Title: The Construction of the Image of Chinese Students in Japanese Mainstream Social Media Platforms

Abstract: Based on real online discourses on the Japanese mainstream social media platform Twitter, this study uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the discourse generators’ referential strategies and the empathic and dissociative functions of different referential strategies from a pragmatic perspective, in order to explore the way the Japanese mainstream social media platform constructs the discourse image of “Chinese students”. The study finds that the group images of Chinese students constructed by mainstream social media platforms are: those who receive special treatment from the Japanese government; “spies” who violate intellectual property rights; participants in illegal and criminal acts; competitors for employment. In addition, when constructing a positive image of an individual Chinese student, the discourse generators will use the nominalization strategy to achieve the effect of in-grouping, but this positive image only pertains to certain individuals at the linguistic level; while constructing a negative image of a group, the discourse generators will use the categorization strategy to project the negative image onto the whole group of Chinese students, so as to achieve the effect of distancing, othering and out-group.

Keywords: Chinese students, online discourse, referential strategy, image construction

Author: Fengjuan Cui, School of Foreign Language, East China University of Political Science and Law, Shanghai, China.