Minghui Gao – University of Turku, University of Helsinki, Finland
Keywords
Cultural identity, intercultural couples, media discourse, intercultural communication, Chinese media
Abstract
Movement across national and cultural borders are increasing rapidly in the era of accelerated globalization, which creates more opportunities for people to establish relationships in countries other than their own. Hence, intercultural couples, which consist of “partners from different countries, nationalities, ethnicities and religions”, are expanding in numbers and have become socially acceptable. Taking China as an example, with China’s swift economic development and increasing communication with the outside world in recent years, Chinese people have more opportunities to meet with people from other countries and to establish a romantic relationship with them. The statistics in 2017 shows that there are 40524 registered married intercultural couples in China. Due to their different backgrounds, intercultural couples have been considered different from “normal” relationships, and the problems in their relationship tend to be attributed to “cultural differences”. Hence, discourse on intercultural couplehood often relies on solid national/cultural identities when explaining intercultural couples’ experiences. By looking at different Chinese television programs across the past 8 years, this study is interested in exploring the media construction of intercultural couples in the Chinese media. Data used for this study is taken from three shows that introduce the stories of intercultural couples living in China on Chinese national television channels. The first show is “The Foreign Wife in Our Village” of the program “Country Date”, first broadcasted on January 29, 2011 on CCTV7, previously the channel of military and agriculture. The show is about 38 minutes long. The other two shows are “There Comes the Foreign Wife at Our Village” and “Nina’s Journey” of the program “Foreigners in China”, first broadcasted on January 24, 2015 and January 13, 2019 respectively on CCTV 4 international channel. The shows are about 30 minutes and 27 minutes long. Each show introduces an intercultural couple of Chinese husband and foreign wife. Through the “liquid” approach to linguistic discourse analysis, the study takes a critical stance towards a culturalist approach to intercultural relationships and aims to find out how the couples are presented and constructed, as well as if and how cultural differences are used to enact the couples’ identification. Moreover, by looking at the television programs produced over the past years, the study also examines if and what have been changed in terms of the presentation and construction of intercultural couples in the television programs over the years. The results of this study, especially the possible shifts of how media discourse says about intercultural are useful examples on analyzing how the gap between academic and social meanings of “cultural identity” can be reduced.
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