The Construction Of Rural Migrants' Images In Urban Newspaper In China

This study focuses on the newspaper reports about rural migrants of Chutian Metropolis Daily and Wuhan Evening News in 2007, trying to find out what images of the rural migrants are represented in these reports and how does the representation influence their social identity. Through discourse analysis, we can find that three image groups of the rural migrants are constructed: "suffering", "positive" and "negative". The "suffering" image group, the major one in these groups, represents the rural migrants as people who are poor, miserable, and who need help or protection. The "positive" image group, which is inspiringly constructed by the Press, is enterprising and helpful. While the "negative" image group is greedy, non-rational and peaceable. Furthermore, the representation of the "positive" images describes the rural migrants as "contributors" to cities, which is beneficial for them to be integrated into urban society and achieve social identity. Though the construction of "suffering" images and "negative" images tends to depict the rural migrants as "people of difference" of which the label is harmful, it is in favor of establishing relationships between urban society and migrants as "help/ be helped", "direct/be directed" and "exclude/be excluded". Among these three models the first two are contributing to solve the migrants' problems, and the last one is thoroughly adverse for the rural migrants to be identified by townspeople. In the end, I put forward some possible means for the mass media to construct good images of rural migrants.