"THERE IS NO UNCONDITIONAL LOVE" - DECODING ANTI-REFUGEE SENTIMENTS ON CHINESE SOCIAL MEDIA SONG JING - DIVA PORTAL
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“There Is No Unconditional
Love”
Decoding anti-refugee sentiments on Chinese social media
Song Jing
Photo taken by Song Jing, June 11 2021
Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies
Master’s thesis 30 HE credits
Middle Eastern Studies
MA in Middle Eastern Studies (120 credits)
Spring term 2021
Supervisor: Professor Jenny White
“There Is No Unconditional Love” Decoding anti-refugee sentiments on Chinese social media Song Jing Abstract This paper attempts to decode anti-refugee sentiments on Chinese social media. It is based on the selection, organization, and thematization of typical anti-refugee narratives extracted from social media in order to better understand the reasons behind such sentiments. Attitudes towards refugees on Chinese social media are overwhelmingly negative. The negative reaction was multi-layered: (1) a narcissistic presentation of China’s self-image; (2) Islamophobic sentiments; (3) resentment towards the West. Keywords Anti-refugee; China; social media; Islamophobia; critical discourse analysis.
Contents
Acknowledgement ........................................................................................... 1
Introduction ............................................................................................ 2
Research questions ......................................................................................... 4
Literature Review .................................................................................... 5
Delimitations and future directions ......................................................... 8
Methodology............................................................................................ 9
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) .................................................................... 9
Data collection and analytical procedure ....................................................... 10
Background ........................................................................................... 13
Main discussion ..................................................................................... 16
“He is sure to have a different mind”: How ingroup positivity was formed .... 16
Self-racialization: The “Middle Kingdom mentality” .............................................16
Race, culture and nationalism ..........................................................................17
“China first”: Nativist discourse ........................................................................23
Delegitimizing refugees ...................................................................................24
Devaluing refugees .........................................................................................26
Rationalizing anti-refugee sentiments ...............................................................28
“Islam is out of the question”: The convergence of Islamophobia and anti-
refugee sentiments ....................................................................................... 35
Essentializing Muslims and Islam ......................................................................36
Demographic threat ........................................................................................41
Sacralization of secularism ..............................................................................42
Global and local Islamophobia discourses ..........................................................43
“Are we going to be bullied again?” The role of the West in anti-refugee
discourse ....................................................................................................... 44
White Left and their Western thoughts ..............................................................46
Refugees as a tool to frame China: Victim mentality ...........................................48
The refugee crisis as a lesson: “Declining West” .................................................49
Conclusion ............................................................................................. 51
Epilogue: In pursuit of compassion ....................................................... 53
Bibliography .......................................................................................... 57
Acknowledgement
I would like to send my biggest thanks to my supervisor, Professor Jenny White. She has
supported and encouraged me all along when I was writing this paper. She offered me brilliant
suggestions and invaluable feedback. With her help, the paper turned from a disaster to this. I couldn’t
be thankful enough. I felt really lucky that I had the chance to take her courses and have her as my
supervisor. Her courses changed me and helped me find my academic interest. I couldn’t imagine my
student life without her. She’s a true inspiration and I’m forever grateful.
I would like to thank Professor Elie Wardini. His encouragement meant the world to me. He was
always there when we needed help. Thank you Martin Säfström, for being probably the best study
director ever. He’s a true lifesaver. I would like to thank all of the professors, lecturers, staff members,
classmates, and colleagues who have helped me. You made my life at Stockholm University truly
unforgettable. I would also like to thank Professor Zhimin Han from Shanghai International Studies
University. Without her, I couldn’t be where I am today.
I want to thank my parents for their “unstoppable” love. You’re there when I was the toast of the
town, and when I struck out and crawled home. I would like to thank my therapists Urban and Martin
for keeping me calm and changing the way I see myself. Thank you Xinyi: for proofreading this paper
and being my friend for more than 10 years. Thank you Zhaoxu: you know there’s a part of me only
you can understand. Your intelligence kept challenging me and inspiring me. Thank you Mengru and
Yixuan: I feel safe when I’m with you. Thank you Jiali and Yaping for challenging this paper.
In the end, I would like to thank anyone who has ever made my day. You made this life bearable.
1
Introduction
“There is no unconditional love in this world.”
— A comment from a netizen
This paper attempts to decode anti-refugee sentiments on Chinese social media. It is based on the
selection, organization, and thematization of typical anti-refugee narratives extracted from social
media in order to better understand the reasons behind such sentiments. Attitudes towards refugees on
Chinese social media are overwhelmingly negative. The negative reaction was multi-layered: (1) a
narcissistic presentation of China’s self-image; (2) Islamophobic sentiments; (3) resentment towards
the West.
The idea for this paper came up last spring when I read a Chinese article and comments on social
media about Wilma Andersson, a Swedish girl who was murdered by her Muslim boyfriend. Chinese
netizens expressed Schadenfreude, seeing this as karma for Sweden’s generally tolerant attitudes
towards Muslims and Islam. This aroused my curiosity, so I started to research Chinese people’s
attitudes towards the Middle East/Islam/Muslim.
Chenchen Zhang (2020) researched China’s right-wing populism discourse on Zhihu, a Quora-
like social media in China. Inspired by her brilliant work, I also started my research on Zhihu. Zhihu
users enjoy long articles and serious discussions (Graziani 2018), thus compared to other social media
platforms, Zhihu can offer richer text resources to analyze. I searched several keywords to see what
people were talking about. When I searched ‘refugee’, I noticed something different from the way
other topics were discussed. The debate was much more heated, and the negativity was overwhelming.
For instance, in this paper, from the 327 comments I collected randomly, only 29 were positive or
neutral. In another word, more than 90% of collected comments held a negative attitude towards
refugees. The result was consistent with public opinion polls. In an online poll on China’s Sina Weibo
platform in 2018, 97.7 percent of over 8,600 users said they oppose China taking foreign refugees, and
in a similar week-long poll from June 2017, 97.3 percent of over 210,000 users indicated the same
choice (Li 2018).
As a result of this research, I decided to narrow down my focus and to only collect people’s
opinions towards refugees. This would allow me to complicate existing survey research by asking:
How did Chinese netizens view refugees? What did the image of refugees stand for on Chinese social
media? Why did netizens hold such a negative attitude towards refugees? As I will show later in this
paper, the refugee issue was not directly related to China. China has not been affected by recent
2
refugee waves, nor did China intend to accept more refugees. Then why did refugees matter to
Chinese netizens?
To answer these questions, I used critical discourse analysis, which seeks to “capture the
interrelationship between language, power and ideology” (Machin and Mayr 2012, 4). By analyzing
texts collected from the mainstream website on what users said about ‘refugees’, I identified three
active actors in their discussion, refugees, China, and the West. The image of ‘refugees’ pulled several
triggers at once, and that is probably why it caused such great opposition on Chinese social media.
Social identity theory (Tajfel 1974) posits the existence of ingroups and outgroups and explains how
they function. This paper tries to explain this ingroup love and outgroup hate at the intersection of the
three actors.
As for the data collection process of this paper, I collected them by choosing the top 4 user
questions when I searched ‘refugee’ on Zhihu on April 13th, 2021. To reduce the numbers, I only
collected the top 100 answers to each question in the default sorting order. Thus the data collection
process was completely random and not based on my own selection. Since more than 90% of these
randomly collected texts are negative, this paper analyzes netizens’ negative attitudes solely and does
not discuss the few positive or neutral ones. I firstly ‘dismantled’ the texts by breaking 327 answers
into sentences. Then I analyzed sentences and coded them by different angles — the emotions, the
agents, the strategies, etc. Though I mainly analyzed texts by sentences, I did not ignore the bigger
picture — I also analyzed the answer as a whole. After ‘dismantling’, I ‘reassembled’ the texts by
what they have in common. As a result, the texts are mainly divided into three categories. Some
netizens mainly wrote about China instead of refugees per se. Some netizens were bothered by
refugees as ‘what they are’ and ‘what they did’. Other netizens held negative attitudes, not due to
refugees themselves but the West. In this way, I identified three actors in netizens’ discussion, China,
refugee, and the West. Under each main category, the texts were further subcategorized. For example,
some texts are in the same subcategory because they all reflect the authors’ nativist point of view. The
main discussion of this paper was also structured in this way. What’s more, since many answers are
long discussions due to the characteristics of Zhihu platform which I will further explain later, also
since texts were mainly analyzed by the sentence unit, most of the examples I put in this paper are
only extracts from original answers.
As for the structure of this paper, it first started with the introduction, literature review, and
methodology part. Then it moved on to the background part. In this section, I presented the current
refugee status, refugee law, and policy in China to offer an overview. It showed that refugee is not an
actual threat to Chinese society. However, it still caused a huge outcry in China. The main discussion
part was divided into three sections, as I discussed the three actors one by one. The first section
focuses on ingroup love — how distinctive ingroup identification was made. The second section
attempts to discuss the role Islamophobia played in the anti-refugee sentiments. It will show that most
netizens assumed refugees as Muslims and their bad characteristics were attributed to their
3
Muslimness. The third section of the main discussion explains why the West is also an important actor
in the anti-refugee discussion. At the end of this paper, the epilogue was my suggestion to restore
compassion and make this world a better place.
Research questions
This paper attempts to answer following questions: How did Chinese netizens view refugees?
What did the image of refugees stand for on Chinese social media? Why did netizens hold such a
negative attitude towards refugees? Why did refugees matter to Chinese netizens?
I hope this paper can shed light on how and why Chinese netizens held such negative attitudes
towards refugees and contribute to the global anti-refugee research. By analyzing the way how
netizens created a superior self-image, this paper also contributed to any future work regarding online
hate speech on Chinese social media. By discussing netizens’ hatred towards Islam/Muslims and
refugees from the Middle East, this paper also filled the academic vacuum, though only to a very small
extent, of how Chinese perceive the Middle East.
4
Literature Review
Work regarding refugees in China is very limited. Jing Wang (2020) discussed the anti-refugee
controversy in contemporary China. She attributed the anti-refugee sentiments to the limits of
multicultural imagination of refugees, particularly those from the Middle East and North Africa. She
argued the limits of multicultural imagination are shaped by domestic policies and global imaginaries
towards refugees. Three aspects were highlighted: (1) the global circulation of right-wing populism
imaginaries, and their entanglements with the anti-Muslim sentiments in China; (2) the current
insufficiency of the legal-institutional framework regarding refugees and asylum-seekers; (3)
population politics, the rise of Han-centric nationalism, and their constraining impact on the
interpretation of historical events related to cultural diversity. She noted the Islamophobic discourse
from the West is imagined and localized in the Chinese context. “The global rise of right-wing
populism has further fueled the debates over multiculturalism and minority issues in China’s media
platforms, thus providing a hotbed for the fermentation of the anti-refugee discourse in China.” (Wang
2020, 140) The PRC government still lacks a comprehensive legal-institutional framework to address
the issue of refugees which further constrains the multicultural imagination in policy making and
public opinion.
Chenchen Zhang’s (2020) work analyzed an emerging discourse on Chinese social media that
combines the claims, vocabulary and style of right-wing populisms in Europe and North America with
previous forms of nationalism and racism in Chinese cyberspace. Through qualitative analysis of
around one thousand posts, she analyzed how some Chinese Internet users with a keen interest in
global politics adopt the style of right-wing populism to reconstruct self-other relations and produce
popular narratives of international order. The most frequently raised issues in the debate are
“immigration/refugees, Islam/Muslims and race” (Zhang 2020, 107). The refugee issue offered an
opportunity to construct China’s ethno-racial identity against the “inferior” non-Western other on the
one hand, and formulates China’s political identity against the “declining” Western other with realist
authoritarianism on the other. The discourse embodies the logics of anti-Western Eurocentrism and
anti-hegemonic hegemonies.
There are also a few studies focusing on how China perceives the European refugee crisis. Chun
Gan (2020) reviewed how the crisis was presented in popular discourse between 2015 and 2017. He
argued the narratives, which are created through recontextualization of long-standing nationalist
discourses, reflected the dilemma between China’s ambitious globalist vision for future development
and the persistent myth of homogeneity of Chinese nationhood. Gan (2020) noticed the responses
turned from mocking Europe to bashing refugees. The “immigrant bashing” emerged abruptly in 2017
5(Gan 2020, 26). “The changing socio-cultural context, wherein the subject of immigration became
increasingly difficult to avoid, motivated them to draw a connection between Europe’s trouble with
the crisis and the possible threat faced by the taken-for-granted homogeneous Chinese identity.” (Gan
2020, 34)
Jiang, Zhang and d’Haenens (2021) analyzed the Chinese newspaper coverage of the political and
civil responses in European societies towards the refugee issue. The study found that Chinese media
portrayed a fairly unwelcoming attitude from both political and civil society actors in Europe towards
refugees, though civil society actors tend to be more welcoming than political actors. They showed
that Chinese media interpret the European refugee issue “more from a political perspective than a
societal or economic perspective” (Jiang, Zhang, and d’Haenens 2021, 12).
Jiang, Zhang and d’Haenens’ (2021) study showed how Chinese media reported the European
refugee crisis, but it did not touch upon its influence on the Chinese audience. They made an
extremely wrong claim, arguing “it is not surprising to see the welcoming civil responses as perceived
in Chinese media” (Jiang, Zhang, and d’Haenens 2021, 15). As many studies, as well as this paper,
showed, civil attitude towards refugees is far from “welcoming”. The authors sugarcoated Chinese
people’s response, maybe deliberately as they made this claim in the same paragraph praising China’s
contribution to refugee work.
Wang’s (2020) work was the only one that directly analyzed netizens’ anti-refugee discourse, as
far as I know. She attributed the sentiment to several domestic reasons which all resulted in the limits
of multicultural imagination. However, people’s attitude was not thoroughly presented as she used a
mixed approach, including textual analysis, interviews, and archival research. She touched upon the
influence of global Islamophobia discourse but did not deeply analyze it. Both Zhang (2020) and Gan
(2020) associated Chinese people’s attitudes towards refugees with that towards the West. Zhang’s
(2020) analysis was from the perspective of political science and international relations. Her article’s
focus was the right-wing populist discourse in Chinese cyberspace while the refugee issue was a
trigger. None of the posts she collected were directly from discussions about refugees. However, she
still shed light on the question “what refugees stand for”, which inspired this paper a lot. When people
are against refugees, what they’re against may be the West. Gan’s (2020) work showed how anti-
refugee sentiments were related to Chinese identity construction.
However, no studies did a thorough analysis of the anti-refugee discourses and combed the
narratives to show what strategies are frequently used in anti-refugee discourses. Some work, for
example Wang (2020), touched upon the Islamophobia issue, but no work analyzed how
Islamophobia, which I believe is an important reason, works in the anti-refugee discourse in China.
This paper, as critical discourse analysis, was based on text. I focused on what the grassroots
wrote, on their sentiments and emotions, and then I tried to find out the roots of their sentiments. This
paper categorized and thematized different discourses. The reason why refugee issues caused such
intense debate was that refugees pulled several triggers at once. This paper took all three actors into
6consideration, namely China, refugees, and the West. The three actors intertwined to shape the anti-
refugee discourses on Chinese social media.
7Delimitations and future directions
This paper is a qualitative study based on the critical discourse analysis of 327 texts from one
social media platform. The amount of data was limited and it only showed people’s attitudes from one
platform. Thus a big limitation of this study is generalizability. Quantitative studies are needed to
show more people’s, not only netizen’s, general opinions towards refugees. Future work can also
focus on other social media platforms. Texts are very detailed and the analyzing process was
exhausting. Due to my limited capability, I dare not say I analyzed my data exhaustively. I noticed
some patterns but there must be more that I ignored or not included in my data. Also, the data I
collected were not bounded by temporal limit. Therefore, this paper does not reflect how netizens’
attitudes changed through time.
The anti-refugee discourses on Chinese social media were very rich and made me ponder on
many different issues. I touched upon some of them but cannot answer them all. Also, many issues
were well beyond the scope of this paper. However, I wish more future work could deal with them.
For example, how did the official discourse influence people through media and education in China?
How did Chinese people view social problems when they exempt the government from blame? Most
importantly, more diverse work from different disciplines about the Middle East is needed in China.
As Sun (2011) noticed, Chinese Middle East Studies remains underdeveloped. Most current work in
China centers on international relations, Islamic and Jewish culture, and history. When preparing this
paper, I also noticed there is almost no work about the Middle East-China relations on the grassroots
level.
8Methodology
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
CDA research is not ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’, nor does it claim to be. Rather, “it is motivated by a
desire for positive social change” (Page et al. 2014, 98). CDA researchers typically have a question
about or a problem in society as a starting point. Thus for analyzing anti-refugee texts, I believed it
would be proper to apply the CDA method.
Critical Discourse Analysis is a “loose combination of approaches founded in linguistics”
(Machin and Mayr 2012), associated for the most part with a number of key authors such as Norman
Fairclough (1989), Ruth Wodak (1989), and Teun van Dijk (1991). Critical Discourse Analysts sought
to “develop methods and theory that could better capture the interrelationship between language,
power and ideology and especially to draw out and describe the practices and conventions in and
behind texts that reveal political and ideological investment” (Machin and Mayr 2012, 4). There is no
single or homogeneous version of CDA. Rather, what we find is a whole range of critical approaches
which can be classified as CDA. But what they have in common is “the view of language as a means
of social construction, that language both shapes and is shaped by society” (Machin and Mayr 2012,
4). Van Dijk (1995, 21) noted that “ideologies control how people plan and understand their social
practices, and hence also the structures of text and talk”. CDA is not so much interested in language
use itself, but in the linguistic character of social and cultural processes and structures. The term
‘critical’ means “denaturalizing” the language to reveal ideas, absences and taken-for-granted
assumptions in texts (Machin and Mayr 2012, 5). ‘Discourse’ is “language in real contexts of use”
(Machin and Mayr 2012, 20) and operates above the level of grammar and semantics. Ideologies
seldom express themselves directly in text and talk. “More subtle and indirect ideological control and
reproduction is effected through general attitudes and specific personal models which form the basis of
discourse production and are the result of discourse comprehension.” (van Dijk 1995, 33)
Machin and Mayr (2012) argued that we should “think about language as a set of resources”. A
choice of word or visual element might suggest kinds of identities, values and activities due to
established associations, that is, it would frame the subject. Robert Entman (1993) defines ‘framing’ as
“to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in
such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation,
and/or treatment recommendation for the item described”. Entman (1993, 52) suggested that frames
have at least four locations in the communication process: “the communicator, the text, the receiver,
and the culture”. Communicators make conscious or unconscious framing judgments in deciding what
to say, guided by frames (often called schemata) that organize their belief systems. The text contains
9frames, which are manifested by the presence or absence of certain keywords, stock phrases,
stereotyped images, sources of information, and sentences that provide thematically reinforcing
clusters of facts or judgments. The frames that guide the receiver’s thinking and conclusion may or
may not reflect the frames in the text and the framing intention of the communicator because they are
overdetermined by a readily available cultural inventory of frames. Culture provides a stock of
commonly invoked frames; in fact, culture might be evidenced by an empirically demonstrable set of
common frames exhibited in discourse and thinking of most people in a social grouping. “Frames
highlight some bits of information about an item that is the subject of a communication, thereby
elevating these elements in salience, which means making a piece of information more noticeable,
meaningful, or memorable to audiences.” (Entman 1993, 53)
The analytical methods for this paper were guided by Machin and Mayr (2012). The following
definitions will be used in this paper:
⚫ Objectivation: participants can be reduced to a feature;
⚫ Presupposition: meanings which are assumed as given in a text;
⚫ Modality: any units of language that express the speaker’s or writer’s personal opinion of or
commitment to what they say;
⚫ Overlexicalization: a word or its synonyms overpresent in a text.
Data collection and analytical procedure
Zhihu was chosen as the platform to collect the data for this paper for two reasons. First, it was
more effective in obtaining targeted user-linked information than other social media platforms. The
main feature of Zhihu is user-generated Q&As. When the keyword ‘refugee’ is searched, the result is a
list of questions including the keyword ‘refugee’. Under the questions about ‘refugee’, people share
their opinions related to refugees. Thus it guarantees that most of the data are relevant. In contrast, if
we search the keyword ‘refugee’ on other platforms, say Weibo (Twitter-like), the results would be all
the posts including the keyword ‘refugee’. These can be about anything, not necessarily related to
‘refugee’. For example, I may get a post saying ‘The taxi driver is really talkative. He can talk about
everything from tax reform to the refugee issue…’ This is irrelevant to my study and would make the
filter process exhausting. Second, the data on Zhihu is richer and deeper. As Graziani (2018) noted,
Zhihu users enjoy long articles and serious discussions. Zhihu is a platform predominantly focusing on
‘text’ rather than emotions. Professional opinions and deep thoughts are expected by users. Therefore,
compared to other social media platforms, Zhihu can offer richer text resources to analyze.
Founded in 2011, Zhihu is one of the most popular social media sites and the biggest knowledge
sharing platform in China with 220 million registered users and 34 million daily active users in 2019
(Smith 2021). Often called the Chinese version of Quora, Zhihu’s main feature is the user-generated
10questions and answers. According to Zhihu’s LinkedIn introduction, it is trying to build a peer-to-peer
network of knowledge, expertise and insight. Its mission is explained as connecting people and the
knowledge, know-how, expertise and first-hand information constrained in each individual’s mind
(Linkedin, n.d.). Their typical audience, according to Zhihu is used to reading long articles and enjoys
serious discussions and more than 70% of users are there to seek professional knowledge and self
improvement (Graziani 2018). Authenticity, genuineness and professionalism are the core value of
Zhihu that users appreciate (Graziani 2018). Here are some basic facts about Zhihu users (Graziani
2018):
⚫ Zhihu users are generally well-educated, with 80% of registered users having a bachelor’s degree or
above;
⚫ They are well-paid (30% of them earn more than RMB 10,000 a month, while the majority of internet
users earn between RMB 2,000 to RMB 5,000 per month);
⚫ Zhihu has a rather old population for a social App, with 78.2% of them are 25 or older;
⚫ Zhihu has a predominantly male audience; 53.3% of users are male.
As for the data sampling, I sampled by theme, which means I collected data from “thematically
organized streams of online discourse” (Androutsopoulos 2017, 235). I searched the keyword
‘refugee’ on Zhihu, and chose the top 4 user questions in the result list. The default search results can
be different at different times, and I used the result I searched on April 13 th, 2021. The top 4 questions
on that date were:
⚫ Q1: How many refugees from other countries are there in China? (with 27 answers)
⚫ Q2: Will China accept refugees in the future? (with 297 answers)
⚫ Q3: How do you comment on the phenomenon that a large number of Weibo users denounced
refugees on World Refugee Day?1 (with 1083 answers)
⚫ Q4: Did any Europeans realize that the refugee issue is very serious in Europe? (with 498 answers)
As can be seen, there were numerous answers to Q2, Q3 and Q4, especially Q3 with more than a
thousand answers. Since this research is a detailed textual analysis, and the analysis process is manual,
it would be impossible to analyze a large amount of data. Thus for Q2, Q3, and Q4, I decided to
reduce the number of answers to 100 for each question. There are two ways to sort the answers on
Zhihu, ‘by time’ and ‘default’. I selected the top 100 answers in the default sorting order. Therefore, I
have 327 answers in total to 4 questions, and these are my data for analysis in this paper.
The webpages were captured by screenshots and saved in PDF files. The files were later cleaned
up from other useless text contents such as banners, sidebars, etc. in order to be input to NVivo.
“NVivo is Computer Aided Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) software, which is used in a wide
range of academic and market research qualitative studies.” (Fenton and Procter 2019, 6) NVivo was
used in this research to help analyze, locate themes, search word frequency, etc.
1
The question was modified later as “How to comment on the phenomenon that the UNHCR’s post on
World Refugee Day was criticized by Weibo users?”
11All the data are “screen-based” (Androutsopoulos 2017), which means data are produced by
participants and collected online by me. In other words, I ‘gathered’ data that already exists instead of
‘eliciting’ data. In this research, my involvement, or online observation, was passive. Online
observation refers to the process of “virtually being there”, with or without active participation, and
watching the digital communication you will eventually analyze as it unfolds in a website or a network
of connections across sites (Androutsopoulos 2017, 238). However, Androutsopoulos (2017) noted
that observation comes in degrees, even limited online observation offers a degree of ethnographic
grounding. In other words, in this research I did not engage in systematic and regular online
observation. My participation was akin to “roaming around”, which means “exploring the virtual
ground, browsing around sites, sections, threads, or profiles.” (Androutsopoulos 2017, 238) I did not
pay iterative visits to the selected online site to routine activities and changes, since what is important
to my research are the texts themselves rather than the online behaviors of users. However, as a
‘lurker’, I did view many more texts on the site than I ended up analyzing. I have been a longtime
Zhihu user, though not a very active or loyal one, but long enough to allow me to acquire some of the
“tacit knowledge” underlying the semiotic practices (Androutsopoulos 2017).
All translations were done by myself. For the sake of accuracy, I include the original Chinese
text, particularly as the lexicon, grammar, and sentence structure between English and Chinese can be
extremely different. However, including the original text leads to an ethical concern. Including the
original text means that people might be able to search it and find the original post.
After consideration, I decided to include the original text, for two reasons. First, the data are
public. All the data are publicly available and none of them are prompted by me through contact with
users. Second, Zhihu offers an anonymity function, which means users can post anonymously. In fact,
a lot of users do so when they don’t want to be associated with what they write.
In order to analyze the texts, I reread them several times while taking notes. I firstly ‘dismantled’
the texts by breaking 327 answers into smaller units. Then I analyzed and coded them by different
angles — the emotions, the agents, the strategies, etc. I ‘reassembled’ the ‘dismantled’ texts by what
they have in common afterward. As a result, the texts are mainly divided into three main topics, China,
refugee, and the West. Under each main topic, the texts were further subcategorized by the common
emotions, strategies, etc.
12Background
Refugee, in Chinese 难民 (nan min), is a contemporary Chinese word and was not used officially
in ancient and modern times (Liu 2019). In the literal sense of the word and from the perspective of
Chinese native speakers, ‘nan min’ refers to people who have serious difficulty. From a standard
perspective, in the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (Chinese-English edition), ‘nan min’ is defined,
in a general sense, as people who have been forced to leave their homes and face difficulty in
supporting themselves for war, natural disasters and other reasons (Ibid.).
The UNHCR Beijing Office conducts refugee registration and refugee status determinations in
China. Recognized refugees are permitted to remain temporarily in China while the UNHCR is
seeking a durable solution, which most of the time involves resettlement in a third country (Zhang
2016).
In 2020, China hosted 303,410 documented refugees, almost all (303,095) from Viet Nam.
According to the UNHCR, except for a group of 970 refugees from unknown places in 1966, Viet
Nam has always been the main origin of refugees in China since the UNHCR started to record annual
refugee statistics in China in 1979.
However, a large number of undocumented refugees also have come to China since the
foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Lili Song (2018) noted that in the past
20 years, China witnessed at least four mass influxes of displaced people from neighboring countries,
namely the continuous inflow of North Korean escapees since the mid-1990s, the influx of ethnic
Kokangs from Myanmar in August 2009 and again from February 2015 to the present, and the
ongoing arrivals of the ethnic Kachins from Myanmar since June 2011. Zhang (2016) noted that the
Chinese government generally does not recognize these people as refugees. Undocumented North
Koreans who have crossed into China since the mid-1990s are generally treated as illegal economic
migrants. While the Chinese government promptly opened camps to host Kokangs and provided other
humanitarian assistance, the authorities did not refer to them as refugees.
As can be seen, China hosted rather small numbers of refugees, and almost all from Viet Nam.
This seems surprising, compared to such a great outcry from the public. So will China accept
refugees? Will refugees be able to resettle in China?
13Refugee populations in China by country of origin in 2020 (UNHCR n.d.)
Refugee populations in China (1966-2019) (Macrotrends n.d.)
As for the government’s stance towards refugees, “notwithstanding its commitment to provide
financial and other humanitarian aid to Middle Eastern countries impacted by the influx of refugees,
China remained firm on staying away from the centre of the crisis and keeping a low-profile role”
(Gan 2020, 20).
14In terms of refugee law, China acceded to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees
and its 1967 Protocol in September 1982 (Zhang 2016). However, the domestic law on refugees and
asylum is still under development. The PRC government still has no specific law to deal with asylum
seekers and refugee-related issues (Wang 2020). Article 32(2) of the Constitution 1982 (2018
Amendment) states: “The People’s Republic of China may grant asylum to foreigners who request it
for political reasons.” (Liu 2019) And according to the article 46 of the 2012 Exit and Entry Law,
foreigners who apply for refugee status in China may, during the screening process, stay in China with
temporary identity certificates issued by public security organs. Foreigners who are recognized as
refugees may stay or reside in China with the refugee identity certificates issued by public security
organs.
The Chinese government was not intended to accept more refugees from the Middle East and
refugees are not able to become citizens due to the refugee law. In other words, the perceived threat of
refugees to Chinese society expressed by the netizens I sampled appears not to be rooted in any actual
threat. On World Refugee Day in 2017, UNHCR launched a series of campaigns, featuring its
goodwill ambassador, actress Yao Chen. Yao’s supportive message calling for solicitude for refugees
was quickly interpreted by netizens as encouraging people to accept refugees into China. Yao was
forced to apologize and even the Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi had to clarify China’s stance
again.
15Main discussion
“He is sure to have a different mind”: How
ingroup positivity was formed
Social identity theory defines ‘social identity’ as those aspects of an individual’s self-concept
based on their social group or category memberships together with their emotional, evaluative and
other psychological correlates (Tajfel 1974). According to the theory, because people seek positive
social identity, they evaluate the group they belong to positively. Since groups are evaluated in
comparison with other groups, a positive social identity requires one’s own group to be positively
distinctive from relevant groups.
The anti-refugee discourses I sampled seem to contain a reflection of the self-image of China. As
Gan (2020, 26) noted, the online discussions about refugees usually “turned into a stunning display of
nationalism powered by populist and chauvinist arguments”. Over centuries, Chinese people have
adopted the ‘Middle Kingdom mentality’, as Jacques (2009) called it — “China believed that it was
the center of the world, the Middle Kingdom, on an entirely different plane from other kingdoms and
countries, not even requiring a name” (Jacques 2009, 240-241). This ‘Middle Kingdom mentality’ can
be seen as a positive ingroup evaluation that now finds its modern form in racism, nationalism,
nativism, and chauvinism. In the texts I sampled, netizens used ‘Middle Kingdom mentality’ in its
modern form to normalize and rationalize their anti-refugee discourses.
Self-racialization: The “Middle Kingdom mentality”
Pfafman, Carpenter and Tang (2015, 543) showed in their study about Chinese netizen’s racism
towards Africans, that people tend to think “China doesn’t actually have racial discrimination against
Africans, and the so-called discrimination is instead similar to how urban residents discriminate
against people from the rural countryside who have no money nor know the rules.” The nature of a
socialist state and the history of a peaceful and benign civilization, as the official narrative relates,
exonerate China from criticism or accusation of racism (Cheng 2019). However, there has been more
and more work focusing on racism in China recently. Rather than perceiving Chinese civilization and
Chinese people as the innocent victims of foreign racism throughout history, Yinghong Cheng (2019)
urged us to treat racism in China seriously and “call a spade a spade”. He noticed that many people
almost instinctively avoid the term racism in a Chinese context (Ibid.). They rejected any connection
between the Chinese and racism, and “what they acknowledge is ignorance and what they insist is
16innocence rather than an informed bias or constructed discrimination” (Ibid.). Cheng (Ibid.) argued
that this Chinese exceptionalism in terms of race issues assumes that “there exists a pure racism, a
racism for racism’s sake”.
Jacques (2009, 246) argued that far from being a Western invention, “racism has ancient roots in
China” which can be traced back to at least 1000 BC. Thus when the concept of race was introduced
into China, it was “a spirited interaction rather than a passive acceptance” (Cheng 2019, 6). Imperial
China embraced an utterly Sinocentric view of its place in the global order. It was “a bifurcated world,
consisting of a single civilization surrounded by many barbarians” (Jacques 2009, 241). The ruling
elite measured groups by “a cultural yardstick according to which those who did not follow Chinese
ways were considered to be barbarians” (Jacques 2009, 246). Cheng (2019) argued that “whether they
have a particular Other to discriminate against or even persecute is situational: when you racialize
yourself, it is just a matter of circumstance under which you racialize Others”.
The ‘Middle Kingdom mentality’ shows a sense of superiority and homogeneity. Dikötter (1992)
pointed out the absence of any kind of cultural pluralism in Chinese classics — the world was
perceived as one homogeneous unity. The ruling elites were dominated by cultural superiority, or what
Jacques (2009) called a belief in their own universalism — the relevance and applicability of their
culture to all peoples and societies, and inherent superiority in relation to others. In ancient China
expansion was a hegemonic project, a desire to absorb other races, to civilize them, to teach them
Chinese ways and to integrate them into the Chinese self. What is also noteworthy here is, as Jacques
(2009) put it, the Chinese sense of superiority was based on a combination of culture and race — the
two inseparably linked, the relative importance of each varying according to time and circumstance.
Racial nationalism refers to a kind of exclusionary ethnic nationalism that defines national
belonging primarily in ethnic and cultural terms, and that views ethno-cultural others as fundamentally
threatening to the homogeneous nation-state (Mudde 2007). The narratives of ethnic lineage and
cultural homogeneity are also associated with an implicit or explicit formulation of ethno-racial
hierarchies and the essentialization of cultural differences. As Zhang (2020) argued, racial nationalism,
usually taking the forms of xenophobia, racism, and Islamophobia, undergirds the discussion on issues
of immigration and Muslims in Chinese society. Next, I will show how the discourse of race, culture,
and nationalism was combined by netizens in my study to positively present the Self and justify the
negative attitudes towards refugees.
Race, culture and nationalism
This subsection discusses how netizens employed discourses of race, culture, and nationalism to
justify their exclusionary stance towards refugees.
17Gan (2020, 30) argued that opponents of immigration often referred to “the Han-centric
discourses on Chineseness to argue for the necessity of fending off outsiders with different cultural
identities and safeguarding the purity of Chinese civilization”.
Example 1.1: China’s orthodoxy can’t be tarnished, and I don’t want to see the
tragedy of “wu hu luan hua” (五胡乱华, The Upheaval of the Five Barbarians)
again.
华夏正统不容玷污，不想重赴五胡乱华的悲剧。
In Example 1.1, refugees are regarded as barbarians, resembling the rhetoric in ancient China.
They will bring the tarnish to China. Here the superiority of Chineseness is more than obvious. It is
noteworthy that here the author used ‘hua xia’ (华夏) to refer to China. Huaxia is a historical concept
representing the Chinese nation and civilization. However, originally it refers to a confederation of
tribes who were believed to be the ancestors of Han people. The Han-centrism is underlying here, and
it was further underlined by the author mentioning ‘wu hu luan hua’ (The Upheaval of the Five
Barbarians). ‘Hu’ (胡) means ‘barbarians’, referring to non-Han peoples. ‘Luan’ (乱) is used here as a
verb, meaning ‘to disturb’. The upheaval is a Chinese expression referring to a series of rebellions and
invasions between 304 and 316 by non-Han peoples living in North China against the Jin Empire. The
author called this historical event a tragedy. To whom it was a tragedy exactly? Certainly, it was a
tragedy to the Jin Empire. The author picked a position here instead of staying objective. The Jin
Empire was built by Han people, and the author lamented its collapse.
“Historical narration is how we tell stories about the past.” (Levin 2011, 13) Following a
constructivist view of history, historical narration allows us to construct identities and ethnicities.
History is thus “socially reconstructed in the context of present needs” (Levin 2011, 21). The event of
‘wu hu luan hua’ is one of the typical arguments often brought up by Han-supremacist. In the texts I
sampled, it was brought up 11 times in total. The use of ‘luan’ (to disturb) instead of other alternative
verbs is suggestive. The reason for the collapse of Jin Empire was interpreted as solely because of
those barbarians regardless of other reasons. The author of Example 1.1 raised this historical event as a
warning of the consequences of accepting ‘barbarians’. The hidden meaning was that if China ever
accepts refugees, then the country will fall apart just as the Jin Empire did in the past. Netizens often
draw on ‘ancestor wisdom’ and quote the classics. One of the most quoted is “If he is not of our race,
he is sure to have a different mind” (非我族类，其心必异。) (translation in Dikötter 1992).
Example 1.2: The Han is the heart of the Chinese nation and the country. Without
one or all of the ethnic minorities, China will still be there in spite of the pain. But
if the Han is gone, this country and civilization will be gone as well. It is also a
bridge and core. Without the Han, would the ethnic minorities unite together? ......
The core of the contemporary concept of the Chinese nation is modernization
under Hanification, and the combination of modernization and Han civilization
18…… It doesn’t matter whether you like this kind of “nationalism” or not. More
than one billion people like it. Who do you think you are?
汉族是中华民族和这个国家的心脏，少了哪一个甚至全部的少数民族，中国
经历阵痛也还是会存在。但汉族他要是没了，这个国家和文明就没了。他还
是个桥梁和核心，没有汉族，少数民族会团结在一起吗？……当代的中华民
族概念的核心就是汉化下的现代化，就是现代化和汉文明的结合…..至于你
不喜欢这种“民族主义”没关系，十几亿的群众喜欢，你算老几？
Example 1.2 is an extract of the netizen author’s long discussion to prove that China cannot
accept refugees because the Chinese are not ready. Accepting refugees would be unrealistic. ‘We need
to respect and recognize the fact.’ At the end of the example, the author used a typical topos of people:
if the people favor/refuse a specific action, the action should be performed/not performed (Wodak
2015, 53). The author put anyone who refuses this kind of ‘nationalism’ on the opposite side of the
majority and invalidated their opinions. In Example 1.2, Han-supremacy was unapologetically
worshipped and presented as a matter of fact to refuse the liberal ideologies. Ethnic minorities are
unimportant and even unnecessary since the author believed even if all of them are gone China will
survive as intact as ever. The author also used ‘modernization under Hanification’ instead of
alternatives such as ‘Chinese-ization’. As Link (2015) argued, in daily life ‘Chinese’ has continued to
be understood, implicitly, as Han. The author of Example 1.2 constantly equates Han with Chinese.
Example 1.2 is clear proof of James Leibold’s (2010) argument that while admitting that China is a
multi-ethnic state, the Han are said to be the ‘core race’ in China, meaning that the interests of the Han
race are equivalent to the interests of China as a whole and the welfare of its people.
The myth holds that the Chinese are and always have been one race, that they share a common
origin, and that those who occupy what is China today have always enjoyed a natural affinity with
each other as one big family. However, The Han Chinese is an imagined group. “The term ‘Han
Chinese’ only came into existence in the late 19th century.” (Jacques 2009, 236) It was during this time
when the cultural superiority was shaken and undermined that the nationalist writer Zhang Taiyan
introduced the term ‘Han people’ to describe the Chinese nation. The term was an invention, nothing
more than a cultural construct. The Han Chinese were, in reality, “an amalgam of many races”
(Jacques 2009, 244). In the early Republican era when the need to establish a common identity was
urgent, the Han elites managed to establish “the centrality of the Han blood and ancestors in the
process of creating a common origin of the Chinese people and ‘melting’ branches or marginal groups
into this Han-centered Chinese nationhood” (Cheng 2019, 7).
Jacques (2009) noticed that ethnic minorities are regarded as inferior because they are less
modern. There is an underlying belief that ethnic minorities have to be raised to the level of the Han,
whose culture is considered as “a model for the minorities to follow and emulate” (Jacques 2009, 252).
19This kind of assimilation thinking not only shows the obsession with homogeneity, or in Wang’s
(2020) word “limits of multicultural imagination”, but also the absolute confidence in their superiority.
The thought of ‘assimilating foreigners’, unexceptionally, applies to the discussion about
refugees. Some netizens mentioned the Chinese refugees from Vietnam and Indonesia that China had
accepted before. They believed the reason to accept them and that they can resettle in China is because
those refugees are ‘from the same culture and same race’ (同文同种). Thus they did not necessarily
need to be assimilated. Chinese nationalism is racial, as well as cultural. As Cheng (2019, 240) argued,
as for overseas Chinese, “regardless of the nationality on their passport, as long as they were Chinese
by blood, they were forever Chinese”. The Chineseness is in the blood.
Example 1.3: Why is obtaining Chinese nationality so demanding? Because what
we want are the compatriots who take roots in this soil wholeheartedly, the
cultural blood of the same clan, and the feeling of serving the country and
protecting home when the country falls into distress again one day.
为什么获得中国国籍如此苛刻？因为我们要的，是全心全意扎根于这片土壤
的同胞，是同宗同源的文化血脉，是也许在某一天再度陷入危难之中时，我
心头油然而起的那腔报国之情，和毫不犹豫的保家之心。
In Example 1.3, the author believed that obtaining Chinese nationality is difficult is because few
people are qualified to be ‘Chinese’. In another word, one needs to be ‘real Chinese’ to obtain Chinese
nationality. ‘What we want’ is the ‘cultural blood’. Chineseness is cultural. This is a modern version
of ‘cultural yardstick’. Nothing much has changed, except that the yardstick is not only in the hands of
the ruling elite anymore: groups are still judged by how much they follow the Chinese way.
Jacques (2009, 245) noticed that a racialized sense of belonging is often at the heart of national
identity in East Asia and he argued the reason is “the centrality of the family”. In Chinese custom,
lineage, like the family, is intimately associated with biological continuity and blood descent as is the
nation itself (Jacques 2009). In terms of citizenship, with blood the defining precondition: indeed, it is
almost impossible to acquire citizenship in any other way (Ibid.).
But how is blood cultural? As I mentioned above, Chinese nationalism is racial, as well as
cultural. ‘Blood’ emphasized the ethnic lineage, a very ethno-racial expression, but what’s in the blood
is culture, as Example 1.3 hinted. The Chinese sense of cultural superiority was shaped by the long-
running conflict between the Chinese and the steppe nomads which gave rise to the distinction
between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarians’. Lucian Pye puts it: “The most pervasive underlying Chinese
emotion is a profound, unquestioned, generally unshakeable identification with historical greatness.”
(as cited in Jacques 2009, 269) As Jacques (2009) argued, Chinese nationalism cannot be reduced to
nation-state nationalism because its underlying roots are civilizational. This ‘Middle Kingdom
mentality’ is civilization-based. China was believed to be chosen land. However, unlike the case of
20Israel and the United States, China was chosen “by the sheer brilliance of its civilization” (Jacques
2009, 241).
Recently the idea of cultural differences has gradually replaced the ideas of biological differences
as a basis for excluding or inferiorization, both in discourse and practice (Anthias and Yuval-Davis
1992). In cultural racism, cultural signifiers are used to manifest essentially fixed characterizations
among different groups in society, and these differences are essentially insurmountable (Balibar 1992).
Example 1.4: When the Chinese started building the Great Wall, you were still
living a primitive life!
中国人开始修长城的时候，你们还在过原始人的生活呢！
Example 1.5: Now almost all other cultures are contrary to it (denoting Chinese
culture). In another word, if foreign people want to integrate into China, they must
abandon almost all their original culture, otherwise they cannot be
accepted……Large-scale immigration is impossible, let alone refugees,
subversion of blood lineage, and extinction of culture.
现在几乎所有其他文化都是与之相违背，换句话，外来人口想要融入中国必
须抛弃几乎所有的原本文化才可以，否则必然不被接受……大规模移民不可
能的，更不要说难民、血统颠覆、文化消失之类的了。
In Example 1.4 the author clearly articulated his/her belief in the superiority of Chinese culture
while refugees were depicted as primitive and barbaric. In Example 1.5, the author made a
presupposition that all other cultures are contrary to Chinese culture without further explaining it. The
modality is very high as the author presented the idea as a fact. The consequence of the incompatibility
is that in order to adopt the Chinese way, one needs to lose all the original culture. This is extremely
difficult given the so-called characteristic of refugees. Refugees are depicted as unwilling to adapt and
integrate, which is usually attributed to their Muslimness. The author here emphasized the difficulty,
or impossibility, for foreigners to integrate into China now. Also, ‘acceptance’ was depicted as
something foreigners should earn. Instead of using ‘we cannot accept’, the author wrote ‘they cannot
be accepted’. The agent to accept was absent. ‘They cannot be accepted’ unless they abandon their
original cultures. The responsibility was on foreigners instead of the Chinese. Therefore, if they’re not
accepted, it’s not because Chinese are exclusive but because foreigners fail to earn acceptance.
Positive self-presentation was made. China was depicted as a place where only ‘ticket holders’ are
welcomed. It is a private garden rather than a public park.
The author then went on to juxtapose ‘refugee’ with ‘subversion of blood lineage’ and ‘extinction
of culture’ — two very strong phrases. Therefore, the author regarded refugees as a serious problem as
the other two. The coming of refugees will bring the dilution of Chinese blood. The author also
believed the coming of another culture will bring others to ‘death’ — the underlying assumption is that
there should only be one homogenous culture in one country. The author employed arguments about
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