Framing Ethnic Minority Representation in Chinese Media: A Comparative Analysis of People’s Daily and Hunan Daily in the Context of Targeted Poverty Alleviation

Abstract

This paper examines how ethnic minority identities were produced in news reports of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation campaign in China between 2015 and 2020 by examining how the Party organ, People's Daily, and the provincial newspaper, Hunan Daily, reported the same issue. Using a corpus of 230 articles (120 national, 110 provincial) available through digital archives (using governance and ethnicity-related search terms), it employs qualitative comparison as the main method of the research, basing it on framing theory, Faircloughian critical discourse approaches, and the theory of representation. The analysis coded texts on evaluative lexis, agency assignment, and voice attribution as well as cultural imagery. Results indicate that people's readings are biased towards macro achievement discourses, Party elite, and passive grammar that present communities as benefactors whose sense of gratitude is a political reward. Hunan Daily, on its part, uses human-centered narration, quotations, and action verbs to predict local decision-making, entrepreneurship, and cultural economy. The comparison shows no institutional scale in representation of the authority of the institution because the central discourse produces symbolic inclusion with a poor voice, whereas provincial discourse can partially represent the self and have more subjectivity. The study explicates how poverty governance communication produces an imagination of agency and provides implications for increased voice-based reporting on rebuilding post-poverty revitalization.