Journal article
Health Crisis Racism and Medical Scapegoating: Media Representation of Chinese and Asian Ethnicity During COVID-19 in the UK
,
Matthew Wall ,
Jun Yang ,
Xin Zhao
Journal of Language and Discrimination, Volume: 10, Issue: 1, Pages: 51 - 76
Swansea University Authors:
Yan Wu , Matthew Wall , Jun Yang
Full text not available from this repository: check for access using links below.
DOI (Published version): 10.3138/jld-2024-0016
Abstract
Public health crises caused by infectious diseases have long been racially charged in Western countries, frequently functioning as vectors for the stigmatisation and othering of ethnic minorities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a surge of Sinophobic sentiment and violence against Chinese and East and...
| Published in: | Journal of Language and Discrimination |
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| ISSN: | 2397-2637 eISSN 2397-2645 |
| Published: |
Toronto
University of Toronto Press
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| Online Access: |
Check full text
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa71873 |
| Abstract: |
Public health crises caused by infectious diseases have long been racially charged in Western countries, frequently functioning as vectors for the stigmatisation and othering of ethnic minorities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a surge of Sinophobic sentiment and violence against Chinese and East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) communities brought renewed attention to these dynamics. Although communication scholarship has examined overtly racialised news framings in the United States, the United Kingdom remains comparatively underexplored. This is because British political and mainstream media discourse appeared to reject explicit racialisation of the virus at large. In this paper, we argue that a subtle yet consequential form of cultural racism is detected in press coverage and is responsible for the reproduction of “othering” logics, negative evaluations, and elite level scapegoating of minority communities for public health mismanagement. Employing corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, this study examines UK press coverage of Chinese and ESEA communities across 14 newspapers and online outlets. The time frame for the study was from 29 January 2020, when the first two COVID-19 cases were reported in the United Kingdom, to 21 February 2022, when all COVID-19 restrictions were lifted. The findings demonstrate that medical scapegoating operates in the UK media context through subtle narrative strategies. Our study advances scholarly understanding of racism in media representation by proposing a new concept of public health crisis racism, which shapes media narratives and functions to construct a positive self-image for the majority population and to unite social groups against ethnic minorities as “others.” |
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| Keywords: |
Chinese, COVID-19, East and Southeast Asian, health crisis racism, media representation, medical scapegoating |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Issue: |
1 |
| Start Page: |
51 |
| End Page: |
76 |