"People's Daily" Left-behind Children Image Research (2000-2011)

In the early1990s, the farmer labors began to migrate to cities. The labors migrate in the form of couples, which leads to the generation of two kinds of children. One kind is called the migrant children who follow their parents to cities. And the other kind is called the left-behind children who are separated from their parents. Since the year of2000, the media, the scholars and the government started to pay attention to the left-behind children, except this, the whole society gave love and help to these children. The paper analyzes the representation of the left-behind children’s image in the People’s Daily in the perspective of the media image representation.This paper studies the636reports about the left-behind children in the People’s Daily from May11,2000to December31,2011. The author uses the content analysis method to set a code table, and get data of the People’s Daily according to the basic category, the demographic category and the image category. Based on the data, the paper analyzes the characters of the reports about the left-behind children, and analyzes the characters, the way and the motivations of the representation of the left-behind children’s image.It has been found out that the People’s Daily has represented the left-behind children as three kinds of images:’the happy children given by favor’,’the problem children left in country’ and ’the poor children in need of help’. When representing the image of the left-behind children, the People’s Daily constructs the subject position of readers. In the last part of the paper, the author analyzes the motivations of the representation, and the functions are constructing the subject position of readers, reflecting the mainstream value and maintaining the normal society order.