Empathetic Solidarity: How Chinese English-Language Media Portrays Urban Community Participation

This article examines how Chinese state media tries to legitimize and promote civic solidarity in its portrayal of grassroots community participation to an international audience. It performed a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of 758 articles published in major Chinese English-language newspapers between 2001 and 2022. The results reveal a message of 'empathetic solidarity' in which Western ideas of liberty are blended, or hybridized, with the Chinese discourse of caring to 'serve the people', a fusion of Confucian culture and CCP's socialist values. This study finds that code hybridization in Chinese media coverage serves a dual purpose: to highlight the agency of individual citizens in the context of caring for others and to legitimize state interference in community issues. By centering civic solidarity in caring and service for ordinary people, the media expands and transforms the code of liberty with a mutual collaboration between the government and individuals.