Abstract
Recent years have witnessed an increasing academic interest in Chinese homosexuality; however, linguistic-oriented research on this topic is scant and multimodal inquiry on it is even rarer. To address the gap, this article conducts a discourse analysis of how tongzhi in mainland China are represented by news media. Specifically, we examine both linguistic and visual representations of tongzhi by utilizing two influential English-language newspapers in mainland China published between 2009 and 2019. Our data consist of 221 news articles totaling 117,407 words; 44 of the articles are accompanied with pictures. Methodologically, we draw on Halliday’s transitivity structure coupled with van Leeuwen’s classification of social actors. Our findings reveal that Chinese tongzhi are mainly represented in a negative fashion, and that there is little positive news representation of this invisible community. In addition, socio-cultural factors contributing to media representations of Chinese tongzhi are considered.
Introduction
Over the past decade, there has been a prevailing misconception that Western cultures have strongly influenced the existence of Chinese homosexuality (Neill, 2009). However, as is evidenced by the existing literature, homosexuality in China enjoys a relatively long history of 1000 years or so. This can be briefly summarized as in Table 1 (e.g. Chou, 2001; Ruan and Tsai, 1987; Wu, 2003). It is worth noting that, unlike the homosexual community in contemporary China which “has so much work left to do before achieving full civil rights” (Wu, 2003: 137), ancient Chinese homosexuals were “wide-spread, recognized and fairly tolerated” so long as they got married and continued their “family line” by producing “legitimate offspring” (Wu, 2003: 118). Despite such tolerance, being homosexual was far from being totally accepted at that time. 1 Indeed, as of today, total acceptance of homosexuality still remains challenging for Chinese society.
A history of Chinese homosexuality.
Against this backdrop, we intend to understand how tongzhi in mainland China are represented in Chinese news media over a 10-year period (2009–2019). First, however, it is useful to clarify the connotations of the term tongzhi. According to Chou (2001), tong originally refers to “same/homo” whereas zhi denotes “goal,” “spirit,” or “orientation” (p. 27). Interestingly, after several semantic shifts summarized in Table 2 (Wong, 2008a, 2008b), tongzhi (comrade) has taken on new meanings, and even become the most popular umbrella label for Chinese sexual minorities including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (as in Chou, 2001; Wu, 2003; Zheng, 2015). It is widely believed that the term tongzhi was first appropriated by Hong Kong gay activists in the late 1980s (Wong, 2008a, 2008b). In the mid-1990s, this usage spread to mainland China with the support of more gay activists from Hong Kong. In the ensuing years, a series of social campaigns and events were launched under the name of tongzhi. These include, for instance, “the first Chinese tongzhi conference” in San Francisco in 1998, and the tongzhi movie festival hosted at Peking University in 2001 (Wu, 2003: 131). Such campaigns and events have undoubtedly helped to popularize its wide usage and accelerated its rapid spread. However, it is also true that not all Chinese homosexuals prefer this label owing to (1) same-sex desires being viewed as personal matter, and (2) the “communist connotations” of tongzhi (Wong, 2008b: 283).
Semantic shifts of the term tongzhi.
The remaining sections of this article are organized as follows: We will first review previous research on media representations of tongzhi in mainland China. We should mention that for the scope of the present article, the term tongzhi is used in this article to refer solely to Chinese gay men. However, during the process of literature review, we will follow researchers’ original labels of people with same-sex desires, such as homosexual, gay, and tongxinglian. After the review, we proceed to introduce the news materials we have collected and the theoretical frameworks we have adopted. Following that, we present findings derived from our news analysis. The final section is a conclusion of the current findings and suggested avenues for further research.
Representations of Chinese tongzhi
Attitudes toward homosexuality may vary from culture to culture. However, they are generally observed to be negative, intolerant, and discouraging (Baker and Jaborooty, 2017; Gouveia, 2005; Zulkffli and Rashid, 2019). This observation is prominently evidenced by Western newspapers that negatively represent gay people from various cultures, since “media reports are reflections of the mindsets and attitudes among certain groups [such as the powerful] in society” (Fongkaew et al., 2019: 263). Typically, gay men are negatively represented as: (1) bad idols for the young (Baker, 2005, 2014a), (2) dangerous reactionaries or enemies threatening and undermining society (Bartley and Hidalgo-Tenorio, 2016; Gouveia, 2005), (3) demons and criminals (Baker, 2005; Bartley and Benitez-Castro, 2016), (4) sexual perverts and sex addicts (Bartley and Hidalgo-Tenorio, 2016; Fongkaew et al., 2019), (5) sinners against religious practices (Mbaye, 2021; Vincent and Howell, 2014), and so on.
Such representations are also backed up by the Chinese press that predominantly represents tongzhi in a negative fashion (e.g. Huang, 2018; Zhang, 2014a). Of note here is the fact that Chinese media, whether in English or in Chinese, are often owned and operated by the government; thus, to some extent, they serve as the spokesperson for the government. A typical example is People’s Daily (PD) functioning as a media platform that is the official voice of the central government and delivering the ruling Communist Party’s “attitude toward homosexuality in the unique Chinese system” (Chang and Ren, 2017: 318–319).
For instance, using data from PD and focusing on Chinese homoeroticism, Zhang (2014a) finds that homoeroticism has always been suppressed since the founding of People’s Republic of China. Possible reasons accounting for this suppression include “socialist ideologies, red revolutionary culture, Westernization and the AIDS discourse” (Zhang, 2014a: 1021). This article should receive its due acclaim for shedding light on Chinese homoeroticism in the post-Maoist era. As far as we are aware, this is also a pioneering study that calls attention to Chinese non-normative love by relying upon official media, and it appears to influence Huang (2018), who meticulously walks the audience through the changing attitudes of PD to Chinese tongxinglian. Ultimately, we also applaud the author for his study of international homosexuals within the newspaper.
Apart from PD, other Chinese mainstream newspapers have also been selected for research analysis. For example, Chang and Ren’s (2017) study on representations of Chinese gays is impressive in its reliance on five other Chinese newspapers. It reveals that the main thread throughout these newspapers is the stigmatization of Chinese gay men. Specifically, this marginalized group is mostly stigmatized as people of violence and as enemies of traditional values and social stability. Unfortunately, some of our preconceptions regarding Chinese gay marriage receive insufficient attention, as will be further demonstrated in this current study.
Constraints exist in the aforementioned studies in that they are all confined to non-linguistic investigations of Chinese-language newspapers. In this regard, Wang and Ma (2021) deserve more praise as they not only expand the range of their research to include Chinese bisexual and transsexual people, but boldly use domestic English-language media as data. Three points should be mentioned here in particular. Firstly, their study falls into the tradition of corpus-based critical discourse analysis of media images of gay people (e.g. Baker, 2014a; Bartley and Hidalgo-Tenorio, 2016), revealing unfriendly attitudes on the part of government and society as a whole regarding Chinese sexual minorities. Such a corpus approach escapes the-subjectively cherry-picking-discourse analysis of news reporting; however, it inevitably neglects “other symbolic forms such as visual images” (Fairclough, 1992: 4) in news discourse that construe meanings. Secondly, it contributes to the literature by highlighting Chinese sex education programs, which also lends support to Fongkaew et al. (2019) calling “for policies to integrate LGBTIQ human rights issues into the school curriculum” (p. 271). And lastly, their follow-up study corresponds with our initial research proposal to compare news representations of Chinese sexual minorities from a diachronic perspective. However, we abandoned this idea after tentatively searching the oldest domestic English-language newspaper (i.e. China Daily issued since 1986), where the first report surrounding foreign gay men appeared in 2001, while the earliest coverage regarding Chinese gays appeared in 2003. 2 This reality does not fully support a longitudinal research.
Overall, these scholars are credited for their contributions in portraying Chinese sexual minorities from various perspectives. They engage readers not only with news representations of the Chinese tongzhi community, but with attitudes of the public and even of the central government toward this marginalized group. That said, the reader would benefit much more if sufficient linguistic attention were given to representing tongzhi in mainland China, as nobody can contend that only theories derived from the fields of sociology and communication studies can apply to this sexuality issue. This observation is reminiscent of Zhang’s (2018) claim that LGBT-related topics remain underexplored for Chinese linguists. Additionally, visual representations could be taken into account rather than merely focusing on verbal representations. Indeed, as emphasized by Catalano and Waugh (2016), analyses without non-verbal data are incomplete because symbolic forms including images and diagrams can also generate meanings, reflect attitudes, and unveil ideologies (e.g. Fairclough, 1992; O’Halloran et al., 2011). Furthermore, non-Chinese audiences may welcome more discussions of the cultural factors that influence news representations of Chinese tongzhi. All these considerations motivate us to revisit this media topic by seeking (1) to identify both linguistic and visual representations of tongzhi in Chinese news media, and (2) to uncover the Chinese socio-cultural factors impacting such representations.
Materials and methods
Materials for our research were taken from two Chinese English-language newspapers published between 1 January 2009 and 31 December 2019. Given that “[China] is a Communist country with state-owned media” as an arm of the government (Coleman and Chen, 2020: 6011), we selected two prestigious but centrally-controlled party press outlets: China Daily and Global Times. The former, launched in 1981, has become the first and largest English portal in China with more than 350 million users around the world. The latter is a branch of the People’s Daily News Agency, and its English version is the second of its kind to circulate around mainland China. It claims to provide an “informative, influential and innovative” representation for the vortex of China’s ongoing transformation (https://www.globaltimes.cn/about-us/). Institutionally affiliated to the Chinese Communist Party, both newspapers are designed and controlled to convey the voices of the Party and to direct the State Council’s ideologies to the public.
The specific process of collecting data consisted of four phases. Initially, we logged on each newspaper’s website and searched the archives for mention of tongzhi. Surprisingly, only seven news reports containing this word were found. This may be because homosexual topics “have consistently been discouraged in China” (Wang and Ma, 2021: 193); they are thus always covered in “fragmented, inconsistent, and one-side” ways (Huang, 2018: 343). In response to this, we then expanded our search by using other terms to describe Chinese homosexuality, including tongxinglian, the lemmas gay, and homosexual. Additionally, variations of the two lemmas including gayness, gays, homosexuals, homosexualise, and homosexuality were also examined. As a result, 304 potential reports were obtained and put into four separate files. The next phase involved independent inspection. Two authors separately and carefully read through these collected news reports, singling out pieces that concerned tongzhi in mainland China. This was the criterion that we adopted in targeting materials. The third phase involved the comparison of independent inspection. We collaboratively checked potential pieces, yielding a final news data comprising 117,407 words of relevant reports, namely: 113 pieces from Global Times and 108 from China Daily. Among them, 44 news reports appeared with pictures. In the final phase, each author independently re-read the 221 reports that we had collected to discover their recurring themes for further analysis. Then the two authors cross-checked their results by consulting a third author regarding the classification of controversial news pieces. Following that, we identified six salient themes (see Table 3), some of them having been described by existing scholarship (e.g. Chang and Ren, 2017; Wang and Ma, 2021).
Six salient themes concerning tongzhi-related issues.
Such themes will be discussed in the following section by drawing on the analytical frameworks of Halliday (1994) together with van Leeuwen (2008). According to Halliday (1994), people’s inner and outer experiences of the real world fall mainly into six types of process: material process (doing), mental process (sensing), relational process (being), behavioral process (behaving), verbal process (saying), and existential process (existing). Any process can be further broken down into “the process itself,” “participants in the process,” and optional “circumstances” pertaining to the process (Halliday, 1994: 107). “This grammar of process-participant configurations” was chosen for our study because of its usefulness “in revealing agency, power relations and ideologies” (Tang, 2021: 808).
However, we are reminded by Chaemsaithong (2019) that Halliday’s transitivity structure has omitted “the fact that a participant (i.e. social actor) in a clause itself does also constitute a network of possible representation choices” (p. 243). This issue was well addressed by van Leeuwen’s (2008) social actor theory, which demonstrates how collective identity representations are constructed. Precisely speaking, in this study, eight sub-categories of his social actor representation network have been identified, as summarized in Table 4.
Sub-categories of social actors (van Leeuwen, 2008: 33–44) used in the data.
Findings and discussion
In what follows, we explain how tongzhi in mainland China are represented both linguistically and visually in two Chinese state-owned newspapers. To be specific, we center on news themes representing tongzhi as virus spreaders, victims, criminals, fraudsters, patients, and sluts, respectively.
Tongzhi as virus spreaders
Our data reveal that HIV/AIDS is a highly salient case in news portrayals of Chinese tongzhi. This observation is supported by recent research (e.g. Huang, 2018; Wang and Ma, 2021), arguing that the tongzhi community is often identified with HIV/AIDS (transmission). Below is one of the examples that lend credence to our observation.
In his study on British media representations of bisexuals, Wilkinson (2019) has observed that both homosexual and bisexual people are represented as identical in relation to the AIDS virus. Joining his observation, we also find that both the Chinese media we have studied tend to equate HIV/AIDS with tongzhi in consideration of their infection rates being higher than for heterosexuals. In order to make their reports more credible, journalists are most likely to rely on numbers and percentages as in the above examples. Such a practice echoes van Leeuwen’s (2008) argument that “aggregation is often used to regulate practice and to manufacture consensus opinion” (p. 37). Also, we should mention that the collocation of homosexuality with such nouns as “act,” “activity,” “contact,” “intercourse,” and “sex” in newspapers is reminiscent of Baker’s (2005) research where homosexuality is perceived as “a (sexual) behavior, rather than an identity” (p. 73). Another case of representing tongzhi as virus spreaders can be found in the case of syphilis, a disease previously not mentioned by the work of Chang and Ren (2017) and Huang (2018). What follows is a representative example:
Similar to Examples 1–2, the journalist in Example 3 also presents a rough number of tongzhi contracting syphilis. In this case, he absolves himself from responsibility by citing official statistics as the authoritative source. As a result, the representation of tongzhi with health problems is achieved by the use of aggregation. News reports such as these may provoke public panic and give the reader a negative impression that tongzhi as an invisibly unhealthy community will transmit fatal diseases. In response, corresponding measures taken to control such transmissions of diseases are justified, including depriving Chinese tongzhi of their rights to donate blood and sperm. Below is a case in point that constructs tongzhi as imaginary spreaders of virus.
Here, potential sperm donors are announced by using classification identification of gender and age. This implies that only Chinese heterosexuals who are young, energetic, and healthy are entitled to donate sperm, which excludes non-heterosexuals including tongzhi. Worth noting here is that using differentiation strategy adds to the implication that non-heterosexuals are perceived as at best unqualified sperm donors or at worst virus carriers. As a consequence, members of tongzhi are passivated and stigmatized as noxious individuals who can carry contagious or even deadly viruses and are therefore left no other choices but to follow and accept official prohibitions.
Representing tongzhi as virus spreaders in news may be attributed to homophobic sentiments. Just like gay men in Portugal who are afraid to come out of the closet (Gouveia, 2005), Chinese tongzhi also dare not to disclose their same-sex orientation owing to familial and social homophobic sentiments. Such sentiments in China may derive from the medical connection between tongzhi and these deadly viruses aforementioned. They may also interweave with nationalist values, which leads to the reinforcement of Chinese homophobic discourse and the enhancement of patriotism and nationalism (Liu, 2021). In this sense, people with homophobia positively view themselves as protectors of the Chinese nation, whereas tongzhi are perceived negatively as unpatriotic others.
Tongzhi as victims
Unlike the theme that negatively represents tongzhi as infectors, the second salient theme depicts this group of people as passive victims and presents them in a positive light. Typical examples of this observation include the same-sex marriage (Examples 7–8) and tongzhi adoption (Example 6).
In Example 5, the victim is constructed as a helpless and immature student through the classification identification strategy realized by such words as “teenage,” “boy,” and “school.” This construction leads the reader to consider that the first priority should have been given to guide the boy who was in danger of committing suicide in the right direction. The journalist further uses prepositional circumstantials such as “at” in “at home” and “in” in “in school,” to activate both parents and teachers as actors in the material process of beating, while the young boy has been given the participant role of goal who suffers from beatings and bullyings. Unlike Example 5 that contextualizes the boy in a vulnerable and defenseless situation, Example 6 shows a positive case where tongzhi are wholeheartedly supported by their families who are aware of the difficult realities confronting tongzhi. A prime example is their desire to have an heir to carry on family bloodlines. However, desires like this are currently discouraged by Chinese laws, as is demonstrated by the lack of governmental and legal support. In this case, tongzhi are associated with each other to strive for their right to adopt children. Indeed, a similar observation has been made in the UK context that gay adoption is not allowed due to potential risks being posed to children (Baker, 2005). Tongzhi as victims are also found in visual representations as in Examples 7–9.
Example 7:
China Daily, 19/08/2013.
Example 8:
Global Times, 07/02/2013.
The 90-year-old grandma in Example 7 is given the active role of expressing the marital expectations of her tongzhi grandson. Since the laws in mainland China have not yet legalized the same-sex marriage, tongzhi are therefore deprived of the right to marry anyone they love. Through relational identification, the grandson is passivated as the beneficiary who receives support from the social act of his grandma. This is a huge step forward for tongzhi with familial acceptance. Similarly, Example 8 also uses a picture to vividly describe a wedding of two old men, whose wedding banquet is in a restaurant. To identify the protagonists of the marriage (i.e. Chinese old men with same-sex desires), the classification strategy is further deployed. Worth noting is that while opposed by their children, such a wedding is supported by a small portion of tongzhi backgrounded within this picture. Presenting them as a homogeneous group indicates that these people are associated by the same desire of holding a marriage ceremony as that of heterosexuals.
Example 9:
Global Times, 27/09/2018.
In addition to the marriage issue, how tongzhi have fallen victim in work settings also appeals to journalists as shown in Example 9. It presents a placard with the words “I have taught children to be honest; thus, I cannot lie. I am tongxinglian!,” which foregrounds the homosexual identity of the placard holder. Noteworthy is that what he wears (namely, corsage and wristband) also clearly distinguish him as tongzhi, as the rainbow-colors correspond to the symbol of LGBT communities. Unfortunately, his tongzhi identity causes him to get fired by the kindergarten where he works, after his brave acknowledgment of same-sex sexual orientation. This visual representation of the 31-year-old man as an honest member of staff and innocent citizen is more likely to favor positive attitudes toward persons like him and meanwhile to fuel more soul-searching introspection about existing discrimination. This can also be found in another Global Times report, under the headline “Trapped in the Office Closet”:
This example serves as a good explanation of why tongzhi are most likely to “scrub out their tongzhi identity” in heteronormative workplaces (Zheng, 2015: 145), thereby driving audiences to sympathize with how tongzhi have been put at a disadvantage in offices. Furthermore, together with Example 9 it is useful in conveying the positive message that anyone who has contributed to the prosperity of Chinese society should be respected, irrespective of his gender or sexual orientation.
Positive representations of tongzhi in news media can be explained in several ways. A notable reason is the significance and emphasis of the type of workforce that is highly valued and urgently needed in China’s ongoing urbanization and industrialization (Zhu et al., 2011). Irrespective of race, gender, and sexual orientation, anyone who has contributed to the prosperity and productivity of Chinese society may receive respect. Another possible explanation is the rising consciousness and acceptance of individuation in mainland China (Shen, 2014). The concept of individuation highlights a complete and stable development of the personality and realization of the Self (Peng and Zhang, 2003). Hence, stress is laid on people’s inner personal characteristics, which leads to attention being distracted from public labels of such marginalized groups as tongzhi and mabaonan (mommy’s boy). A third factor is the “liberal mindset” of the English-language media (Guo and Huang, 2002: 218) in comparison to conservative Chinese-language newspapers. In other words, although state-owned by the Communist Party, Chinese English-language media are more homosexuality-friendly than media in other languages. It cannot be denied that China Daily and Global Times follow official ideologies through biased representations of tongzhi. However, both newspapers intentionally “disobey and sidestep certain prevailing norms defined in communist journalism” to achieve conflictual functions (Guo and Huang, 2002: 221). This has been strongly supported by our news data where journalists occasionally provide alternative but positive views on tongzhi rights that include those relating to sperm and blood donation, same-sex marriage, and fair employment. Altogether, these factors create more space for tongzhi to gain social support and respect.
Tongzhi as criminals
Previous studies have argued that when reporting homosexuals, journalists are more likely to associate them with negative social practices (e.g. Baker, 2005; Bartley and Benitez-Castro, 2016). The same is true in our news data, which contributes to the third salient theme that relates to crime. This representation is evident in the following.
Both reports describe involvements of tongzhi in illegal activities, thereby creating “moral panic,” namely, potential threats to “the social order itself or an idealized (ideological) conception of some part of it” (Thompson, 1998: 8). For instance, tongzhi in Example 11 are reported to have been engaged in sexual assault. They are activated as agents that carry out the assault causing the victim to contract HIV. Similarly, Example 12 activates the “21-year-old Chinese” tongzhi as a murderer who will be executed for his criminal behavior, whereas the “68-year-old German man” is passivated as undergoing the activity of being murdered. Two other strategies here are worthy of attention. First, the use of classification helps to identify the man being murdered in terms of his age, gender, and race. Second, a functionalization strategy is used to portray the man as a sex partner. Particularly striking is their four-decade age gap, which may suggest that the old foreigner has paid the young Chinese for sex. However, referring to huge age gaps has also been found to be indicative of abnormal relationships between tongzhi (Chang and Ren, 2017).
Example 13 is another case in which tongzhi will receive due punishment thanks to the law. He is passivated as the one “benefitting” from the consequences of blackmail. A broader implication deriving from Examples 12 and 13 is that there is no such thing as a long-term and stable relationship between tongzhi. As Chang and Ren (2017) put it, tongzhi are less likely to maintain “stable, peaceful relationships” (p. 327). Likewise, this is strongly visible in Baker’s (2005) observation that gay relationships are often depicted as “unstable,” “transitory and unimportant” by the British press (p. 72). A second implication relates closely to the “mythopoesis” delegitimation that anyone engaged in illegitimate and illegal social activities will be punished (van Leeuwen, 2008: 106). The following example further reinforces this implication.
Obviously, social actors in this example are organized into two groups. One group is tongzhi framed as protesters, who are associated with the common goal to safeguard the places they frequent. By enumerating the number of protesters who have clashed with policemen, China Daily succeeds in making the protest more serious and convincing. According to Baker (2005), places frequented by gays are “where sexual activity may take place” (p. 81). Mbaye (2021) similarly notes that gay men and heterosexual people belong to different cultural spaces. Their observations serve to justify such police violence against tongzhi in the park, in Mbaye’s (2021: 20) words, “gay territories,” since the image of the police is normally linked to protective and social order-maintaining activities. From this perspective, Chinese policemen have succeeded in differentiating themselves from tongzhi, thereby forming another group whose duty is to build an orderly and harmonious society.
Tongzhi as fraudsters
The next salient theme pertains to news coverage of tongzhi as fraudsters engaged in fake marriages. Examples 15 and 16 serve to illustrate this type of representation.
Here, the negative word “just” draws the attention of the reader to the fact that tongzhi involved in heterosexual marriages are motivated only by reproductive purposes. They regard straight females as procreative tools; in other words, the tongzhi group will feel more relieved when the obligation to make their wives pregnant is accomplished (Chou, 2000). To appeal the reader’s emotions, the China Daily journalist uses a relational process when describing the terrible situation of the victims, that is, unknowing heterosexual women. Shi et al. (2020) remind us that tongqi (homo-wives) are likely to worry “about their marriage, source of finance, and ability of children to cope with the information” (p. 453). With this in mind, we concur with Chang and Ren’s (2017) assertion that tongzhi are invisible destroyers of traditional heterosexual marriage, while tongqi are innocent victims. In this type of marriage, tongzhi are given the role of fraudsters who selflessly “exploit” innocent heterosexual women. The next example can be used to investigate another type of marriage that adds to the negative representation of tongzhi as fraudsters.
Example 16:
China Daily, 08/06/2010.
In this example, visual representation is used to unravel how family (members) and society have been fooled. This picture is a telling example of what Huang and Brouwer (2018) call “a third path” to marriage in mainland China (p. 155). At first glance, it may seem to be a lovely scene where a heterosexual couple in the middle is having their marriage ceremony with a handsome bridesmaid on the left and the best man on the right. However, on the contrary, they are holding “a queer form of marriage” named xinghun (Huang and Brouwer, 2018: 155). Xinghun (contract marriage) is currently popularized among Chinese tongzhi and lesbians for the purposes of dealing with familial and societal pressures (Huang and Brouwer, 2018; Liu, 2013). It challenges the “[h]eterosexual monogamous union” in mainland China (Huang and Brouwer, 2018: 142).
Here, an association strategy is deployed to indicate that tongzhi and lesbians have formed a newly deceptive hetero-marital union for the sake of reassuring their parents and social relations. Also interesting here is the use of relational identification. Precisely speaking, in private the bridegroom and the best man are a couple whereas the bride and the bridesmaid form a couple; none of them look directly toward the reader, but all look sideways at their beloved. There are two implications to be drawn from visually representing tongzhi in this way. Firstly, this group of people is “smart” enough to disguise their marriages at the cost of concealing the truth from their families and society in general. And secondly, the lack of eye contact with the reader and the slight squint at their beloved indicate their discreetness about their own secrets. This augments the distance between “them” and “us.”
The two recurring representations of tongzhi as criminals and fraudsters remind the reader of law-breaking behavior and deliberate deception. The existence of such representations may lie in the prevailing heteronormativity. Strand (2011: 61) reveals that the “heterosexual form is conceived as a predominantly natural phenomenon, intrinsic to the human race.” This is particularly the case in Chinese society where journalists tend to think of heterosexuality as the conventional and lawful norm. The greater the support for a “dominant ideology in a culture,” the greater the ability “to continually reproduce that ideology in cultural institutions and products” (Dow, 1990: 262). As a result, those failing to follow heterosexual practices in China are most likely to suffer from stigmatization and discrimination due to cultural propaganda. In this article, it is observed that framing tongzhi as criminals and fraudsters further consolidates the separation between “them” and “us.” Consequently, tongzhi are socially and culturally set apart as another group. This dichotomy has been evidenced by Zhang’s (2014b) study, contending that due to “heterosexual hegemony,” Chinese transsexuals are classified as a distinct social group and have been experiencing “enormous discriminations, distortions and depressions” (p. 194).
Tongzhi as patients
Representing tongzhi as patients in need of medical treatment is another salient theme in the news media. Despite the fact that Chinese homosexuality has been depathologized in 2001, it is not uncommon for readers to encounter news coverage of homosexuality as physical or mental illness that needs to be medically cured. This may be owing to the fact that, as noted by Fongkaew et al. (2019), some journalists together with their news editors still have a limited knowledge of and sensitivity toward the LGBTQ-related issues.
Representations in the following two examples remind the reader of the question: What makes a man homosexual? However, it seems the implication of this inquiry is to convert and cure homosexual people by treating them as patients.
The journalist in Example 17 utilizes the passivation strategy to frame tongzhi as patients who will benefit from appropriate cures. This journalist further identifies the so-called curing methods. Simultaneously, to authenticate his report, he uses a verbal process by assigning the sayer to a hospital staff whose affiliation is stressed via the prepositional phrase “at Handan Qianshi Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital.” In contrast to Example 17, tongzhi in the next example is activated as the participant sayer of the verb “said,” that is, to justify his failure to respond to treatment. News reports such as Example 18 that let the voices of tongzhi be heard are rare. That is because most tongzhi in newspapers have been silenced and robbed of their voices, which confirms Chang and Ren’s (2017) observation that sexual minorities are nearly all silenced by Chinese news media.
Interestingly, these two examples share the characteristics of what van Leeuwen (2008) terms “(de)legitimization,” albeit with different sayers. Example 17 legitimizes tongzhi as patients by appealing to a member of the hospital staff who functions as a personal authority, whereas Example 18 shifts to delegitimize being tongzhi through what van Leeuwen (2008) refers to as “moral evaluation legitimization” realized by evaluative adjectives such as “sinful” (pp. 109–111).
Tongzhi as sluts
A final theme tends to represent tongzhi as sluts who always engage in multiple sexual activities or promiscuous relationships. Examples of this representation are as follows:
Example 19 firstly uses the strategy of classification identification of “60-something gay man” to negatively describe tongzhi as being obsessed with sex. Additionally, this old gay man appears as the participant actor in the material process “looking for” that is extended by the goal “a casual sexual encounter.” Such a transitivity structure together with the choice of the adverb “usually” contributes to framing the old man as a sex addict. It should be highlighted here, following the conceptual metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), that we find that the old is activated via the metaphor of hunting, that is, seeking sexual partners is conceptualized as hunting animals randomly. From this perspective, the old man stands for the hunter, while those he encounters sexually correspond to his prey. Consequently, metaphors like this contribute to translating the image of promiscuous and unhealthy sex lives of tongzhi into language. To avoid shouldering responsibility, the journalist in Example 20 resorts to a verbal process and attributes the participant sayer to the “deputy director” responsible for the results of a prostitution investigation. Moreover, this journalist associates tongzhi with transsexuals, both communities being involved in illegal prostitution activities. This observation reaffirms the findings of Baker (2014b) and Zottola (2018) that the transgender group in the press is usually tied to other sexual minorities like gays and lesbians.
Furthermore, representing Chinese tongzhi as sluts is captured in the Global Times reports, as evidenced in Example 21. Through the use of relational identification, the journalist describes an incestuous relationship between a father-in-law and son-in-law. Notably, the latter is activated as actor in the material process of hurting himself to show undying love for his lover, that is, the father-in-law. This kind of representation is supported by Patrona’s (2020) research where homosexuality is accused of being related to such “criminal sexual behavior” as incest and pedophilia (p. 169). The slut image of tongzhi is exacerbated by cases like Example 21 that might beget a wider range of public concerns about tongzhi’s erosion of moral values.
Representing tongzhi as patients and sluts in newspapers is a cue for the suggestion that they lead to a breakdown of moral values. Both negative representations tend to imply mental and psychological disorders of tongzhi, which will threaten Chinese traditional moral values, such as the filial piety. Filial piety has been accorded a supreme role in defining an upright person in Chinese culture (Chou, 2001), and this in turn influences news representations of tongzhi. One essential concept of filial piety refers to the younger generation’s duty of submission when it comes to marriage, procreative issues, educational concepts, or employment decisions (Du and Qu, 2013). Those who fail to get married, to conceive children, or to accept the jobs their parents expect them to accept at a particular due age will be considered as morally abnormal and deviant, owing to their failure to extend the “family network” (Chou, 2001: 34) and to bring honor to the whole family. Confronting such familial, social, and cultural pressures in China, tongzhi are left with few choices other than to get married with heterosexual females or lesbians. As is shown by recent studies (Shi et al., 2020; Wen and Zheng, 2020), the more closely connected tongzhi are with their families, the more likely they are to marry straight women.
Conclusion
Informed by transitivity structure and social actor representations, the current study has examined how Chinese tongzhi are linguistically and visually represented in two centrally-controlled English-language newspapers in mainland China. It has been found that they have been typically portrayed in a less positive fashion. That is, they are negatively represented as virus spreaders, criminals, fraudsters, patients, and sluts. While public attitudes toward homosexuality have recently become more and more favorable (Lin et al., 2016), representations like these will construct the image of tongzhi as an unhealthy community, whose members, young or old, spread contagious diseases and destablize Chinese society by engaging in illegal activities and weakening Chinese traditions. Such a negative image reifies the notion of moral panics, namely, the media tend to frame a certain community “as a threat to societal values and interests, and causes the concern (and often hostility) of the public and of authorities or opinion-makers” (Litosseliti, 2007: 207).
These current findings not solely corroborate previously identified negative representations of tongzhi (see Chang and Ren, 2017; Huang, 2018; Zhang, 2014a) as shown above, but complement extant research by revealing that relatively positive representations also appear on Chinese state-owned news media. Positive representations are largely characterized by sympathy for tongzhi through framing them as passive victims where their rights to sperm/blood donation, marriage, child(ren) adoption, and fair employment are concerned. However, “context plays a part in determining what [newspapers] say” (Halliday, 1978: 3), which reminds us to consider socio-cultural factors rooted in the Chinese context that influence news representations of tongzhi. One notable factor for such reasonable representations of tongzhi may be the ongoing liberalization of English media productions.
In contrast to the liberal mindset that facilitates positive coverage of tongzhi, three socio-cultural factors contributing to negative news representations are also detected and interpreted: homophobia, heteronormativity, and filial piety. Further, hidden factors are likely to emerge from an expanding news data, which is undoubtedly an area that should be investigated in follow-up studies. In addition, comparative studies are expected to evidence and verify the aforementioned findings. Given that China’s English news outlets at the provincial (municipal) level enjoy larger discursive spaces when covering sensitive issues like homosexuality, future scholars can utilize both central and regional levels English media to explicate the underlying similarities and differences in representing tongzhi. Lastly, it should be mentioned that reading images, to some extent, runs the risk of subjective interpretations. The present study is clearly no exception. As Holsanova (2012) has rightly pointed out, “different people can perceive the same visual differently, and attribute very different meanings to it” (p. 253). In this respect, novel tools such as eye-tracking should be deployed in further research to reduce subjectivity in image reading and to verify current findings. 3
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the anonymous reviewer’s comments and the Editor’s guidelines. Additionally, we are indebted to discussions with Mark Buck, Na Wang, and Xiaohui Qin.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.