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Yu, Jinyang

University of British Columbia

China appears to have a divergent trajectory from the global trend of improving gay rights. Previous research suggests an increase in attention toward gay people. However, the situation of China presents a contrasting socio-political context, in which these theories might not hold. I conduct word counting and topic modeling on 547 articles and a content analysis of 73 articles mentioning gay people from two official Chinese newspapers from 1949 to 2023 to explore the evolution of media attention and the contexts in which gay people are featured. My findings show that in contrast to the expectation of increasing attention, attention toward gay people sharply declined in 2017 and ceased entirely by 2018. Gay people typically appear in three contexts: international events, public health concerns, and the arts, which form safe zones for their mention. However, critical gay issues such as identity, coming out, same-sex relationships, and gay rights receive limited coverage, reflecting areas of restriction. When the safe zone and the forbidden intersected with each other, it created a gray area, which allowed the forbidden to be seen. Gay issues are rarely the main subject of the articles, suggesting a neglect. The decline in media visibility coincide with the rise of President Xi. These patterns suggest more broadly that in an authoritarian regime, the supreme leader’s agenda can swiftly and profoundly influence shifts in the social landscape for sexual minorities. Gay people in China are confronting an unprecedented crisis, marking a stark departure from the previous trends.

Text

2024-07-08

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88598

Sociology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/