Constructing the cultural Other: Discursive representations of South Korea/Koreans on Chinese social media

This study proposes an analytical framework to examine how Chinese netizens construct South Korea/Koreans as cultural Others through various discursive strategies on a Chinese social media platform. The framework conceptualizes Other representation as realized by a two-level process: referential and predication sub-strategies and pejoration and homogenization meta-strategies. A dataset consisting of 239 Weibo comments is analyzed through two procedures of data analysis including quantitative content analysis and discourse analysis. This study identifies four dominant configurations of sub-strategies and their associated linguistic devices that realize the meta-strategies. It is found that the negative representations of South Korea/Koreans and positive Chinese self-presentation are mutually serviceable, reflecting a superiority–inferiority hierarchical positioning. Counterintuitively, it is also found that Other representation can be realized through the sophisticated yet nuanced mechanism of ingroup othering. We argue that these representations are instrumentalized to further reproduce Chinese nationalism through the interplay of platform governance and socio-political tensions.