Mass Media, Discourse, Power And Identity:a Study On Discourse Archaeology Of Rural Migrant Workers And Identity Formation

With the progressing of modernization and urbanization of China, Rural migrant workers (Nongminggong) have been a group which are drawing the whole society’s attention. According to its original definition from the policy document of Chinese government, rural migrant workers are people who have hukou (residence registration) in country and work in the cities or towns. With the development of society, however, even though country hukou has been cancelled, some people are still being identified as rural migrant workers. They are reported as construction worker, labors or people doing service in the city. These people’s contribution is usually acknowledged by city, but they are marginalized by the city. They live in suburb where there is low-rent housing. It is hard for them to safeguard their rights and interests. In the city they are working, their salaries were not paid in time, and they have no medical care insurance and it is hard for their children to go to school. Therefore, the meaning of word "Nongminggong"(rural migrant workers) seems beyond its original meaning from policy document. They are not only an existing group in society, but also a group existing in the mind of the public. The public related the word to poverty, weakness and uncivilized and took the relationship for granted.There are many studies on Rural migrant workers, but few of them pay attention to the change of the signified meaning of the word. The research focused on meaning of the discourse "Nongmingong" from a perspective of the Archaeology of Knowledge, which is of great help to reveal the production process of rural migrant workers in which mass media is involved. Based on the corpus made of news report collected from the People s Daily from1980to2010, the research uses wordsmith4.0to give archaeological analysis to media discourse of rural migrant workers and uncover the identity construction process of rural migrant workers by mass media. The research applied Foucault’s power theory to explain the transformation from media identity to social identity of rural migrant workers, based on which, the study introduced empirical study in the form of questionnaire to further analyze the formation of the meaning of "rural migrant workers".The research finds a conflicted constructed meaning of "rural migrant workers" by media, which in essence is the result that a variety of discourse function in media field and influenced by the fighting of power. It is the confliction that extends the meaning and produces the meaning of "the other" and "weakness".The research also finds the production of identity of rural migrant workers is the result of convergent media power, which consists of macro-power and micro-power respectively represented by government power and media discourse. The convergent media power naturalizes the current situation of rural migrant workers, which eventually solidifies identity of rural migrant workers and a stereotype comes into shape finally. The research provides a research framework for future study on identity, media and power as well as a method that corpus-based discourse archeology may combine communication, history and text together, which can be new for communication methodology.