Dynamics of inclusion and exclusion: media representation of Tibetans on China Central Television and its audience reception

As one of the largest minority groups in China, the national/ethnic identities of Tibetans have been topics of debates due to the historical and political complexity of the Tibet-China relationship. The conflicting issues surrounding the national/ethnic relationship have posed a serious question regarding the contemporary formulation of a multi-ethnic Chinese nation-state. With special attention paid to the historical (and ongoing) nation-building project in China, this thesis examines how Tibetans are represented as the ‘Internal Other’ on state-owned China Central Television as part of an investigation into the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the media representations of Tibetans and audience receptions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The project aims to examine the mediated inclusion and exclusion of Tibetans within the PRC and to explore the complexity of the “ethnic” in Chinese nationalism. The theoretical underpinning of this study draws on recent debates in nationalism studies and studies regarding the politics of representation and the vital role of audiences in the “circuit” of meaning-making. Using a mixed-method research design, this thesis examines the practices of othering and the process of inclusion in the media representations of Tibetans in a combined textual and audience research project. The thesis is based on content analysis of the news coverage of Tibetans on Xinwen Lianbo (N=375) during the period spanning 2014-2016, as well as qualitative narrative analysis of selected news items and extensive qualitative interviews with Tibetans and Han Chinese collected during fieldwork in Shanghai and Lhasa between September and November 2017. Based on the empirical results, this thesis demonstrates how Tibetans are represented as the “Internal Other” through different representational strategies within the dominant discourses of nationalism and modernisation, and in which ways these dominant discourses gain resonance or are challenged in the process of interpretation. The findings illustrated that, under the authoritarian public sphere, Chinese audiences’ interpretations of media coverage of Tibetans are situational. Social categories of difference, such as ethnicity, gender, generation, rural/urban background and religion intersect with each other and contribute to a diverse range of experiences in the mediated inclusion and exclusion within the Chinese society. However, it is also found that the complexity of Othering practices among both the Han majority and Tibetans does not imply a strong oppositional discourse in relation to Tibetans and Chinese nationalism in China.