of the most influential news programs in China, Xinwen Lianbo adheres to an editorial policy of remaining “positive-publicity-oriented” and is responsible for promoting national policy. Therefore, its reports depict women in various strata playing distinct social roles. The coverage of the women in the prominent stratum depicted them as bellwethers in China’s socio-economic development, that is, as leaders in advanced and sophisticated fields, and highlighted their contributions to economic development and innovation repeatedly to reinforce this impression. The coverage of women in the ordinary stratum, by contrast, depicted them as outsiders to the process of national development in many respects. It also represented these women in much smaller numbers than is actually the case in China, and rarely if ever associated them with the themes of politics, economy, education, culture, sports, and science.

The ordinary-stratum women were outsiders in media observations in many aspects of development, with a small group appearing in reports on social security and well-being; in other words, they continued to suffer “symbolic annihilation” (Tuchman et al., 1978: 3) in the olive-shaped pseudo-community. Accordingly, their appearances became more frequent in 2020 during a key stage in the national Targeted Poverty Alleviation campaign. The representation of their progress in the social security system was consistent with Xinwen Lianbo’s editorial commitment to “positive publicity.” Conversely, the absence of ordinary-stratum women from the coverage of other aspects of development suggests that there may have been few positive stories to report.

The middle-stratum women offered references to diverse social lives. In the United States during the previous century, a new middle class replaced the old one concerning technology and management. Nevertheless, the former was not able, according to Mills (1967), to represent popular lifestyles, social prestige, and values. The coverage of middle-stratum women documented in this study reinforces the notion that the middle class embodies a vision of life and society that is consistent with the dominant ideology (Bellah et al., 1996). Thus, as the desire among Chinese people for a better life grew over the 2010s, Xinwen Lianbo represented the engagement of middle-stratum women in the economy, politics, social culture, family, and so on in ways that accentuated the positive changes in China.

The competence of middle-stratum women in gender-neutral contexts indicated that greater equality was being achieved in the labor market. The images of women enjoying leisure time reflected a growing recognition of the spiritual and cultural needs of the Chinese people, and images of women who had transcended the ordinary stratum served as evidence of the achievements of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation campaign. Especially since the 19th National Congress of the CPC in 2017, when the goal of finishing building a moderately prosperous society in all respects was set, the diverse images of middle-stratum women have exerted a great influence on the modernization of Chinese women generally. Nevertheless, except for the imagery associated with the topic of poverty alleviation, the depiction of the middle-stratum women had little in common with that of the ordinary-stratum women. On the other hand, the middle-stratum women shared with the prominent-stratum women such characteristics as career competence and political participation, these being among the main characteristics of both groups. Hence, though the middle-stratum women were depicted as possessing, at least theoretically, the “backbone power” to bridge the gap between the prominent- and the ordinary-stratum women, the social gap is actually widening.

The olive-shaped pseudo-society created by Xinwen Lianbo also featured an enormous gap between the social roles of the prominent- and ordinary-stratum women. The characteristics of the middle-stratum women, though, seem closer to those of the prominent-stratum women, again undermining social inequality. In these respects, the push for social development and the “positive-publicity-oriented” editorial policy encouraged Xinwen Lianbo’s coverage to re-stratify the real-world tǔ-shaped society to an olive-shaped pseudo-society.

Double standards regarding domesticity

Owing to their devotion to careers, women in the prominent stratum can be said to “disembed” from the family. Similarly, Western societies went through what has been described as a “Great Disembedding” (Taylor, 2007: 146) as part of a transformation from a religious to a secular orientation, in the process of which individuals were uprooted or disembedded from collective practices based on a religious hierarchy and compelled to redefine their identities. So also in the evolution of Chinese gender values, Chinese women have become increasingly disembedded from the traditional gender roles and division of labor that locates husbands outside the home and wives within assisting them and bearing and raising children. The prominent-stratum women who received coverage in Xinwen Lianbo performed their work outside the home and had little in the way of family lives. Notably, this coverage avoided observations such as “She is seldom available to take care of her family” or “She hasn’t seen her children for a long time” that once featured commonly in such reports. Xinwen Lianbo intentionally avoided stereotyping the behavior of the prominent-stratum women as that of “housewives,” focusing on their professional performance and downplaying their family ties, and physical characteristics. The prominent-stratum women on the program seemed to be freed from reliance on their families for support, leaving the family as only one of the many “alternatives” for the achievement of their personal “fullness” (Taylor, 2007: 3, 5).

The ordinary-stratum women in the news program’s coverage, by contrast, remained embedded in the traditional gender-power relations that associate men with strength, and women with weakness, and in a gendered division of labor with husbands managing affairs outside the household, and wives the affairs within it. Althusser (2006) famously described ideology as “a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (p. 162). He noted that the disappearance of some representation was not an inversion or overturning of the material, but a reshuffle of consciousness and belief. Consistent with this theorization of ideology, a reshuffle of Chinese conservative gender concepts is apparent in the first decade of the century despite the positive effects of generational change on gender equality (Xu, 2016). Subsequently, from 2011 to 2020, the coverage represented women in the ordinary stratum as self-sacrificing and submissive wives. In the first place, they appeared frequently in news reports as the primary sources of information about affairs within the family and vulnerable groups, a tendency that reinforced the stereotyping of them as housewives and as weak. Further, while their husbands were depicted as working hard outside the home, the ordinary-stratum women were shown as willing to stand by them in the home without complaint. Xinwen Lianbo recognized such women as model wives with such reporting techniques as introducing praise with criticism and depicted their support for their husbands as ceding their rights to make decisions for the family and even themselves, as Figure 5 shows. Moreover, the coverage of ordinary-stratum women who worked part-time outside the home nevertheless focused on their domestic role, characterizing their employment as grounded, not in their aspirations, but in their family responsibilities to which their primary identity was tied. Lastly, even when women served as spokespersons in news reports about the government’s successes in alleviating poverty, it was their husbands who received certificates for their families’ achievements. The government’s record-keeping regarding the underprivileged population in China has been on a household basis, with the head of a household assumed to be the husband or father of the family by default.

Figure 5.

Wu Qijiao led an impoverished life with her husband who stuck to his post (Xinwen Lianbo, January 18, 2014).

A kind of double standard is evident in Xinwen Lianbo’s coverage of the prominent-stratum and ordinary-stratum women regarding the role of housewife. Thus, the stories featuring the former tended to focus on the guidelines that the basic national policy on gender equality provided and the need for socio-economic development while giving them other places in society to “hold up half the sky” than within the household. By contrast, the framework of Confucian ethics was inscribed on the media images of ordinary-stratum women, such as the yin-yang notion of harmony dictating that wives obey their husbands, which is, of course, a fundamentally masculine and patriarchal construct. The ordinary-stratum women depicted in Xinwen Lianbo continued to live within the context of the traditional “productivity-power” gender relationship, which excludes women from social production and binds them to unpaid housework (Jansen, 2002). Likewise, ordinary-stratum women tended to be bound to the maternal identity associated with the female anatomy (Pia and Evans, 2021). As a result, the biological characteristics of women generally and the socio-cultural context of ordinary-stratum women particularly combined to reinforce their subordination. As a further result, a considerable gap is evident between the coverage of the prominent-stratum and ordinary-stratum women relating to the division of labor and other gender norms.

Gendered glass ceiling in careers

Women worldwide have long encountered career barriers and struggled to reach higher positions within their organizations, a phenomenon referred to as the “glass ceiling” (Baxter and Wright, 2000). Even women who reach upper management often find themselves given token positions in which they wield little power or influence (Baumgartner and Schneider, 2010). Female professionals in the media, for example, have grown accustomed to the status of political outsiders, and to being less competitive than men in the fields of science and technology (Fiona, 2020; Steinke et al., 2012).

To be sure, some of the women covered in Xinwen Lianbo had broken through the career glass ceiling, in particular, the prominent-stratum women who pursued successful careers in technology, business, politics, and so on. Examples include senior officials in China’s ministries, scientists who received international awards, and chief executives of large companies. The program’s coverage also included many experts and mid-level officials among the middle-stratum women with the potential to reach high positions. This representation of women’s breakthroughs in science, economics, and politics conformed with the Chinese government’s current policies, such as the Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation initiative proposed in 2014, the Innovation-driven Development strategy in the Plan of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016–2020), and the goals of increasing women’s participation in policymaking, and management in the Outline for the Development of Women in China (2011–2020).

However, the women represented in Xinwen Lianbo continued to encounter the glass ceiling, especially in politics. As our analysis showed, there were more male political officials than female officials featured on the program, with few if any reports about female leaders in the CPC’s Central Committee or assessments of women’s political power. In large part, the representation of women in the Chinese media reflects the fact that men have occupied most, or all of the middle and senior leadership positions in the party and the government generally throughout Chinese history (Chen and He, 2020). In addition, Chinese women have been raised to be quiet, introverted, and forbearing rather than outgoing and slick in Chinese culture, qualities that tend not to facilitate participation in politics (Liu, 2003). Even when given opportunities to hold political positions, Chinese women have continued to focus on their roles as dutiful wives because of the extensive domestic duties that they are expected to perform and the persistence of gender stereotypes (Yang, 2020). As a result, there has been a shift in the perspective of the Chinese media from the conviction that there were no female politicians to report to a policy suggesting that female politicians are less powerful than male politicians.

Conclusion

The meaningful social changes in China over the second decade of the present century included the transformation of social stratification, improvements in the social status of women, and increasing popularity of feminism. For this study, we analyzed the coverage of the news program Xinwen Lianbo as an example of the representation of female figures in Chinese state media. Our particular interest was in charting the re-stratification of women in the pseudo-environment created by this media outlet from a longitudinal perspective.

Our analysis revealed striking differences in the coverage of women in what we termed the prominent, middle, and ordinary social strata. In particular, we revealed an enormous difference between the images of the prominent- and ordinary-stratum women with regard to social function and domesticity: the former were depicted as highly competitive, powerful, and independent, while the latter were depicted as submissive and sacrificial. The depiction of the middle-stratum women was more multifaced, showing them to be independent and competitive but also interested in leisure and warm-hearted. This result indicates that, in research on the representation of women in the media, it should not be assumed that women are amenable to analysis as an undifferentiated whole or that the differences among them are inconsiderable.

Stratification is one of the most significant indicators of differentiation in the media representations of women. It is in this respect that we describe as “re-stratification” the effort by Xinwen Lianbo to reconfigure China’s real-world tǔ-shaped society into an imagined olive-shaped structure in which women in the middle stratum constitute the majority, and those in the prominent and ordinary strata are relatively few. Within this olive-shaped social structure, Xinwen Lianbo depicted the women in the various strata as playing distinct social roles. Specifically, the prominent-stratum women served as bellwethers of socioeconomic development, the middle-stratum women served as social role models highlighting the diversity and positivity of Chinese society, and the ordinary-stratum women were positioned almost outside of social development. These disparities were associated with the imperative for national development and the editorial policy of the CPC-controlled media outlets that the coverage be “positive-publicity-oriented.” The active presence of the prominent- and middle-stratum women in non-family contexts in Xinwen Lianbo’s coverage was intended to prompt the society as a whole to value the professional abilities of women as well as to set an example for women in the ordinary stratum, coverage of whom was limited to family issues, thus helping to balance the regressive trend away from gender equality. Nonetheless, as a reporting framework, the olive-shaped stratification structure also has the potential to exacerbate gender inequality by broadening the gaps among the strata. The representation of the prominent-stratum women as disembodied from the roles of wife and mother was in line with China’s fundamental national policy regarding gender equality. The ordinary-stratum women were symbolically annihilated as housewives subordinate to their husbands owing to the ideological reshuffle of the conservative gender values and division of labor. This finding provides insight into the barriers to gender equality, including the fact that it has multiple dimensions, and is not reducible to a gender binary.

Further, this study exposed the elitist attribute of Chinese feminism and the need for attention to women in the ordinary stratum. In recent years, the women described here as belonging to the prominent and middle strata have dominated feminist activism in China, especially on social media, a phenomenon that is evident worldwide. We also found that the rights, interests, and desires of the ordinary-stratum women covered in the state media news program that we analyzed were under-represented. The concealment of the ordinary-stratum women may shield underlying social problems from public scrutiny, thereby undermining social stability. Accordingly, there is a particular need for a comprehensive and even-handed analysis of the coverage of ordinary-stratum women in Chinese state media.

This study is not without limitations. The primary limitation relates to the enormous amount of work required to establish rigorous standards for categorizing social strata in all of their complexity over a long period. Second, our sampling may have neglected some female figures in certain contexts. For example, reports on female healthcare workers fighting Covid-19 in the first half of 2020 may present a distinct perspective on the images of women in the media. Further studies of the differentiation of the visual representations of women in the media using larger and more precise samples can be expected to yield more robust and nuanced results.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China under the project “Research on the Construction of Cultural Image From the Perspective of International Communication (22FXB021).”

ORCID iD

Min Wang

Notes

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“Re-stratifying” women: female images in China’s state media from the perspective of social stratification (2011–2020)

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Literature review

Media representation of women: a Chinese perspective

The social stratification of women in media representations

The social stratification theory: development and sinicization

Methodology

Findings

Overall composition and variation

Characteristics of the women in the three strata

Discussion

Gaps in social roles in the olive-shaped pseudo-society

Double standards regarding domesticity

Gendered glass ceiling in careers

Conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References