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Political coming-of-age in the era of WeChat: understanding the ethnic media ecosystem and group politics of first-generation Chinese Americans

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Political coming-of-age in the era of WeChat: understanding the ethnic media ecosystem and group politics of first-generation Chinese Americans

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POLITICAL COMING-OF-AGE IN THE ERA OF WECHAT: UNDERSTANDING THE
ETHNIC MEDIA ECOSYSTEM AND GROUP POLITICS OF FIRST-GENERATION
CHINESE AMERICANS

by

Chi Zhang

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

August 2019

Copyright 2019 Chi Zhang

ii

Acknowledgment

This dissertation is firstly dedicated to the wisdom and mentorship of my advisor, Dr.
Sandra Ball-Rokeach. I am so fortunate to have witnessed her remarkable tenacity, courage, and
steadfast sense of justice. Through the ups and downs in her life and in mine, I have found both
an incredible mentor and a friend. I will always draw strength and inspiration from her.
I would also like to thank Karin Wang, former vice president of Asian American
Advancing Justice, for articulating the challenge presented by WeChat for immigrant Chinese
politics, and urging research in this area. I am indebted to her for allowing my observations and
intuitions to develop into a research project.
Friends and colleagues at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School and the
Metamorphosis Project have been an unwavering source of inspiration and friendship throughout
my journey. My appreciation goes out to Evelyn Moreno, Bei Yan, Diana Lee, Andrea Wenzel,
Nancy Chen, Wenlin Liu, Cynthia Wang, Marina Litvinsky, Deborah Neffa Creech, Brianna
Ellerbe, Stella Chung, Prawit Thainiyom, Nahoi Koo, Wei Wang, and Lena Uszkoreit. I would
also like to thank Arlene Luck, the managing editor of the International Journal of
Communication, who supervised my graduate assistant work with the journal. Even though my
tenure with IJoC was not long, Arlene has created such a sense of family and community, and for
that, I am grateful.
Other people at USC Annenberg have enriched and supported this intellectual journey. I
am indebted to the mentorship of Tom Hollihan, Mike Ananny, Francois Bar, Tom Goodnight,
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Patti Riley, and Ben Lee. Special thanks to Anne Marie Campian, Christine
Lloreda, and Sarah Holterman, whose meticulousness and dedication kept me on track and kept
iii
the entire school in one piece. I also want to thank Manuela, the custodial staff who expressed
concern over my sleeping overnight in the office and my lack of progress on the marriage front.
Los Angeles has an irreplaceable place in my heart. It was there that I met many of my
most special friends: Nikii Henry, Carolyn Krueger, Donna Speckman, Akiko Tanazawa, Aygul
Maksutova, Jane Kirkland-Glaser, Mari Sandoval, Ruxandra Guidi. They taught me about life
and gave me much needed perspective when the demands of graduate school can constrain and
stifle. I am also thankful for my new friends in Dallas, Sheri Cody Carcano, Rebekah Armstrong,
and Julia Alcantara, who kept me grounded and sane through this arduous transition to a new
city and mode of life.
Of course, this dissertation would not have been possible without the unfailing support of
my family. The research and writing for this dissertation coincided with the birth of my son, my
relocation away from Los Angeles to Dallas, and the beginning of a life where daily sleep
deprivation and social isolation became the norm. My mother and mother-in-law left friends and
family in China to help us out with childcare, and despite their own health issues, graciously took
on work that they certainly did not need to do. I am grateful to know such kind and giving souls.
To my husband, Wen, and our son, Emerson, I love you both so much.

Table of Contents

List of Tables ................................................................................................................................. v
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... vi
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ vii
Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1
Chapter Summary .................................................................................................................... 5
Chapter 2: Immigrant Political Participation and Interracial Relations: Towards a Group-
based Analytical Framework ....................................................................................................... 7
Group-based Political Participation ........................................................................................ 8
Interracial Politics ................................................................................................................... 12
Summary .................................................................................................................................. 16
Chapter 3: Ethnic media and political participation: literature and new configurations ... 19
Ethnic Media and Immigrant Political Participation .......................................................... 20
Internal Differentiation and Changing Forms of Ethnic Media ........................................ 25
Chinese Ethnic Media in the Digital Age .............................................................................. 30
Research Questions ................................................................................................................. 36
Chapter 4: Research design ....................................................................................................... 41
Automated Text Analyses ....................................................................................................... 43
Manual Coding ........................................................................................................................ 46
Additional Analyses ................................................................................................................ 50
Chapter 5: Results ....................................................................................................................... 51
Profile of WeChat outlets (RQ1) ........................................................................................... 51
Geographical Focus and Political Content (RQ2) ................................................................ 55
Issue Salience (RQ3) ............................................................................................................... 57
Group Consciousness (RQ4) .................................................................................................. 61
Sense of Group Position (RQ5&6)......................................................................................... 66
Sourcing and Content Flows (RQ7) ...................................................................................... 73
Chapter 6: Discussion ................................................................................................................. 80
Implications ............................................................................................................................. 87
Limitations and Future Research .......................................................................................... 90
Chapter 7: Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 97
References .................................................................................................................................. 100
Appendix A. Dictionary of Issues and Racial Groups ........................................................... 116

v
List of Tables

Table 1. Three top Chinese ethnic presses in the United States…………………………………..31
Table 2. Summary of media sources analyzed and sample size …………………………….........47
Table 3. Top 25 US-focused WeChat outlets (ranked by view count) ……………………………52
Table 4. Geographical focus of Chinese ethnic media …………………………………………...56
Table 5. Co-occurrence frequency of terms denoting group consciousness ……………………..64
Table 6. Representation of minority outgroups …………………………………………………..67
Table 7. Portrayal of intergroup relations ……………………………………………………......68
Table 8. Use of media sources by the ethnic press and WeChat …………………………………75
Table 9. Top 30 media sources in the Chinese ethnic media ecosystem …………………………75

vi
List of Figures

Figure 1. Example headlines from three WeChat outlets with different topical foci. ……………53
Figure 2. Issue salience in WeChat ………………………………………………………………59

Figure 3. Issue salience in the ethnic press ………………………………………………………59

Figure 4. Issue salience in U.S. English-language media ………………………………………..59

Figure 5. Top 20 words that co-occurred with Chinese Americans ……………………………..62

vii
Abstract

Against the backdrop of heightened political activism by first-generation Chinese in
recent years, the goal of this dissertation is to move towards a more systematic understanding of
the distinctive and robust Chinese-language media ecosystem in which first-generation Chinese
come to engage with the political process, with a focus on how it shapes group boundaries.
Specifically, I examine how Chinese ethnic media cover U.S. politics for its foreign-born
audience, construct co-ethnic political consciousness and ethnically specific political interests,
and situate Chinese Americans vis-à-vis other minority groups in the United States. In addition, I
foreground the internal heterogeneity of the Chinese ethnic media ecosystem, and trace how
different ethnic media players are positioned in relation to Chinese American politics as well as
how they are interwoven in their influence of each other.
By leveraging automated textual analysis and manual content analysis of WeChat-based
digital outlets and three major ethnic Chinese presses, I illuminate discursive dynamics in
Chinese ethnic media that provide telling clues for how group-specific or even group-bound
first-generation Chinese political participation may be. Findings from this research reveal the
differential roles of WeChat and the ethnic press in the trajectory of first-generation Chinese
politics. The former is a discursive space that could elevate coethnic group consciousness and the
centrality of group relations for Chinese American politics. Although WeChat has opened up the
space for different articulations of group positions to compete for visibility, the dominant
tendency is toward content that pits Chinese Americans against other minority groups and
coalesces the antagonistic positioning into a coherent narrative. The ethnic press, on the other
hand, has largely sidelined questions of intergroup relations. As the ethnic press continues to
viii
serve as an original source and gatekeeper in the ethnic media ecosystem, the overall invisibility
of outgroups and intergroup dynamics suggests a missed opportunity in articulating and shaping
the group position of Chinese Americans.
These findings point to both challenges and opportunities in the political engagement of
first-generation Chinese, especially with regard to minority group relations and coalitional
politics. I conclude by discussing the implications of this study for advocacy and engagement. In
particular, I highlight ways of engaging with and elevating discursive spaces that are productive
for political engagement and cross-racial understanding of first-generation Chinese.
1
Chapter 1: Introduction

In recent years, many have observed political fervor from an unusual group: first-
generation Chinese Americans (Shyong, 2015; Kuo, 2016; Wong, 2018). If Chinese Americans
have generally been seen as politically apathetic and disengaged (Wong et al., 2011), they have
entered the public limelight for political actions that are marked in their intensity, distinctiveness,
and fraught relationship with other minority groups, even other Asian Americans. For one, first-
generation Chinese have become the face of high-profile federal lawsuit against affirmative
action in public higher education, as the latest in an extended history of highly intense anti-
affirmative action mobilizations. Large-scale surveys suggest while Asian Americans overall
have displayed consistent and growing support for affirmative action over the years, Chinese
Americans’ support for affirmative action has fallen sharply (Ramakrishnan et al., 2008;
Ramakrishnan et al., 2016). In particular, support among first-generation Chinese was more than
20 percentage points lower than native-born Chinese Americans (Wong, 2018). First-generation
Chinese have also staged large rallies protesting the guilty verdict of a Chinese American cop
who killed an unarmed African American man (Fuchs, 2016), vigorously opposed sanctuary laws
protecting undocumented immigrants (Turque, 2017), and successfully stymied state-level
legislations to collect disaggregated data for Asian Americans (Wang, 2017). Taken together, we
could be witnessing a pivotal moment in first-generation Chinese politics, one that, in addition to
its striking and puzzling momentum, also throws into question what kind of shared interest and
political commonality can be identified with other minority groups.
The political coming-of-age story for first-generation Chinese is, by many accounts,
inseparably intertwined with the rise of WeChat, a highly popular mobile app used in China and
2
among the Chinese diaspora. The platform has enabled the emergence of a striking array of
digital news outlets, and serves as a central venue where news and information is disseminated
and discussed (Shyong, 2016; Zhang, 2018; Wong, 2018). The entry of WeChat bolsters and
complicates the existing landscape of Chinese ethnic media, which has always played a robust
role in the social and political life of Chinese immigrants in the United States (Zhou & Cai,
2003; Lin & Song, 2006; Matsaganis et al., 2011). From journalists to advocacy organizations,
observers and practitioners of Asian Americans politics alike have begun to grapple with the
growing sense that WeChat is shifting the way first-generation Chinese immigrants are
connecting with U.S. politics, but lack systematic understanding of the discourses, players, and
political potential of this changing ethnic media environment. This space is not well monitored
and understood, often inaccessible to and entirely unnoticed by non-Chinese actors, who are
therefore often taken by surprise by the intensity and particularity of first-generation Chinese
political participation.
Chinese Americans are one of the fastest growing immigrant populations in the United
States, with China overtaking Mexico in 2013 as the biggest immigrant-sending country
(Migration Policy Institute, 2017; Pew Research Center, 2017). According to the 2016 American
Community Survey, 25% of foreign-born Chinese Americans arrived in the United States
between 2000 and 2010, while as many as 34% arrived after 2010. Reaching 2.6 million in 2016,
the foreign-born Chinese population and continues to experience rapid in-migration, particularly
from the skilled and educated segment of society (Migration Policy Institute, 2017; Xiang,
2016). This demographic shift, coupled with the nascent momentum in political participation,
suggests that the political behavior of first-generation Chinese could increasingly matter in the
outcome of political contests and policies (Ramakrishnan, 2014).
3
The goal of this dissertation is therefore to move towards a more systematic
understanding of the distinctive Chinese-language media ecosystem in which first-generation
Chinese come to engage with the political process, with a focus on how it shapes group
boundaries. Specifically, I examine how Chinese ethnic media cover U.S. politics for its foreign-
born audience, construct co-ethnic political consciousness and ethnically specific political
interests, and situate Chinese Americans vis-à-vis other minority groups in the United States. By
leveraging automated textual analysis and manual content analysis of WeChat-based digital
outlets and three major ethnic Chinese presses, I illuminate discursive dynamics in Chinese
ethnic media that provide telling clues for how group-specific or even group-bound first-
generation Chinese political participation may be. In addition, I argue that understanding Chinese
ethnic media as a networked media ecosystem allows more nuanced understanding of the distinct
positionings of different players in this ecosystem and the interplay among them. Findings from
this research point to challenges and opportunities in the political engagement of first-generation
Chinese, especially with regard to minority group relations and coalitional politics.
By focusing specifically on the ethnic media and politics of first-generation Chinese, this
dissertation takes up a timely examination of an under-researched population that have
distinctive pathways and modes of political participation. Although an expanding body of
research efforts in recent years have shed light on Asian American political participation (e.g.
Lien et al, 2004; Wong et al, 2011; Ramakrishnan et al., 2016), there is strong reason to consider
national-origin groups separately in their political formation, given the vast linguistic, cultural,
and occupational diversity among Asian Americans (Wong et al., 2011). Chinese Americans, in
particular, are distinguished by experience with authoritarian political culture and history
(Ramakrishnan, 2005; Lien, 2014), a high level of transnationalism (Lien, 2004b), and the high
4
percentage of skilled and professional immigrants (Xiang, 2015). Furthermore, this study focuses
on first-generation Chinese immigrants, who, in the context of this study, are distinct from
native-born Chinese Americans in their media practices. Consumption of ethnic media is
significantly shaped by immigration generation, with second-generation immigrants much less
likely to be ethnic media audiences than their first-generation, foreign-born counterparts
(Matsaganis et al., 2011; Haynes & Ramakrishnan, 2016). Although an increasing number of
ethnic media have started providing English language content to attract second and third
generation audiences (Matsaganis et al., 2011), the main players in the Chinese ethnic media
ecosystem are publishing only in the Chinese language. Data from the 2016 National Asian
American Survey showed that while 85% of first-generation Chinese Americans use primarily
ethnic media for political information, only 13% of second-generation Chinese Americans do so
(Ramakrishnan et al., 2016). Chinese ethnic media therefore serves as a particularly significant
pathway to political engagement for first-generation Chinese.
Seen in the larger context of immigration, the ethnic media and politics of first-generation
Chinese also crystallize a broader challenge to the practice and research of multiracial
democracy. Over the past few decades, the United States has seen a dramatic upsurge in the
number of foreign-born as well as a striking shift in the racial and ethnic composition of its
population. Such population diversity, for one, has complicated the nature of group-based
politics, and requires research to go beyond the binary of black and white, majority-minority
relations (Segura & Rodrigues, 2006; Saenz & Douglas, 2014). In addition, the tight coupling
between immigrants and their specific networks and institutions creates the possibility that
knowledge of and engagement with politics may take place within ethnically demarcated spheres
(Chen et al., 2013). Yet, existing research in both communication scholarship and studies of
5
immigration does not do enough to account for the role of ethnic media as an institution shaping
political outcomes. The democratic ideal, as Dewey (1927) put it, entails different groups
“interact fully and flexibly in connection with other groups”. By focusing on the nature of group
boundaries in Chinese ethnic media, this dissertation addresses a critical need to understand the
new political realities brought about by immigration-generated population diversity.

Chapter Summary
In Chapter 1, I draw on literature from immigrant political incorporation and intergroup
relations to delineate two aspects of how and why group formations matter for political
outcomes. First, I focus on the salience of ethnicity and the coethnic group in structuring the
political participation of immigrants. Second, I discuss the dynamics of conflict and cooperation
among minority groups. These perspectives inform and guide my inquiry of the political
communication role of Chinese ethnic media.
In Chapter 2, I review the extant literature on the political communication role of ethnic
media, and highlight gaps and unanswered questions in the literature. In particular, I point to the
need to understand the role of ethnic media in shaping coethnic political consciousness and
situating their audiences in relation to other minority groups. In addition, I situate ethnic media
in a changing media landscape that requires attentiveness to new players as well as the interplay
among them. This chapter also includes specific research questions investigated in this
dissertation.
In Chapter 3, I give a brief overview of Chinese ethnic media to provide the context for
this dissertation, before outlining the research design and the specific analytical procedures
undertaken in Chapter 4.
6
In Chapter 5, I present findings from the content analysis. Then, in Chapter 6, I bring
together these findings to discuss the differential role of WeChat and ethnic presses in the
trajectory of first-generation Chinese politics, especially in formulating ethnically specific
political interests and the possibility of coalitional politics. In addition, I reflect on opportunities
for engaging with and elevating discursive spaces that are productive for political engagement
and cross-racial understanding of first-generation Chinese.
Finally, I conclude by addressing questions about first-generation Chinese media
ecosystem and politics that this dissertation opens up, and concretize a few areas of future
research on this topic.
7
Chapter 2: Immigrant Political Participation and Interracial Relations: Towards a Group-
based Analytical Framework

Ongoing and intensifying immigration in the past few decades have generated significant
scholarship on how immigrant groups become incorporated into and participate in the political
process of their adoptive societies. Faced with new institutions, norms, and social structures, as
well as continuing ties to the home country, immigrants rarely come into a host society as fully
formed and adapted political selves. Correspondingly, a prevailing perspective in this research
tradition has revolved around the question of what may draw immigrants into the political
process, and highlighted that forces specific to the immigrant adaption process must be
accounted for to understand the political participation or nonparticipation of immigrants (e.g.
Uhlaner, Cain & Kiewiet, 1989; Lien, 1994; Leighley & Vedlitz, 1999; Wong et al., 2011).
This is the foundational premise of my inquiry – that ethnic media, as a key institution in
the adaptation process of immigrants, could shape how much they come to engage with the host
society’s political process. But beyond the level of participation, there is also an inherent
question of how immigrants engage with politics when they do. What issues are political
energies focused around? To what extent do the acts of political participation advance goals
perceived to benefit the coethnic group? And to what extent do these actions align with,
contradict, or have little to do with the interests of other groups? To develop an analytical
framework for understanding the role of ethnic media in shaping how immigrants develop their
politics, I discuss perspectives that elaborate on the importance of group formations and
relational dynamics in the context of multiracial democracy. These perspectives are premised on
a conceptualization of immigrants as groups that have distinct shared cultures, identities, social
8
and civic institutions, as well as group-based political interests and loyalties that may come in
tension with other groups. Group-based perspectives are particularly crucial for contemporary
immigrants, who are not only foreign-born but also predominantly racial and ethnic minorities.
As potential or actual political groups, these immigrants’ subsequent trajectory in politics is not
only a process of acculturation and adaptation, but also, importantly, a process of articulating
their version of minority politics and negotiating their political goals with other groups.
First, I discuss how the coethnic group structures political participation for immigrants
and acquires political salience, and draw attention to the strength and group-specificity of the
ethnic politics as key variables. The second strand of literature I bring into the mix is interracial
relations among minority groups in the United States, which highlights how the sense of group
position and racial hierarchy shape interracial conflicts and cooperation. In doing so, I train the
analytical lens toward questions of group formation in understanding the relationship between
ethnic media and first-generation Chinese politics.

Group-based Political Participation
While individuals have multiple affiliations and identifications, for first-generation
immigrants, ties based on ethnicity tend to be strong given shared origins, common language,
cultural habits, as well as the experience of migration and reception in the host society (Glazer &
Moynihan, 1975; Portes & Rumbaut, 2006; Bloemraad, 2007). Immigrants have the tendency to
live in areas with high coethnic concentration and develop ethnically homogeneous interpersonal
networks (Massey & Denton, 1992; Fischer, 1982), as well as a set of ethnically specific
infrastructure, including businesses, media, and civic organizations (Light & Bonacich, 1988;
Waldinger, 1995). This coethnic community is usually where immigrants begin their social, civic
9
and political integration into the host society (Fennema & Tille, 1999; Ramakrishnan &
Bloemraad, 2008). In particular, informal ethnic networks, immigrant organizations, and the
mobilization of coethnic leaders have been found to be particularly central and effective
mechanisms of political integration for new immigrants (Kasinitz, 1992; Jones-Correa, 1998;
Wong, 2006). As a result, there is increasing recognition that political participation of
immigrants needs to be understood as a group-based experience (Bloemraad, 2007).
One central concept that has garnered a lot of research interest is group consciousness, a
psychological and cognitive resource that could elevate the motivation and impetus for group-
based collective action (Stokes, 2003; Sanchez, 2006; McConnaughy, 2010; Lien, 1994; Lien,
Conway & Wong, 2003; Wong et al., 2005). This theoretical model could be traced to earlier
research on African Americans. Faced with the observation that African Americans participated
more actively in politics than their socioeconomic status would predict, scholars suggested that
collective identity compensated for the disadvantage in socioeconomic status and constituted a
resource for action (Dawson, 1994; Shingles, 1988). Importantly, group consciousness is distinct
from group identification. Identification refers to sense of belonging or attachment to a social
group (e.g. Tajfel, 1978). Group consciousness, on the other hand, goes beyond in-group
identification and requires awareness of shared group status and strategies for improving it
(Miller et al., 1981; Shingles, 1988; Bobo & Gilliam, 1990; Chong & Rogers, 2005). To be
specific, group consciousness is commonly conceptualized as a multidimensional construct,
comprising perception of linked fate with the in-group, sense of discrimination or alienation, and
system blame or the attribution of disadvantage to institutionalized inequity. These dimensions
together describe a process of politicized group formation that could bolster awareness and
interest in politics, shape interpretation of group problems, and provide the impetus for collective
10
action. Discrimination, in particular, provides a unifying basis of concern and a rallying point for
making political demands among immigrants (Wong et al., 2011; Okamoto, 2003). In the same
vein, some have argued that group consciousness can take the form of “reactive ethnicity”, where
ethnicity persists rather than erodes over time as a primary source of identity in response to the
perception of discrimination and exclusion (Rumbaut, 2006).
Group consciousness is contingent and variable, both across groups and over time. In
contrast to the strength and consistency of group consciousness among African Americans, the
salience of group consciousness is emergent and conditional among immigrants (Lien, Conway,
and Wong, 2004; Junn & Masuoka, 2008b). The limited evidence available also suggests that
Chinese Americans do not stand out among other Asian ethnic groups in the United States in the
robustness of their ethnic consciousness. In the 2008 National Asian American Survey, one of
the few nationally representative surveys on Asian American political practices, 42% of Chinese
American respondents identified a moderate to strong sense of linked fate with other Chinese
Americans, on par with other groups such as Vietnamese and Indian Americans, but quite a bit
lower compared to those of Korean origin (Wong et al., 2011). Empirical evidence also suggests
that, across Asian American subgroups, including Chinese Americans, identification and sense of
linked fate are much stronger with the coethnic group than the panethnic group (Lien, Conway &
Wong, 2004; Masuoka 2006; Wong et al. 2011; Masuoka & Junn, 2013). Furthermore, the sense
of linked fate with coethnics has been found to foster political participation more so than
panethnic identification (Wong, et al., 2015). But we know little about the antecedents and forces
shaping group consciousness among immigrants. Earlier scholarship on African Americans has
shown that the strength and form of group consciousness are a product of elite messaging, values
circulated through in-group networks, and discursive construction in the media (Chong &
11
Rogers, 2005; Dawson, 1994). This suggests the importance of accounting for cognitive schemas
and discursive frames that constitute groupness (Brubaker, 2002; Lee, 2006), as well as agents
that generate and circulate them.
The groupedness of immigrant political participation also suggests that their politics can
be organized along coethnic lines and take on an ethnically specific iteration. There is evidence
that ethnic minorities are particularly sensitized to and mobilized by issues that affect their own
group. In a 2000 national survey of Asian Americans, about 80% of the respondents reported
never participating in any form of political activity directed generally, while about half of the
respondents participated in at least one form of political activity involving an Asian-American
candidate or issue affecting Asian Americans (Seo, 2011). Compared to knowledge about
politics in general, awareness of issues that are seen to particularly affect the coethnic
community tends to be higher (Lien et al., 2001; Wong et al., 2011). Ethnic minorities have also
displayed the propensity to support political candidates of the same ethnicity, sometimes falling
back on ethnic cues even when all candidates are equal in experience and qualification (Glazer
and Moynihan, 1963; Jones-Correa, 1998; Barreto, 2007). This type of ethnic politics has been a
staple feature of immigrant America, scrutinized by scholars since the turn of the twentieth
century (Dahl, 1921). But unlike earlier prognosis based on European immigrants that saw ethnic
politics as a transitory phenomenon that will quickly diminish with assimilation, group-based
politics could be an enduring and indeed predominant form of politics for today’s immigrants,
the majority of whom are racial minorities, who experience racial hierarchies and tensions more
acutely.
The tension inherent in group-based politics is that it can both enable political
participation and minority interest representation, and produce a mode of politics that is
12
potentially ethnically bounded. On one hand, ethnic politics constitutes an important axis of
political action and socialization for immigrants. As many have noted, the alternative to coethnic
political participation could be no participation at all (Fennema & Tille, 1999; Bloemraad, 2007).
Ethnic politics also represents a crucial way to articulate and advance group interests that may be
neglected by mainstream society or dominant groups (Jones-Correa, 2007; Bloemraad, 2007).
Consequently, ethnic politics is seen less as an indication of insularity and more as an
indispensable pathway to integration in a pluralistic society marked by inequality. On the other
hand, grouping along ethnic and racial lines invariably raises questions of how groups may come
together to collectively define, agree on, and solve problems. Group-specific considerations may
even manifest as exclusionary forces, prevent group members from seeing past their own group
boundaries, or prompt political actions at the expense of other groups (Ramakrishnan, 2014).
Seen this way, the question is no longer just whether immigrants participate or not, but how and
around what issues they are mobilized, and to what extent ethnic groups constitute political
groups with a set of goals and issues specific to their own interests. Therefore, in this study, I
place analytical emphasis on how Chinese ethnic media may shape the strength and particularity
of group-based politics among first-generation Chinese.

Interracial Politics
Group formation is intrinsically a relational process, as in-group identification and
solidarity are often accompanied by outgroup differentiation and intergroup competition (Huddy,
2001; Tajfel, 1978). In this section, I draw on the literature on interracial relations to direct
attention to the prospect for conflict and cooperation among minority groups and its implications
for politics. Considerable immigration of minority populations in the past few decades has
13
created a multiracial reality and foregrounded the need for understanding dynamics of interracial
relations beyond the majority-minority, black-white binary (Lee, 2000; Segura & Rodrigues,
2006; McClain & Stewart, 2006). The violent clashes between Korean, black and Latino
Americans in Los Angeles of 1992 was but the most dramatic reminder of the fault lines among
minority groups. Hostility, overt conflicts, and intense competition in the electoral and policy
arena have also been documented among different pairings of Latinos, African Americans, Asian
Americans (Kim, 2000; Kim & Lee, 2001; Meier & Stewart, 1991; Vaca, 2004; Broad et al.,
2014). Interminority tensions highlight how political action to advance group interest can be
factionalized and antagonistic, and pit minority groups against each other. Of course, there have
also been instances of successful cooperation and coalitions across minority groups in the form
of community activism and in electoral politics (Sonenshein, 1994; Horton, 1995; Saito & Park,
2000; Saito 2001). Although such multiracial alliances have tended to be issue-oriented and
short-lived (Oliver & Grant, 1995), they underscore the significance and possibility of forming
shared interest across group boundaries. Especially in the face of intensifying racial divisions and
inequality in today’s political climate, the capacity for cross-racial political alliances is all the
more crucial to tap into the combined political power of minority groups. Therefore, by focusing
on interracial relations, I emphasize that immigrant group-based politics can develop variously
competitive or cooperative relationships with other groups, and place the analytical weight on
opportunities and challenges for articulating and forming shared interest in a pluralistic political
system.
Research on interracial politics has illuminated how a sense of group position (Blumer,
1958) — ideas about where one’s own group stands in the social order vis-à-vis outgroups – can
shape the prospect of interracial conflict and cooperation. The sense of group position is
14
constructed through simultaneous processes of ingroup identification, outgroup stereotype, and
perceived competition over resources and statuses, particularly those that the in-group perceives
themselves to have claims over (Blumer, 1958; Bobo, 1999). Although these processes most
strongly manifest in dominant groups, minority groups could also develop a clear sense of group
position relative to each other. Negative stereotypes held among minority groups, depicting other
minority outgroups as alien, inferior, or as occupying particular social roles, have been well
documented (Lee, 2000; Oliver & Wong, 2003; McClain & Tauber, 2001). Perceptions of threat
are also common, especially around important social and political resources such as electoral
seats and jobs (Meier & Stewart, 1991; Vaca, 2004). Such perceptions of group zero-sum access
have been found to underlie rifts in policy preferences among minority groups on issues such as
immigration, bilingual education, and affirmative action (Cho & Cain, 2001; Bobo & Johnson,
2000; Lien & Conway, 2001; Vaca, 2004). One possibility for mitigating an exclusionary and
hierarchical sense of group position is a lateral extension of group boundary, where minority
groups recognize that they share common positions in the racial order as disadvantaged groups
(Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000). Perceptions of discrimination and subordination experienced by the
in-group (Craig & Richeson, 2012) as well as by other minority outgroups (Merseth, 2018) have
been found to foster a sense of shared status with minority outgroups. Notably, a sense of linked
fate with one’s own racial group, or the belief that one’s experiences and outcomes are affected
by the racial group one belongs to, could in fact facilitate the identification of commonality with
other minority groups (McClain et al., 2006; Merseth, 2018). In sum, the prospect for interracial
conflict and cooperation depends on the extent to which the sense of group position is
constructed through outgroup differentiation and competition, or the perception that groups share
a common position as racial minorities.
15
One related theoretical perspective that helps situate the specific tensions between
Chinese Americans and other groups is racial hierarchy. Race scholars have theorized the
ambivalent and liminal position Asian Americans occupy in the existing racial hierarchy, as a
group that is neither white nor black, but rather “triangulated” relative to the dominant and
subordinate groups (Bonacich, 1973; Kim 1999). Such a position in the racial hierarchy creates
particularly fraught relationship between Asian Americans and other minorities, as the “racial
bourgeoisie” status (Matsuda, 1993) of Asian Americans is often used to valorize them relative
to other groups, legitimate discrimination and systemic inequality, and engender competitive and
resentful attitude between Asian Americans and other minorities (Kim, 1999; Wu, 2015).
Chinese Americans, in particular, occupy an indeterminate and contradictory position in what
has been described as the triracial order (Bonilla-Silva, 2005). Going beyond the binary of white
and blacks, Bonilla-Silva (2005) proposed that an alternative racial cartography was emerging in
the United States, which consists of whites, honorary whites, and collective blacks. Some Asian
groups, including Chinese Americans, are cast as honorary whites – honorary in the sense of
secondary and contingent on the wishes of whites. Others, like Hmong, Vietnamese, and Filipino
Americans, together with non-White Latinos, will join the collective blacks. The theory of racial
hierarchy suggests that Chinese Americans, as the intermediary group, would have the most
unstable and contingent relationship with other minority groups (Kim & Lee, 2001). Some have
suggested that one option available for those cast as honorary whites is to distance themselves
from other racial minorities and have less concern for racial justice, in turn foreclosing
opportunities for minority cooperation and reproducing systemic inequality (Yancey, 2007).
For first-generation immigrants, the sense of group position cannot be presumed to be
immediately available or fully developed. Notions of race, racial hierarchy, and where the
16
immigrant’s own group stands in racial order of the host society have to be acquired, learned,
and negotiated (Merenstein, 2008). That is to say, a compelling possibility for intergroup
relations is indifference, where groups overlook and have little concern for each other (Segura &
Rodrigues, 2006). To be sure, this is not to suggest outgroup differentiation and stereotypes
would not exist for new immigrants. Immigrants can certainly carry pre-existing prejudicial
views of other groups from their native cultures (McClain et al, 2006). But on its own, negative
outgroup perceptions would not constitute a fully formed sense of group position that can be
mobilized in political contexts. Therefore, it is pertinent to consider the emergent nature of
immigrants’ understanding of their group position, and instances where a weak articulation of
group position may denote disregard for other minority groups or racial politics more broadly.
Taken together, the interracial politics literature suggests the significance of
understanding how a shared sense of group position is constructed through the “collective
process of defining racial groups and their statuses” (Bobo, 1999, p.448). In other words, I
examine how outgroup stereotype as well as perceptions of competition and threat figure into
ethnic media’s discursive construction of group position, what opportunities exist for articulating
a common group position with other minority groups, and the extent to which the more prevalent
tendency is one of indifference.

Summary
In this chapter, I have drawn together different theoretical perspectives to highlight the
importance of group formations in understanding the outcome and stakes of immigrant political
incorporation. Instead of a process where, over time, immigrants come to resemble native-borns
in their pattern of political participation, fall into existing ideological camps, and become part of
17
an established civic and political system, this dissertation treats them as groups that share certain
sociocultural traits and experiences in the receiving society, which could translate into political
inclinations and goals that are not only group-specific but also sometimes at odds with the
interests of other minority groups. The stakes of immigrant political incorporation, to borrow the
words of Lee (2006), reside in “whether diversity would breed a factionalized politics around
ascribed and agonistic identities or flourishing pluralist politics around countervailing and
constitutive groups” (p.434).
Following the preceding discussion, I contend that group formation would serve as a
useful analytic to understand the relationship between ethnic media and emerging immigrant
politics. Group formation inheres in the level of group consciousness and nature of group-based
politics, and the sense of group position in relation to outgroups. Ethnic media may, to different
extent, focus more exclusively on issues affecting the coethnic community, shape political group
consciousness by shedding light on coethnic political interests, discrimination and system
injustice, and serve as a vehicle through which immigrants encounter and make sense of
outgroups and race relations. By focusing on group formation, we can expand our understanding
of the potential for ethnic media to produce group-specific versions of politics, and to enable
articulations of group relations that vary in the capacity to reify group boundaries or develop
political affinity with other groups.
Although the research traditions I discussed in this chapter have been useful in informing
a group-based approach to understanding immigrant politics, they tend to give short shrift to the
role of ethnic media in the political life of immigrants. In the next chapter, I turn attention toward
the collective scholarship on ethnic media, and more fully engage with prevailing perspectives
on the political communication role of ethnic media, as well as how group-based perspectives
18
could fill gaps in the extant literature. I also open up questions about how evolving
configurations of ethnic media may change its relationship with immigrants and their political
participation.
19
Chapter 3: Ethnic media and political participation: literature and new configurations

Eddie Huang, the Chinese American restauranteur whose memoir formed the basis for
the ABC series “Fresh Off the Boat,” recounted his parents being unimpressed by his New York
Times profile, but really acknowledged his success when the Chinese newspaper, the World
Journal, featured him. Stories like this attest to the strong ties ethnic media develop with its
audience, often in addition to mainstream media but sometimes more exclusively in place of
mainstream media. As media produced by and for immigrants, ethnic media represent a distinct
and significant institution in the social and political processes of multiethnic America. With over
3,000 ethnic media outlets in the United States and an estimated 57 million Americans as
audience (Roberts, 2011), ethnic media is a fast growing sector in the United States, with
Spanish and Asian language media experiencing especially high growth in readership and
advertising revenue (Viswanath & Lee, 2007; Matsaganis et al., 2011). A 2005 poll conducted by
New America Media revealed that the reach of mainstream national newspapers among ethnic
audience is limited. Only 5% of Hispanic and 10% of Asian adults reported reading USA Today,
the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal frequently (New America Media, 2005).
Although many immigrant groups consume media in both languages (Viswanath & Lee, 2007),
the increasing availability and presence of ethnic media create opportunities for easy access and
a particularly tight coupling between ethnic media and ethnic populations.
A small but growing body of scholarship has recognized the significance of ethnic media
for immigrant communities and multicultural societies at large (Viswanath & Arora, 2000;
Georgiou, 2005; Felix et al., 2008; Matsaganis et al., 2011; Lopez, 2016). While this body of
work has begun to illuminate ethnic media’s role in social and cultural integration, identity
20
formation, and community building, the relationship between ethnic media and the political
practices of their immigrant audiences has received less attention. As I demonstrate in this
chapter, the empirical evidence on ethnic media’s role in immigrant political incorporation is
mixed, and the literature, primarily driven by an immigrant adaptation perspective, offers a weak
basis for understanding the role of ethnic media in group politics. Furthermore, with the increase
in immigrant populations and transformations in digital media, ethnic media has proliferated in
number and encompassed a wide range of sites, modalities, and platforms. These changes bring
new complexity to the content generation practices and discursive output of ethnic media, and its
impact on the ethnic audience’s politics, making it imperative to account for multiple expressions
of “ethnic media”. I specifically discuss new forms and configurations of Chinese ethnic media,
and make the case for viewing contemporary Chinese ethnic media as a heterogeneous
ecosystem with differentiated and interconnected players.

Ethnic Media and Immigrant Political Participation
Among the limited works on political role of ethnic media, one main thread has pointed
to a deficit in political information in ethnic media. Ethnic media has the tendency to cover
American political issues, policies, and processes less frequently and more narrowly, thereby
providing less opportunity for political knowledge and participation. Lin and Song (2006)’s
comprehensive content analysis of over 30 Spanish, Korean and Chinese-language media in Los
Angeles found that coverage of stories taking place in the home country exceeded coverage of
United States news, while stories at the local level only constituted 15% of the sample. In
addition, while political content accounted for 20% of home country news, only 12% of local
stories pertained to politics. The propensity for ethnic media content to focus on home country
21
news mirrors, and is in part driven by, the interests of its audience. Ethnic minorities, in
particular first generation immigrants, rank home country news as more important than local
neighborhood news (Matsaganis et al., 2011). In addition, many of the most prominent ethnic
media options available are owned by international parent companies, which can syndicate
stories from the home country (Lin & Song, 2006; Matsaganis et al., 2011). This deficit in
political content could translate to lower political knowledge and levels of civic and political
participation for ethnic media audiences (Haynes & Ramakrishnan, 2016; Seo & Moon, 2013).
Drawing on two national surveys on Latino and Asian Americans, Haynes & Ramakrishnan
(2016) showed that ethnic media consumption did not provide the same gain in political
knowledge as mainstream media. This political deficit is not limited to when ethnic media is
compared to mainstream media. For Latinos, those who consumed ethnic media exclusively and
those who did not consume any news media did not deviate significantly in their political
knowledge (Haynes & Ramakrishnan, 2016). These studies reflect a fundamental tension
between ethnic media’s connective and orientation functions (Matsganis et al., 2011, p.58), the
former reflecting the centripetal force of ethnic media in congregating an imagined ethnic
community and sustaining the connection with native cultures, and the latter referring to ethnic
media’s role in guiding immigrants in the process of their integration into the host society. The
balance of this dual function directly impacts the extent to which immigrants, especially those
who rely more exclusively on ethnic media, gain political information and opportunities for
political participation.
Other studies suggest ethnic media can play an important role in connecting immigrants
with the electoral process. Project for Excellence in Journalism found that in the period before
and after the 2008 presidential election, Spanish-language newspapers had twice as much
22
coverage than major English newspapers on voting and electoral politics, focusing especially on
educating voters about their rights and explaining specifics about the voting process (PEJ, 2009).
This intensity of coverage could be attributed in part to the historic nature of Obama’s campaign
as a minority presidential candidate. Moran (2006)’s content analysis of English and Spanish
local broadcast stations in San Diego also showed that the Univision affiliate began coverage of
local elections earlier and sustained a higher level of coverage than the ABC broadcaster. The
coverage included basic information about voting and ballot propositions, reflecting ethnic
media’s function in orienting immigrants with the institutions and practices of the host country.
In the same vein, ethnic media has been noted for facilitating and encouraging naturalization,
voter registration, and voting (Felix et al., 2006; Pantoja et al., 2008). These studies suggest that
despite the potential deficit in political coverage more generally, ethnic media’s role in
immigrant political participation could be focused around critical events or specific domains of
participation.
Another way in which the political coverage of ethnic media could be selective is the
tendency to direct attention around group-specific issues and interests. One study showed that the
ethnic press for Asian Indians in the 1990s devoted significant coverage to impending changes in
immigration laws, which directly affected Indians, while little attention was given to civil rights
and other social and political issues, because “presumably the community and the press chose
not to define the issue as important” (Visnawath & Arora, 1997). Similarly, Moran (2006) found
that compared to local English-language television, local Spanish-language television focused
more on border issues and immigration. This specificity in issue coverage is expected given
ethnic media’s position as a particularistic form of media catering to a niche audience, with
content that could fill the gap in mainstream media coverage. This tendency of ethnic media has
23
been linked to the heightened awareness among immigrant audiences about coethnic political
issues, over and above political issues in general (Seo, 2011).
Other studies have honed in on the potential for ethnic media to serve as a watchdog
against mainstream injustice and advocate for minority rights, challenge mainstream framing of
issues, and organizing collective action among its ethnic audiences (Molina Guzman, 2006;
Shumow, 2014). Historically, Spanish and Chinese ethnic press in the United States both started,
at least in part, to document the travails of the early immigrants and advocate for their social
rights (Rodriguez, 1999; Lai, 1987). Several case studies offer a window into the role of ethnic
media in political mobilization around issues that have particular consequences for the ethnic
audience. One of the most conspicuous examples of this is the major role played by Spanish-
language radio stations in mobilizing the massive march and protest in 2006 against proposed
legislative changes to immigration policy (Baum, 2006; Felix, Gonzalez & Ramirez, 2008). The
massive popularity of these radio stations and their intimate relationship with the Latinx
community helped call to action more than half a million protest participants, to the great
surprise of the English-speaking public. Similarly, Shi (2009) demonstrated the role of Chinese
ethnic media in mobilizing voters to oppose Proposition 54, the so-called “Racial Privacy
Initiative” that proposed to prohibit state and local governments in California from using racial
categories. Her interviews with first-generation immigrants in San Francisco showed how they
borrowed jargons and positions taken by Chinese ethnic media, which launched a campaign to
argue that the proposition would make it difficult for the public sector to provide services to
disadvantaged groups and correct racial disparity.
Taken together, the extant literature suggests ethnic media’s role in immigrant political
participation is a complex one, and has pointed to both political mobilization and lack of
24
engagement as possible outcomes. Broadly speaking, two main perspectives can be distilled from
these literatures. One strand of the literature emphasizes the process of immigrant political
adaptation. In this view, ethnic media’s role in encouraging political participation depends on the
extent to which it directs attention toward home country issues, provides sufficient political
information about the host country as well as its political processes and institutions. The other
perspective tends to emphasize how ethnic media could invigorate and contribute to multicultural
democracy (Husband, 2005; Georgiou, 2006), by variously advancing alternative and
oppositional discourses, and allowing for the possibility of collective representation and action.
These two perspectives together suggest that ethnic media not only wield significant influence
over the political participation of immigrants, but also the formation of minority group politics.
While the immigrant adaptation perspective has produced more systematic assessment of ethnic
media’s content and effects on its audience, our understanding of ethnic media’s role in minority
group politics is limited to case studies of overt and episodic political mobilizations and issue
advocacies.
The group formation framework proposed in the previous chapter points to concepts that
offer a more robust lens through which to understand ethnic media’s role in immigrant politics.
For one, it suggests that group consciousness is an important antecedent for the potential strength
and cohesion of group politics. Much has been written on the role of ethnic media in constructing
and preserving social and cultural identity for immigrants (Jeffres, 1999; Johnson, 2000; Zhang
& Hao, 1999; Subervi-Velez, 1986), but the underlying process is different for group
consciousness, which would require definition and negotiation of collective political goal,
discussion of discrimination, and in general, some level of politicization. Previous studies of
ethnic media have shown that ethnic media can indeed serve as a vehicle for understanding and
25
rallying against racial discrimination, and learning group concepts such as “minorities” and
“Asian Americans” (Shi, 2009; Hardt, 1989). In addition, ethnic media may shape immigrant
politics by articulating ethnically specific political interest and agendas. Some of the studies
discussed above hint at the possibility for ethnic media to focus on social and political issues that
particularly affect the coethnic community. But we have little systematic knowledge of what
political issues are covered, to what extent co-ethnic political interests dominate, and the nature
of political interests being surfaced.
The literature is also largely silent on the extent to which ethnic media connect their
ethnic audiences with other minority groups and their interests, portray other racial and ethnic
groups, and depict racial relations in US society. There are passing observations that ethnic
media devote very little space to depicting other ethnic groups or discussing relationships with
other ethnic groups (Matsaganis et al. 2011). But it is unclear exactly how little coverage there is,
or in what context such coverage takes place. Especially in view of the increasing racial division
and occurrence of group conflicts in the United States, race relations could be occupying a more
salient position in ethnic media coverage. During the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles,
for example, Thai newspapers contextualized the event by with reference to the discrimination
encountered by the Thai community, and drew common ground with the Korean experience
(Sudarat, 1993). By focusing on how ethnic media may portray outgroups and group relations,
and shape a sense of group position, the present study addresses a major gap in the literature.

Internal Differentiation and Changing Forms of Ethnic Media
Writing in 2000, Viswanath and Arora (2000) suggested that ethnic media shares
characteristics with small-town community press. Due to the relatively small size and outsider
26
status of ethnic communities, where the differences within an immigrant group have to be
negotiated with the sense of tightly-knit community by virtue of being a minority group, ethnic
media tend to adopt similar orientations in terms of content and relationship with the ethnic
community. But the authors acknowledged that this could change with increasing size and
internal diversity of the ethnic population, as well as changes in communication technology.
Indeed, far from being a monolithic entity, ethnic media differ in ownership, production
process, self-identity, and can adopt different political and ideological orientations, relationship
with mainstream discourses, and degrees of advocacy (Couldry & Dreher, 2007; Shi, 2009;
Shumow, 2014; Zhou & Cai, 2002). These differences have implications for political expression
and participation. Although the heterogeneity of ethnic media has been implicitly acknowledged
and documented across the collective body of work on ethnic media, studies of ethnic media far
too often fail to explicitly address this in their study design or explicate their impact. For
example, studies on ethnic media use typically assess this by asking respondents what language
their sources of political information are in (e.g. National Asian American Survey, 2010), or by
directly asking respondents how much they depend on ethnic media relative to mainstream
media (e.g. The Pilot National Asian American Survey, 2001). These measures essentially
conceptualize ethnic media as one single, undifferentiated entity. Similarly, for their content
analysis, Lin and Song (2016) considered a sample of ethnic media that varied in circulation
numbers, frequency of publication, and genre, including tabloid and newsletters on one end, and
daily newspapers on the other, but the conclusions drawn pertained to the overall sample, thus
treating each news media as an analogous discursive unit.
A handful of scholars have argued that the single category of “ethnic media” can no
longer capture the nuances of different types of media and the variable influences they have on
27
ethnic audience members. Shumow (2014) distinguished between three models of Venezuelan
ethnic press in Florida that have different relationships with home country and immigrant
community audiences as well as politics. His typology of oppositional, market-driven/hybrid,
immigrant/community began to disaggregate the umbrella concept of ethnic media, suggesting
different possible outcomes in political integration and public discourse. For market-driven
ethnic media, the logic of market and profit underlying production of content can displace public
discourse with entertainment and lack of inclusivity in the range of voices represented.
Intentionally oppositional ethnic media, on the other hand, may deviate from practices of
journalistic objectivity, and instead position themselves as a community advocate, and embrace
the mission of uplifting the marginalized voices of the ethnic group they represent (Rodriguez,
1999; Couldry & Dreher, 2007; Mercado, 2015). Shi (2009)’s research with low-income Chinese
immigrants and their reading of different ethnic Chinese newspapers argued that multinational,
corporatized ethnic newspapers should be distinguished from community-based, nonprofit
outlets, with the former more often than not reinforcing the middle-class, consumerist interests of
the group (Shi, 2009). Political participation outcomes could also differ depending on the
modality of ethnic media. Haynes and Ramakrishnan (2016) found that while ethnic newspapers,
TV and radio did not provide political knowledge benefits, Asian Americans and Latinos who
consumed political information from native language websites are more knowledgeable than
those who do not consume news from the Internet at all. This type of disaggregation of ethnic
media acknowledges and begins to capture the variegated ethnic media environment, and
prompts questions about what distinguishes digital ethnic media consumers and/or online ethnic
media coverage. Therefore, to make claims about the role of “ethnic media” in political
28
communication and shaping political incorporation of its audiences would mask important
differences among ethnic media.
The internal differentiation of ethnic media becomes particularly important in a highly
pluralistic and fragmented media environment, where ethnic media continues to morph rapidly
with changing technological underpinnings, ownership structures, and audience base. For one,
the rising importance of ethnic audiences has prompted interest by mainstream American media
companies, who have variously produced select segments in ethnic languages (e.g. the Spanish
and Chinese versions of the New York Times) or acquired ethnic media companies (e.g. the
acquisition of Hoy by the Los Angeles Times). Home country media, which have always
attempted to capture the immigrant market, are increasingly leveraging interest in immigration to
the United States as well as the ease in distribution and access afforded by digital technology to
develop US-focused media (Matsaganis et al., 2011). Mirroring development in digital and social
media more generally, ethnic media has also expanded to include new players who occupy the
online sphere. Although the extent of technological access and adoption is uneven among
different populations, a 2016 survey with 103 ethnic media in New York City found that an
overwhelming majority of these outlets have both web and social media presence, with as many
as 30% even operating their own mobile apps (Matsaganis et al., 2016). The lower barrier of
generating and distributing content has also enabled new forms of information production by
everyday citizens (Gillmor, 2004). Adding to the expanding array of media created and
consumed by immigrant populations are ethnically focused blogs, digital media startups, web
radio and podcasts. With the ease of publishing afforded by platforms such as Youtube and
Facebook, some immigrant communities have developed ethnic media in the form of user-
generated social media pages and video channels (Lopez, 2016).
29
The increasing number and new types of ethnic media suggest a further diversification of
production practices and content orientation. Whereas traditionally, ethnic media may be
considered journalistic venues despite the small scale of operation and resource constraint faced
by many (Husband, 2005; Matsaganis & Katz, 2014; Budarick & Han, 2015), new iterations of
ethnic media can span a range of different information generation practices, gatekeeping
processes, and subsequently, discursive outputs. For example, the heavy coverage of home
country news by ethnic media could be attributed, in part, to the syndicated content available
from parent companies based in the country of origin (Lin & Song, 2006; Zhou & Cai, 2002).
But this connection is not readily applicable to emerging modes of newsgathering in the ethnic
media space, such as individual bloggers, citizen journalists, content aggregators, and digital
media ventures. The proliferation of outlets and possibility for narrowcasting also challenges the
“lowest common denominator approach” (Moran, 2006) often taken by traditional ethnic media,
where commercial interest and the need to capture the mass ethnic audience market drive content
that appeals to the prevailing interests of the ethnic group (Shi, 2009; Moran, 2006). It is possible
that new forms of ethnic media can appeal to their niche audiences with highly specialized
content. With these new configurations in ethnic media, the amount of political content, balance
of home country and US-focused content, focus on co-ethnic issues, and even political bias
should be considered variable and evolving within the same system of ethnic media serving a
specific ethnic population. The proliferation of outlets and types of content producers could
diversify possible expressions of ethnic media, augment its internal differentiation, and further
disrupt the presumably uniform impact exerted by “ethnic media” as a whole on their audiences.
Consequently, the questions asked in this study and the research design are attentive to
differences across various types of ethnic media and what they mean for immigrant politics. Of
30
course, systems of ethnic media vary greatly across different ethnic populations, depending on
the size of the ethnic population, social and economic resources available, different consumption
habits and preferences, digital and traditional literacy, as well as access to technology. Next, I
describe the case of Chinese ethnic media specifically to illustrate its complexity and
resemblance with the contemporary digital media landscape at large, and provide the context for
this study. In doing so, I emphasize the need to understand the differentiated role of various
ethnic media players with respect to immigrant politics, and explain the intentional and analytical
choice of viewing Chinese ethnic media as an ecosystem.

Chinese Ethnic Media in the Digital Age
Chinese language media in the United States have experienced tremendous growth since
the 1980s with increasing immigration from China and Chinese speaking area of the world.
Traditionally, three major Chinese news organizations, World Journal, Singtao Daily, and China
Press, have been most influential in the United States (Zhou & Cai, 2002; Matsaganis et al,
2011). These “big three” dailies have occupied a disproportionate share of the Chinese ethnic
media market. In this dissertation, I refer to them as ethnic presses to distinguish them from
emerging forms of ethnic media. They are offshoots of newspapers originating in different parts
of the Chinese-speaking world, with parent companies in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland
China (Table. 1). Despite differences in their emphasis on current affairs in their place of origin,
linguistic style, and stance on homeland politics, all three cater to a broader Chinese immigrant
audience in the United States (Zhou & Cai, 2002; Matsaganis et al., 2011). In addition to daily
circulation numbers on par with major English news media (Table. 1), these long-established
Chinese media have also developed online editions as early as the late 1990s (Zhou & Cai,
31
2002). Because of their status as a part of international conglomerates, they have been able to
maintain local bureaus and editorial staff, as well as adapt relatively well to transformations in
the news industry and technology that challenge the viability of traditional print media.
Historically, the major three Chinese ethnic presses have also wielded significant political
influence, from editorials on policy issues to endorsement of candidates in local elections
(Horton et al, 1995; Shi, 2009). Along with Chinese language schools and community
associations, these publications have been recognized as one of the three pillars of social and
civic life for immigrant Chinese (Sun, 2007; Zhou & Cai; 2002).

Table 1. Three top Chinese ethnic presses in the United States
Name Circulation* Monthly Unique
Visitor
Parent
Company
Location
Local Editions
World
Journal
350,000

381,115

Taiwan New York, Los
Angeles, San
Francisco, San
Diego,
NJ/Philadelphia,
Chicago, Boston,
Atlanta, Houston,
Seattle
Singtao Daily 180,000

38,220

Hong Kong New York, Los
Angeles, San
Francisco
China Press 120,000

81,901

Mainland
China
New York, Los
Angeles, San
Francisco, Seattle,
Texas
* Circulation numbers are from 2015 and web analytics are December 2017 results from Alexa

In addition, a number of Chinese language television networks and radio stations also
have sizable reach into the immigrant Chinese community in the United States (Zhou & Cai,
32
2002). Mirroring trends in media convergence more broadly, several of these TV networks and
radio stations have crossed platforms and developed web-based products. Since the late 1990s,
online news sites catering to immigrant Chinese audiences, such as the North America edition of
Sina.com, have also emerged and become popular sources of news (Zhou & Cai, 2002; Yang,
2003). As a testament to the strength of transnational online sphere supported by a robust and
well-integrated Chinese language Internet (Yang, 2003; Taneja & Wu, 2014), an increasing
number of homeland-based news sites and online platforms also routinely figure into the
communication practices of Chinese immigrants.
The Chinese ethnic media landscape is being further redefined by the rise of WeChat, a
mobile app established in China in 2011 that has reached a staggering 800 million user base as of
2018. WeChat’s singular dominance derives from its functional integration, which combines
messaging, social networking, personal finance, business, and more. In the context of this
dissertation, what particularly sets WeChat apart from social media and microblogging sites
familiar to the English-speaking world is its role in news production, as it provides the
infrastructure for content publishers native to the platform to flourish. These content publishers
not news outlets in the strict sense, but have become de facto news sources for the Chinese
audience (Li, 2018), providing news and information on a gamut of topics with different levels
of sophistication and journalistic rigor. On one end, there are individual bloggers and boutique
operations, where one writer or a small base of individual contributors and volunteers produce a
mix of news, analysis, and opinions. Larger operations have more substantial, full-time teams
that produce content more consistently and may even have a formalized editorial process. By the
last official count in April 2017, there were as many as 10 million of these outlets in WeChat
(China Tech Insights, 2017). The scale and legitimacy of WeChat-based outlets as a source of
33
news is part and parcel of the ascendant culture of “self-media” in China (Yu, 2018; Li, 2018).
Robust social media use, low barrier to entry, and the lack of credible legacy media have
together enabled individual influencers and digital natives to fill the role of news providers.
WeChat’s particular traction as a source of news among first-generation Chinese is also
closely tied to its social networking features. Such affordances underlie the influence of social
news on platforms such as Facebook more generally (Pew Research Center, 2018), but social ties
are also especially crucial for immigrants as they navigate the new places, customs, institutions,
and support networks that define their new reality (Hagan, 1998; Menjivar, 2000). A central unit
of social networking in WeChat is chat groups, which are often formed with family members in
China or elsewhere in the world, as well as with members of the coethnic community in the
United States, who may share a common hometown, residential location, school, workplace, or
interest in an issue. These chat groups allow immigrants to establish and maintain social
connections both at home and in the host society, and also serve as a major conduit for news
flow. Therefore, news consumption in WeChat is directly integrated into the daily
communication practices of immigrants.
Although there is no official estimate of the number of WeChat outlets focusing on the
United States, the prominence and diversity of such outlets are unmistakable. Many legacy
China-based media, such as the Global Times and People’s Daily, have developed WeChat-
based digital subsidiaries focusing on international audiences and providing content tailored to
the diasporic Chinese community. Notably, all three Chinese ethnic presses have also established
their own WeChat outlets. Many more players in this space are WeChat natives – digital startups
and blogs that emerged from and operate solely out of WeChat. These WeChat natives are
distinct from ethnic presses in that they are unrelated to the established news industry, and can be
34
more specialized in their topical and geographical focus. For example, some WeChat natives
have developed a strong focus on U.S. politics, offering news as well as analysis and punditry,
with some taking on a strong partisan orientation (Zhang, 2018). Local WeChat outlets can also
be found in many traditional and new immigrant gateway cities, including places where
traditional ethnic presses do not have dedicated coverage. A WeChat native can attain a scale and
level of influence that rival legacy or established media. For example, College Daily, one of the
most well-known outlets targeting students and young professionals in the United States, has
over 10 million readers, maintains an editorial team of 30, and has attracted significant investor
funding (Sheehan, 2015; Yu, 2018). The newsgathering practices and resulting content of these
WeChat outlets directly affect how first-generation Chinese engage with news and politics in the
United States.
Compared to the past when a few major Chinese newspapers, radio stations, or TV
channels dominate and directly reach their audiences, the ethnic media space for first-generation
Chinese in the United States has become much more crowded and complex, in large part driven
by WeChat. In this study, I view Chinese ethnic media as an ecosystem comprising an ensemble
of differentiated and interconnected actors that engage in news production, in a way that mirrors
the hybridized and fragmented media environment at large (Stroud, 2010; Webster & Ksiazek,
2012). The term “ecosystem” has seen an uptake in studies of journalism and political
communication, with some using it as a convenient shorthand for the news landscape in the
digital age, and others delineating, with varying degrees of sophistication, its structural features
(Anderson, 2016). For the present purposes, construing ethnic media as an ecosystem
acknowledges the shifting technological and cultural underpinnings of content production, as
well as the expanding array and types of actors that together influence the outcome of news and
35
public discourse. It calls for, first of all, a mapping of who these actors are, their relative
importance and role in contributing to the overall information environment. An ecosystem view
of ethnic media also means going beyond the analysis of a few specific media outlets, and
instead also tracing their connection and relationship with each other as well as with other actors
in the ecosystem. For example, some studies of news ecosystems have shed light on how media
outlets share content and link to each other, thereby serving as sources, amplifiers or gatekeepers
of news content (Weber & Monge, 2011; Graeff et al, 2014; Pew, 2010). The ecosystem
metaphor therefore helps us move away from viewing ethnic media as a single construct, and
instead account for the heterogeneous positions of various actors as well as their
interconnections.
Some have made a similar move in locating ethnic media in the broader transformations
in media and communications. Deuze (2006), for example, saw ethnic media as part of the
contemporary emergence of participatory and collaborative media-making, characterized by
“more diffuse and complex relationships between consumers and producers, between content and
connectivity” (p. 269). Although my focus is different from Deuze’s, his reframing of ethnic
media serves as a reminder of the need to expand conceptualizations of ethnic media premised
on its “ethnic-ness”, and understand ethnic media from the lens of changing conditions in the
media and information environment more generally. Especially in grappling with political
communication role of ethnic media, recognizing the fragmentation, heterogeneity and
interconnectedness of media forms helps us make sense of the changing dynamics of information
production and influence that shape how individuals engage with news and politics.

36
Research Questions
In this chapter, I have situated the present research inquiry in the existing body of work
on ethnic media and the changing media landscape more generally. Ethnic media as a whole
remains an under-researched area, and the role of ethnic media in immigrant politics is especially
poorly understood. Chinese ethnic media, in particular, has evolved dramatically to encompass
an abundant number of emerging media outlets spanning different platforms, genres, and content
generation practices. Here, I tie together the preceding discussion on ethnic media and the
analytical framework set out in the previous chapter to outline the specific research questions
explored in this study.
To begin with, despite the burgeoning scale and importance of WeChat as a source of
news for first-generation Chinese, there is a basic lack of understanding of which WeChat outlets
are playing the role of ethnic media, or what kind of outlets they are. This knowledge gap is
certainly indicative of a general dearth of research on emerging media for immigrant audiences,
but as I explain more in detail in the methods chapter, WeChat’s semi-private platform design
and its tight-fisted control over data also severely limits the scope of information available and
analysis possible. Therefore, this study first addresses the following descriptive but essential
question:

RQ1: Which WeChat outlets have become prominent sources of news about the United
States for immigrant Chinese?

To understand the role played by the Chinese ethnic media ecosystem in first-generation
Chinese politics, this study focuses on traditional ethnic presses and WeChat, which together
37
constitute a major subdomain of the media ecosystem. The former is representative of legacy
journalistic outfits that have been influential historically, while the latter consists of numerous
emerging media outlets that have adopted a range of content orientations and information
generation practices. I examine several aspects of the content produced by these ethnic media
outlets, noting how ethnic presses and WeChat outlets diverge from each other as well as how
they are interconnected in the larger ecosystem.
Firstly, the extant research has generally suggested that ethnic media’s coverage of U.S.
politics is limited in quantity and scope, and the gaze can be disproportionately on home country
news (e.g. Lin & Song, 2006; Haynes & Ramarkrishnan, 2011). However, systematic analysis of
ethnic media content is limited in number, and has exclusively focused on traditional news
media. In view of the explosion in the number of media outlets and diversification of information
brought about by WeChat, it is unclear how the amount of political coverage and balance
between home country and host society news may have changed. Following this, this study seeks
to answer:

RQ2: To what extent do ethnic presses and WeChat outlets cover political news pertaining to
the United States?

Considerations set out in the previous chapter highlight how immigrant politics has to be
understood beyond a matter of participation or nonparticipation, and ways in which questions of
group formation are also critically implicated in the nature of immigrant politics. It is worth
pointing out that the study of how media activate group identities, construct representations of
groups, and shape intergroup attitude and conflicts has become a staple in communication
38
research (e.g. Dixon et al, 2000; Nelson & Kinder, 1996; Valentino et al., 2002). Yet, these
questions have not garnered much attention in the domain of ethnic media. As discussed in this
chapter, the extant literature does suggest several ways in which ethnic media could produce
group-specific iterations of politics, but the evidence is ad hoc and not guided by a strong
conceptualization of group politics. Following the group formation framework, I first ask a series
of questions about how ethnic presses and WeChat outlets may bolster group consciousness and
focus attention around group-specific political issues and interests:

RQ3: To what extent do ethnic presses and WeChat display an ethnically specific political
issue agenda?

RQ4.1: To what extent do ethnic presses and WeChat enable the development of coethnic
group consciousness in its news coverage?
RQ4.2: How is coethnic group consciousness constructed by ethnic presses and WeChat?

In addition, ethnic media scholarship has overwhelmingly been premised on the tension
between the coethnic community and an unspecified mainstream society, often glossing over the
fact that “mainstream society” is constituted by distinct groups and intergroup dynamics.
Critically missing from the literature is an inquiry into the boundary and tension between the
coethnic group and other racial and ethnic groups as an axis of immigrant politics. Ethnic media
may perpetuate representations of outgroups and group relations marked by stereotypes and
perceptions of threat, help illuminate shared status and common interest, or, by inadequately
covering outgroups and group relations, render these dynamics invisible or unimportant.
39
Following the group formation framework, I explore the extent to which Chinese ethnic media
discursively constructs a sense of group position, or, specifically:

RQ5.1: To what extent do Chinese ethnic presses and WeChat outlets portray other racial
and ethnic groups?
RQ5.2: How are other racial and ethnic groups portrayed?

RQ6.1: To what extent do Chinese ethnic presses and WeChat outlets portray the
relationship between Chinese Americans and other minority racial groups?
RQ6.2: How are these relationships portrayed?

Last but not least, in keeping with an ecosystem view of Chinese ethnic media, this study
also traces how ethnic presses and WeChat outlets are connected with each other as well as other
media outlets through sourcing and content flows. As discussed in the overview of Chinese
ethnic media, beyond the big three ethnic presses and WeChat outlets, there is a larger universe
of Chinese-language news publications, websites, platforms, and online communities that can
serve as news providers. At the same time, the ethnic media ecosystem does not exist in isolation
from the English-language media ecosystem, which can also function as a source of information.
By examining the larger set of media sources from which ethnic media outlets draw their
information, I shed light on the content generation practices of different types of ethnic media,
while at the same time also illuminate how these outlets are interwoven in their influence of each
other. That is, I consider content a dynamic product of the ecosystem, rather than solely the
output of a specific media outlet.
40

RQ7: How are ethnic presses and WeChat outlets connected with each other and other
Chinese and English media outlets through sourcing?
41
Chapter 4: Research design

The research questions were primarily addressed through a content analysis of ethnic
Chinese media. To identify the sample of WeChat outlets for the content analysis, an online
survey was conducted with US-based WeChat users in August 2017. Respondents were asked to
name up to three WeChat outlets that are important to their understanding of current affairs and
politics in the United States. Respondents were recruited through snowball sampling within the
platform. To enhance sample diversity, the survey was distributed via various types of WeChat-
based chat groups such as hometown groups, college and alumni groups, and parenting groups.
A total of 407 valid responses were recorded. Survey respondents varied in age (M=44.55,
SD=18.28), gender (58% female), and number of years in the US (M=18.23, SD=2.4). This
approach was necessary as the design features of WeChat do not allow open access and
extraction of data in the same way that social media platforms usually do, and indicators of
popularity, such as follower number, are not available. Content on WeChat is not indexed or
searchable through general-purpose search engines on the open web. In other words, instead of
identifying the most influential US-focused WeChat outlets through a set of search criteria and
metrics, an audience survey became the more labor intensive but requisite alternative. Based on
survey responses, this study focused on 25 WeChat outlets that were most frequently nominated
by respondents. To establish their basic profile, I examined the analytics of these outlets as well
as their About Us or mission statement section.
Along with these 25 WeChat outlets, three ethnic presses (World Journal, Singtao Daily,
China Press) were included for the content analysis. One major challenge for conducting content
analysis on ethnic media is sampling and acquisition of data. The Chinese ethnic presses do not
42
have a reliable online archive that allows backtracking, nor do databases like LexisNexis archive
Chinese ethnic media well. This means the content had to be accessed and documented in real
time. The difficulty in data access was further complicated by the design of WeChat, which, as
mentioned before, did not allow data extraction through an Application Programming Interface
(API), which is the usual practice for retrieving data from platforms such as Twitter and
Facebook. Its content can be viewed on the open web but is not well-indexed through a regular
search engine. A few third-party analytics websites aggregate content from WeChat outlets, but
the quality of the data was inconsistent. I chose one aggregation website (www.aiweibang.com)
that seemed to have the most complete content collection.
Data collection took place from October 1 through November 31, 2017, during which I
retrieved the content of the news outlets on a daily basis with the help of web scraping. As data
acquisition in real time is a resource-intensive endeavor, considerations of representativeness and
generalizability had to be negotiated with feasibility (Luke et al., 2011). With that in mind, an
extended two-month time frame of data collection sought to account for variations in real world
events and the news cycle (Lacy et al., 2015). For the three ethnic newspapers, I retrieved all
articles on the front page at 12AM EDT daily. WeChat content required a different approach.
WeChat outlets can only publish a maximum of 8 articles a day, and the aggregation website
provided access to the 100 most recent articles published by each WeChat outlet. So to obtain all
published content in the months of October and November 2017, I scraped the aggregation site
weekly and removed duplicates. Three WeChat outlets were not accessible through the
aggregation website, and their content was manually archived. A combined total of 9,520 articles
were obtained for the time period, 5,613 from ethnic press and 3,902 from WeChat. In addition
to the textual content, the view count for each article, which was available for World Journal and
43
WeChat outlets, was also obtained as a metric for gauging the prominence and reach of stories
and outlets.
Given the large quantity of data, the study adopted a mix of manual coding and
automated text analyses. Lewis et al. (2013) argue for a hybrid approach that blends computer
text analyses and manual methods in order to “preserve the strengths of traditional content
analysis, with its systematic rigor and contextual awareness, while maximizing the large-scale
capacity of big data and the efficiencies of computational methods” (p. 47). Some of the research
questions in this study, which concern manifest content and discrete attributes, are particularly
amenable to automated coding (Lacy et al., 2015), while others require close reading and
contextualization by human coders.

Automated Text Analyses
Automated text analyses were conducted for all the stories collected for this study
(N=9,025). First, I adopted a dictionary-based approach of text analyses to identify the presence
and frequency of political issues and racial groups in the corpus, with each news story as the unit
of analysis. An issue or racial group was coded as present if a story matched any of the keywords
denoting that specific issue or racial group in the dictionary. Because a comprehensive and
precise dictionary is critical to the rigor of this type of automated analysis, I familiarized myself
with the text to identify and add terms that I had missed, and removed terms that could result in
noise. In addition, World Journal and Singtao Daily publish in traditional Chinese, which not
only differs from simplified Chinese in the written script, but is also associated with a different
linguistic convention originating in Taiwan and Hong Kong. For example, a common term for
DACA recipients, or Dreamers, in traditional Chinese texts is zhuimengren (literally, those who
44
pursue dreams), while simplified Chinese texts translate the term as mengxiangsheng (literally,
dreamer students). I therefore also familiarized myself with expressions in both simplified and
traditional Chinese. The full list of terms used in the dictionary is available in Appendix A.
Racial or ethnic groups coded through this automated process included Chinese
Americans, non-Chinese Asian Americans subgroups (e.g. Korean, Hmong, Filipino), African
Americans, and Latinos. I took care to include code words as well as vernacular and Internet
specific lingo, such as “old Mexicans” for Latinos. In addition to assessing the frequency with
which these groups were discussed by Chinese ethnic media, this process also enabled me to
identify the subset of stories that involved minority outgroups, or, specifically, African
Americans, Latinos, and non-Chinese Asian American subgroups. These stories were examined
more closely for their portrayal of outgroups and intergroup relations through manual coding,
which I discuss later.
Political issues included unauthorized immigration, Muslim/Islam, jobs and the economy,
race relations, gun control, healthcare, female health, climate change, affirmative action, and data
disaggregation. This selection of issues was based on Faris et al. (2016), who studied the
prominence of political issue coverage in the English media ecosystem in the 2016 presidential
election. To that list, I added affirmative action and data disaggregation, which are issues that
have involved Chinese and Asian Americans as the protagonists. Affirmative action, primarily
referring to race-based considerations in college admissions, has been a longstanding issue of
interest in the Asian American community, and the focal point of several well-organized
collective mobilizations by Chinese Americans who oppose the policy (Kim & Lee, 2001; Lien
2014; Ramakrishnan, 2014). Data disaggregation is a more recent issue that refers to efforts to
collect more detailed demographic data about Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI)
45
subgroups. Since 2016, bills have been introduced in several states to improve data collection of
the AAPI population, who differ greatly on outcomes such as economic wellbeing, health,
domestic violence, and education achievement, by ethnicity or national origin. These bills were
met with strong opposition from first-generation Chinese, who viewed it as a form of
discrimination, and also feared disaggregated demographic data could be used to hold Chinese
Americans to higher standards in college admissions (Fuchs, 2017; Wang, 2017). Together, these
ten issues represent a selection of the most pertinent topics in recent politics. In addition to
assessing the prominence of these issues in the Chinese ethnic media, I also compared this issue
agenda set with that of English language media in the same period (October – November 2017)
by leveraging Media Cloud, an open source platform for tracking English-language content
published online. The same dictionary for issues in English was used to query a collection of 68
English language media, including top mainstream media, regional media, online news, and
digital natives.
A separate analysis zoomed in on the discursive construction of group consciousness by
mapping the co-occurrence network for the term “Chinese American” at a more granular level -
that is to say, words that occur in close proximity to each other in a sentence rather than at the
story level. This approach is effective in allowing the collective cognitive structure and
embedded meaning in the text to emerge (Danowski, 1993; Doerfel, 1998). To preprocess the
corpus for word co-occurrence analysis, I first utilized a package in the statistical software R to
segment the corpus into words, as Chinese language text is not separated with space as in
English and many Western scripts. Then I wiped the resulting word set of stop words, or
commonly occurring words such as “is” and “of” that do not have substantial meaning. The co-
occurrence analysis was then conducted with WORDij 3.0, a computer program that identifies
46
terms that appear within a three-word window from each other (Danowski, 2010). The analysis
focused on terms that co-occurred with two expressions for “Chinese Americans” that are used
more or less interchangeably in the Chinese language: huaren, which literally means Chinese
people but specifically signifies Chinese living outside of China, and huayi, which means
individuals of Chinese descent.
1
The results for huaren and huayi were then combined, yielding a
list of terms that co-occurred with “Chinese American” as well as the frequency of their co-
occurrence.

Manual Coding
Manual coding was performed for two subsets of data. First, 30% of the content in each
type of ethnic media was randomly selected, resulting in a sample of 2,858 stories, 1,683 from
ethnic press and 1,175 from WeChat. This data set, which I refer to as the general sample, was
used to examine general characteristics of ethnic media content, including geographical scope,
political news, coethnic orientation, and sourcing, which I will detail later. The second data set
for manual coding included outgroup stories identified from automated analysis (N=505 for
ethnic press, and N=703 for WeChat), through which the nature of outgroup portrayal and
intergroup relations were examined. A summary of the different samples used in this study is
provided in Table 2. Two Master’s students at a Communication program who are native
speakers of Chinese and fluent in English were hired and trained as coders. 25 articles from each
subset of manual coding samples was used for the initial round of intercoder reliability
calculation. On average, the Kripendorff’s alpha, computed with ReCal (Freelon, 2013),

1
Even though these two expressions do not contain the word “American”, the context is often clear
enough for U.S.-based ethnic media, such that these expressions are usually used on their own to refer to
Chinese Americans.
47
was .763, with a few variables contributing to the low score. These variables were re-visited, and
a subsequent round of intercoder reliability produced an alpha of .812.

Table 2. Summary of media sources analyzed and sample size
Automated coding Manual coding -
General sample
Manual coding-
Outgroup stories sample
Ethnic press 5613 1683 505
WeChat 3907 1170 703
Total 9520 4536 1208

The following measures were coded for the general sample:
Geographic focus: Stories were classified by their geographical referent. Adapting the measure
used by Lin and Song (2006), geographical focus considered a story to be primarily local,
regional-state, national, China-specific, or international. A local-level story is one that concerns
the events, issues or policies of a neighborhood, district, city or metropolitan area. A regional-
state level story refers to events, issues or policies that affect the state or a wider region. A
national-level story concerns domestic news of the United States broadly. China-specific stories
take place in China, and include coverage of US-China relations primarily from the Chinese
perspective.

Political news: Stories were also coded as either about U.S. politics or not. Politics include
elections, politicians, policy issues, as well as identity or cultural politics. For example, stories
about NFL players kneeling to protest the national anthem were considered political. Non-
political news may include events, consumer information, sports, entertainment, as well as social
and human-interest stories that are not contextualized in a larger political or policy issue. For
48
example, stories about natural disasters that discuss the action of government agencies or climate
change implications were coded as political, while human-interest stories that focused on the
individual impact of natural disasters were coded as non-political. While the automated coding of
political issues focused on the prominence of a small set of specific issues, this hand-coding
variable provides a more general and direct assessment of how much ethnic media covered U.S.
politics.

Co-ethnic orientation: A co-ethnic story is defined as one that features a Chinese protagonist or
one that is specifically relevant to the immigrant Chinese community. For example, if a story on
a national policy or general issue discusses its implications for the Chinese community, it was
considered to have a co-ethnic orientation.

Sourcing: Hyperlink analysis is one of the most commonly used approaches that lend insights
into the relationships among sites in online networks (Monge & Weber, 2011; Graeff et al,
2014). However, hyperlinking has not been adopted as a common practice for Chinese language
media, and articles in WeChat cannot link to other sites on the open web. Therefore, each story
was manually coded for the names as well as types of media that it referenced or credited as a
source. The types of sources include wire services, English mainstream media, English digital
native media outlets (e.g. Buzzfeed, Daily Beast), English social media (e.g. Twitter, Instagram),
US-based Chinese ethnic press, China-based media (e.g. CCTV, Southern China Morning Post),
and Chinese social media (e.g. Weibo, WeChat).

The following measures were coded for the outgroup stories sample:
49

Outgroup portrayal: Outgroup portrayal was coded as negative, positive, or neutral. Adapting
Entman (1994), negative portrayals are those that associate an outgroup member with
stereotypical portrayals such as criminality, aggression, deviance, lack of intelligence, or a
source of trouble in social and political issues. Positive stories are those that depict an outgroup
member in positions of power (e.g. celebrity, politician) or expertise, as well as human interest
and feature stories that go beyond one-dimensional caricature of a group. Because the sharp
delineation of group boundaries stems from outgroups being “alien and different” (Blumer,
1958), the definition of positive goes beyond the explicitly “good” to include the kind of
portrayals that humanize the minority group or contextualize the minority group’s historical or
contemporary experience in the United States. Stories that only mentioned an outgroup in
passing or did not have an explicit valence regarding the outgroup were coded as neutral.

Intergroup relations: The relational portrayal of groups was coded as absent, competitive, or
shared interest. Relational portrayal was considered absent in stories that did not mention
Chinese Americans and other groups together, or when groups appeared in the same story
without any explicit or implied relationship among them, such as when stories signaled to the
demographic composition of a place, or reported statistics by race or ethnicity. In stories
portraying competition, Chinese Americans – individually or as a group – were depicted as
having their statuses, resources, rights, interests, or privileges compromised or threatened by
other minority individuals or groups. In shared interest stories, Chinese and outgroups are
depicted as common targets of discrimination, common victims or beneficiaries of a policy, or
common constituents or stakeholders. In other words, the former boils down to a “us versus
50
them” construction that emphasizes the threat to a group’s position, while the latter contains
elements of an “us and them” interpretation that identifies common experiences or positionality.

Additional Analyses
While content coding is a productive method for systematically assessing the nature of
Chinese ethnic media content, I also undertook more qualitative and discursive analysis to
ground the interpretation of data. For one, I did a close reading of the outgroup stories to
understand what events, issues, and narratives were driving different types of portrayals of
outgroups and intergroup relations. In addition, I also zoomed in on two stories that took place in
the two-month period to trace where they came from, how they circulated, and how their angle or
framing transformed across different ethnic media outlets. The two stories were selected because
they were carried by multiple ethnic media outlets, and had an emphasis on the group position of
Chinese Americans. Modeled after a Pew (2010) study of Philadelphia’s news ecosystem, this
approach offers a richer understanding of the dynamic nature of the ethnic media ecosystem, and
illuminates dynamics of content flow that go beyond a static snapshot of the discursive output.
51
Chapter 5: Results

Profile of WeChat outlets (RQ1)
User survey revealed a long tail of WeChat outlets that serve as sources of information
for current affairs and politics in the United States. A total of 279 WeChat outlets were
nominated by survey users, attesting to the proliferation of news outlets catering to the Chinese
diaspora. Here, I provide a brief overview of the top 25 WeChat outlets, which are the focus of
this study, to establish their basic profile in terms of volume of output, audience size,
organizational structure, and topical focus.
As shown in Table 3, the most influential WeChat outlets cut across a range of scales and
formats, but many are WeChat natives, or outlets that were born first out of WeChat (as opposed
to those that started as print, broadcast, or other digital media). The most common type of
WeChat outlet is blogs, which are WeChat natives run by an individual or a loosely organized
group of individuals, with no obvious corporate entity behind it or established business model.
Reflecting this scale of operation, blogs tend to publish less content, although neither the scale
nor volume of output is strictly deterministic of audience size. For example, NYC Master, a
locally focused blog, has the fifth highest average view count in the two-month period studied.
Political blogs, including Voice of North American Chinese and Chinese Americans, were also
able to amass considerable audience. WeChat startups refer to outlets that are also native to the
platform, but operate at a large scale and with more organizational structure. Several of the
WeChat startups, including Insight China, College Daily, and Huaren Life, are major players
whose audience size surpasses others by several orders of magnitude. Other WeChat outlets grew
out of pre-existing media entities trying to leverage the influence of the platform. For example,
52
Chinese in LA is an extension of ChineseinLA.com, a digital ethnic media which has been
operating locally as a website and information portal since the late 2000s. Two WeChat outlets
are subsidiaries of China-based legacy media, Global Times and Caixin. Notably, although all
three ethnic presses run WeChat outlets, none of them had significant reach within WeChat.

Table 3. Top 25 US-focused WeChat outlets (ranked by view count)
Name
# of articles
published
Average Article
View Count
Type
Thematic
Focus
Insight China 333 84225 WeChat Startup General
College Daily 371 81222 WeChat Startup General
America HQ 243 73540 Legacy media General
Huaren Life 377 52413 WeChat Startup General
NYC Master 41 19419
WeChat Blog
Local
Chinese in LA 342 17425 Digital ethnic media Local
US Info 168 331 15552 WeChat startup General
Sino Vision 180 9608 Digital ethnic media General
Voice of North
American Chinese
136 8178 WeChat Blog Politics
Chinese Americans 95 7747 WeChat Blog Politics
Chinese in New York 320 7700 Digital ethnic media Local
Global US 50 7128 Legacy media General
Seattle Rainier 27 6936 WeChat Blog Education
CN Politics 27 6090 WeChat Blog Politics
New Yorker 258 6090
WeChat startup
Local
Civil Rights 135 6061 WeChat Blog Politics
About Bay Area 26 5987 WeChat startup Local
Flying PKU 3 5660 WeChat Blog Politics
Moshang US 44 5129 WeChat Blog Politics
Houston Online 168 4571 Digital ethnic media Local
NoMelonGroup 3 4192 WeChat Blog Politics
Voice of Chinese
Americans
47 4173 WeChat Blog Politics
Anti-Rumor 7 3324 WeChat Blog Politics
Atlanta Chinese Life
310 2842 Digital ethnic media
Local
IAmElection 33 1501 WeChat Blog Politics

53
In terms of content niche, six of the leading WeChat outlets specialize in local news and
information, with geographical focus on cities with major concentrations of immigrant Chinese
such as New York, Houston, Atlanta, and cities in California. Outlets with a focus on politics, or
political blogs, were also particularly prominent, including a few with conspicuously partisan
leanings. For illustrative purposes, the screenshots below show a snapshot of stories published by
a general-interest, local, and political WeChat outlet (Fig. 1).

General interest outlet (Huaren Life) Local outlet (Chinese in LA)

54

Political outlet (Chinese Americans)
Figure 1. Example headlines from three WeChat outlets with different topical foci.

Together, the top 25 WeChat outlets have extensive reach, with an average view count of
14,845 per story. To put this number in context, the average view count for front page news in
the World Journal
2
is 2,586, which many niche blogs in WeChat were able to surpass. In
WeChat, page views that exceed 100,000 are only publicly displayed as 100,000+, and as many
as 89 stories in the period studied have reached this level, while the most read World Journal
article in the period studied had 44,240 views. Of course, World Journal also has print editions
and its own news app, making its actual reach at the story level difficult to estimate.
Additionally, it is unclear to what extent the readership numbers can be attributed to immigrant
Chinese residing in the United States. While 13% of World Journal’s traffic originates outside of
the United States (Alexa, 2018), this percentage could be higher for WeChat outlets, especially

2
As explained in the methods chapter, Singtao Daily and China Press do not display view count
metrics on their website
55
prominent general-interest outlets that also have significant appeal to audiences in China. Given
these considerations, the comparison between the reach of WeChat and ethnic press is only
provisional. But collectively, the sheer number of WeChat outlets, along with the diversification
in content, suggests a significant shift in how immigrant Chinese connect with news and politics
in the United States, which could displace the more concentrated audience attention amassed by
ethnic press. In a later section, I take up the question of the relative weight of WeChat and ethnic
presses in the media ecosystem again from the perspective of sourcing and content flows.

Geographical Focus and Political Content (RQ2)
To understand how Chinese ethnic media content may shape political participation
generally, this study first examined the geographical focus and extent of political coverage. The
former reflects how ethnic media constructs the relevance of different locales, while the latter
signals the potential for providing political information and knowledge. Hand coding results
showed that the attention of Chinese ethnic presses was almost evenly split between U.S. and
non-U.S. news (Table 4). 38% of the content primarily pertained to news taking place in China.
Local news made up of 19% of the content, with an additional 2% focusing on the state and
regional level, while national-level news accounted for 34% of the content. Compared to Lin &
Song (2006)’s finding that 51% of Chinese print media content focused on home country news
and only 10% focused on local news, this study did not find as strong a home country orientation
or as limited attention on local news. Differences in sampling may have contributed to this
observed difference. Rather than drawing from the entire publication, this study focused on the
front page of ethnic presses, which reflects the most prominent and salient content both in terms
of editorial emphasis and audience attention (Watts et al., 1993; Kiousis, 2004).
56
The geographical focus of WeChat outlets diverged from ethnic presses in two major
ways. First, WeChat outlets focused more on the United States than on China, with its coverage
of home country news almost one third that of Chinese ethnic presses. Unlike traditional ethnic
presses that have had to serve the dual mission of covering both the host society and home
country, WeChat outlets thrive on differentiation and specialization in a crowded and fragmented
playing field, which is already set up for abundant and ready access to news about China.
Secondly, WeChat’s coverage of local-level news was lower at 14%. Instead, more than half of
its content (59%) pertained to the national level, compared to 36% of content in Chinese ethnic
press. This means while WeChat outlets may provide a stronger connection to news taking place
in the United States, they are not necessarily well positioned to draw readers close to locally
relevant stories. Many WeChat outlets, especially WeChat natives, do not have the capacity for
original reporting, but rather rely on translating and aggregating news from other sources. As
will be discussed later, the main sources that WeChat outlets draw from are wire services and
English mainstream media, and it is possible that the availability and ease of access of national
news contributed to the national focus in WeChat.

Table 4. Geographical focus of Chinese ethnic media
Ethnic press WeChat
Local level 19% 14%
State level 2% 4%
National level 34% 59%
Home country 38% 13%
International 6% 10%

In terms of political news coverage, WeChat as a whole did not focus more on politics
than ethnic presses. Of the WeChat stories focusing on U.S. news, 38% pertained to politics,
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compared to 49% for ethnic presses. Ethnic presses also covered politics more substantially at
both the local and national level. 28% of their local content and 60% of their national level
content pertained to politics, compared to 17% and 52% in WeChat.
However, the substantial presence of political blogs in WeChat provided additional
avenues for more in-depth political coverage and analysis that did not previously exist.
Unsurprisingly, looking only at these WeChat outlets, as much as 87% of the content focused on
the United States and 81% were about politics. In particular, two of the political blogs, Voice of
North American Chinese and Chinese Americans, were among the most widely read WeChat
outlets, suggesting their reach was not confined to highly selective audiences. Therefore, even
though WeChat as a whole did not provide more political coverage than ethnic press, the
presence of niche and influential political blogs opens the possibility for political content to
become more accessible to immigrant Chinese audiences.

Issue Salience (RQ3)
Automated coding of issue topics revealed that the ethnic press and WeChat displayed
distinct issue agendas. In WeChat, while jobs/the economy topped the focus of its content, a
cluster of issues, including Muslim/Islam, unauthorized immigration, data disaggregation, race
relations, and affirmative action, trailed not far behind and all received substantial coverage
(Figure 2). In Chinese ethnic presses, by contrast, coverage of jobs and the economy and
healthcare far outpaced other topics (Figure 3). Comparatively, topics receiving the most
attention in WeChat outlets tended to be more polarizing issues. Of course, in the present
political climate, most issues can lend themselves to divisive interpretations. But relatively
speaking, healthcare and the economy, issues that dominated the attention of ethnic presses, may
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be seen as belonging to more traditional policy areas. Meanwhile, issues such as unauthorized
immigration and race relations, which were much more prominent in WeChat, often tap into
intensely ideological and emotionally charged politics of exclusion and identity. These were also
issues that received the most coverage in the 2016 presidential election cycle (Faris et al., 2016).
In addition, data disaggregation distinctly dominated in WeChat, when ethnic presses only
generated a handful of stories on this topic.
Comparing the issue agenda in English language media and Chinese ethnic media in the
same period both demonstrated the ethnically specific nature of Chinese media coverage, and
further clarified differences between WeChat and ethnic press. Before turning to the results, it
should be noted that the English media agenda here serves as a benchmark to the Chinese
counterpart, and should not be interpreted on its own, as results are subject to the specific time
period analyzed and search terms used. For example, ‘immigration reform’ was not included as a
search term to ensure focus on undocumented immigration and exclude topics such as H1B visa.
In addition, Media Cloud does not provide the total number of stories published by the media
sources, making it difficult to normalize the results. Given the number of English media sources
included in the query and the large volume of their output, this comparison looks at how the
issues are ranked and distributed, rather than the percentage or absolute number of stories on a
specific issue.

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Figures 2-4 (top to bottom). Issue salience in WeChat, the ethnic press, and U.S. English-
language media

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Compared to WeChat, Chinese ethnic presses and English language media exhibited
strikingly similar patterns of issue distribution, with jobs/the economy and healthcare leading the
coverage and far exceeding other topics (Figure 4). Arguably, operating as traditional
newsrooms, ethnic press generated a more conventional news agenda that more closely mirrored
that of English media. Of course, the convergence in issue agenda between ethnic presses and
mainstream media does not speak to how an issue is covered or constructed. As will be discussed
later, ethnic media can adopt a heavily co-ethnic orientation in its reporting angle, and concretize
the implications of an issue for the ethnic audience. But the salience of issues speaks to the
possibility for shared understanding about, and attention around, what matters. The alignment in
issue agenda between ethnic presses and English media is especially clear when contrasted with
the distribution of issue salience in WeChat.
Chinese media as a whole and English language media diverged markedly on the issues
of affirmative action and data disaggregation. Coverage of affirmative action was on par with
other top issues in WeChat, and the issue also garnered notable attention in ethnic presses, but
hardly registered a blip on the English media radar. This was before the Harvard affirmative
action lawsuit moved forward in court and gained more mainstream attention in the latter half of
2018. The prominence of affirmative action in Chinese ethnic media during the study period is a
testament to the sustained visibility of this issue among the immigrant Chinese audience. Data
disaggregation also received some coverage in ethnic presses, while WeChat content seemed
particularly fixated on this issue. However, there was actually zero coverage of data
disaggregation in major English language media in the two-month period studied. This glaring
juxtaposition speaks to the ethnically bounded nature of data disaggregation as an issue, both in
the sense that it was perceived to have particular implications for the coethnic group, and that its
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coverage was exclusively dominated by Chinese ethnic media. The imbalance in coverage
between English and Chinese media on affirmative action and data disaggregation demonstrates
the selective coverage of group-specific issues by ethnic media, particularly WeChat outlets. At
the same time, it also suggests a mismatch in awareness of these issues between ethnic media
audiences and the wider public, and lack of mainstream media’s participation in the construction
of these issues. As will be discussed in the following sections, affirmative action and data
disaggregation were intimately implicated in the definition of Chinese Americans’ political
interest and relationship with other racial groups, and the coverage of these issues tracks the
overwhelmingly oppositional stance on affirmative action and data disaggregation among first-
generation Chinese. Their particular prominence in WeChat played a definitive role in the
platform’s shaping of group consciousness and intergroup relations.

Group Consciousness (RQ4)
To understand the potential role played by ethnic media in shaping group consciousness,
I first established the extent to which ethnic media content focused on the coethnic group. As
anticipated given the existing literature, Chinese media focused heavily on co-ethnic stories,
which are stories that featured a Chinese protagonist, or discussed the relevance of an issue or
event for the immigrant Chinese community. While 20% of the ethnic press sample contained
co-ethnic stories, almost one third the WeChat content had a co-ethnic focus. Although ethnic
media by definition is produced for ethnic audiences, the lower barrier of entry and drive toward
differentiation in WeChat have provided the opportunity and incentives for outlets to focus more
specifically and intensively on coethnic people and events.
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This coethnic focus may elevate group consciousness when group experiences and
identity are situated in the context of coethnic political issues, interests, and injustice. To more
substantively explore the context in which the coethnic group is discussed, I examined what
terms are most often invoked in conjunction with the coethnic group. A total of 1547 and 1012
word pairs were identified in WeChat and ethnic presses respectively, following a long-tail
distribution where 75% of the word pairs appeared less than 9 times. Figure 5 shows the top 20
terms that co-occurred with Chinese Americans. I also identified prominent terms and concepts
related to group politicization from the complete list of word pairs (Table 5). Following the
example of Yuan et al. (2015), who suggested that the interpretation of automated textual
analysis in Chinese depends on the successful tokenization of the Chinese corpus, I included
Chinese characters in the presentation of results.

Figure 5. Top 20 words that co-occurred with Chinese Americans, with terms unique to WeChat
and the ethnic press highlighted

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Unsurprisingly, many of the most prominent terms reflect the focus of Chinese ethnic
media on an immigrant audience. References to immigration, green card, and jobs signal some of
the most pressing concerns of immigrants, while geographical references such as America,
China, California, and New York both reflect the residential concentration of Chinese
immigrants and their locus of belonging. It was in WeChat where we see strong expressions of
group consciousness, with the coethnic group heavily connected with terms and concepts that
articulate different dimensions of group consciousness.
Racial discrimination was a particularly strong theme in WeChat’s discursive
construction of the Chinese coethnic group. The term discrimination ( 歧视) was mentioned 70
times in conjunction with the coethnic group, on par with more generic and commonly used
terms such as life ( 生活), and society ( 社会). Given the associational nature of the analysis, the
frequent co-occurrence of the term not only reflects concerns over discrimination in general, but
specifically as it is experienced by, or affects, Chinese in the United States. In addition, the
expression for Chinese exclusion ( 排华) also appeared relatively often (Table 5). The term, with
the first character signifying “to exclude” or “to eliminate”, and the second character a shorthand
for “Chinese”, can be used in specific reference to the Chinese Exclusion Act, as well as in
general reference to the marginalization and alienation of diasporic Chinese.
WeChat also heavily connected the coethnic group with politics, policy, and political
interests. Among the top word pairs is the term denoting legislation ( 法案), which likely centered
around proposed state-level bills on data disaggregation ( 亚裔细分), itself a prominent theme
that co-occurred with Chinese Americans, as well as affirmative action and the Chinese
Exclusion Act. Discussions of the political goals of the coethnic group were also significant, as
indicated by the frequent mentions of rights and interests ( 利益), as well as variants this term ( 权
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益 and 权利). By tying rights and interests to the coethnic group, and focusing attention on
policy implications for the coethnic group, these discussions could pave the way for a sense of
linked fate with other Chinese Americans. In addition, a set of high frequency co-occurrence
terms directly pertained to the politics. Among these terms are politics ( 政治), Trump ( 特朗普/
川普), Democrat ( 民主党), Republican ( 共和党), election ( 竞选), candidate ( 候选人), vote ( 投
票), as well as both the more generic expression for participate ( 参与), as well as the specific
expression for political participation ( 参政). These word pairs cast the coethnic group in relation
to the actors and actions making up the political process.

Table 5. Co-occurrence frequency of terms denoting group consciousness
Term
Frequency in
WeChat
Frequency in
Ethnic Presses
Data disaggregation 70 11
Discrimination 65 28
Legislation 61 20
Rights/interests 50 14
Politics 42 24
Republican 39 13
Democrat 34 11
Campaign 34 16
Political participation 31 13
Chinese exclusion 31 8
Vote 30 21
Candidate 27 14
Election 25 17

In contrast, ethnic press mostly situated the coethnic group in a social milieu (Fig. 5).
Most of the co-occurrence terms placed Chinese Americans in social relationships and roles such
as family ( 家庭) and children ( 孩子). Top word pairs also made references to groups ( 团体),
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associations ( 协会), community ( 社区), events ( 活动), and services ( 服务), suggesting an
anchoring of immigrant Chinese in social, civic, and associational life. This anchoring can also
be seen in the stronger emphasis of ethnic presses on geo-ethnic stories, which are ethnically and
locally relevant stories that are particularly significant for community building and civic
participation (Kim et al., 2003b; Lin & Song, 2006). As much as 63% of the coethnic content in
ethnic press had a local focus, compared to 40% of WeChat’s coethnic content. However, there
is much less elaboration and politicization of group consciousness in ethnic press. In
juxtaposition with the robust focus on discrimination in WeChat, the connection between the
coethnic group and discrimination was relatively weak in ethnic press. Other terms denoting
politicization of group consciousness, such as legislation, interests, and candidates, also appeared
much less in connection with the coethnic group (see Table 5). Importantly, this is not to suggest
that ethnic presses gave inadequate coverage to legislation or elections per se, but rather that
these concepts were less associated with a group-based understanding of politics and
consequences of political participation. In addition, a few themes related to group consciousness,
such as data disaggregation and Chinese exclusion, had a negligible presence in ethnic press
corpus and could be considered exclusive to the WeChat discourse. Therefore, while ethnic
presses may foster and reinforce a sense of group identification and cultural belonging, content
put out by WeChat outlets contained much more robust elements of politicization and group
consciousness, by emphasizing experience of racial discrimination, policy implications, and
politics as they relate to the coethnic group.

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Sense of Group Position (RQ5&6)
On the whole, non-Chinese minorities, including African Americans, Latinos, and other
Asian American subgroups, did not appear prominently in the coverage of Chinese ethnic media.
Automated coding showed that only 9% of the stories in ethnic presses mentioned one or more
non-Chinese minority group. But outgroups were represented much more in WeChat outlets,
with 18% of the stories mentioning a non-Chinese minority group.
When outgroup minorities did appear in ethnic media, how were they portrayed then? In
about two-thirds of the outgroup stories in ethnic press and one-third in WeChat, non-Chinese
minority groups were only mentioned in passing or without a clear valence. 39% of the outgroup
stories in WeChat and 19% in ethnic press portrayed outgroup minorities by invoking negative
stereotypes, depicting them as, for example, welfare dependent, academically challenged, or
irresponsible. Unsurprisingly, crime stories with Latino or African American perpetrators were
also prevalent. This is a theme that will be discussed again later in the context of relational
portrayal of groups. While stereotyping of minority groups in news media is a pervasive problem
that can arise out of unintentional, routine news production processes (Entman, 1990), Chinese
ethnic media can exude prejudice and bias more overtly, especially in WeChat outlets where
content is more opinion-based and often not subject to journalistic norms. For example, the fatal
shooting of an elderly Chinese man who was visiting his son in Tennessee caught the attention of
Chinese ethnic media. While the Chinese ethnic presses provided a straightforward account of
the incident and ongoing investigation, which did not disclose the ethnicity of the perpetrator,
four WeChat outlets chose to characterize the area as heavily African American, and suggested
that “many people believe areas like this are by nature less safe.”

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Table 6. Representation of minority outgroups
Ethnic press WeChat
Neutral 69% 35%
Negative 19% 39%
Positive 12% 26%

In contrast with the substantial presence of negative stereotypes, stories that illustrated
non-Chinese minority groups in positions of power and expertise, or humanized the individuals
and experiences of these groups, were less prominent. Notably, however, WeChat did produce
more stories in this vein, compared to ethnic press. In particular, some stories centered on the
experiences of outgroups, which offered a lens into how institutional racism has shaped areas
such as gun control, military service, wealth accumulation, and law enforcement. Especially
given the primary orientation of ethnic media as a voice for co-ethnic people, stories, and
interests, the very presence of stories portraying outgroups in a substantive way is notable. These
stories concentrated in a handful of outlets, including Chinese Americans, a left-leaning WeChat
political outlet, iAmElection, a WeChat outlet focusing on U.S. politics, and Global US, a
subsidiary of Caixin Media, which is known for more progressive and investigative reporting.
The choice to historically contextualize and illuminate the experience of other minority groups is
not an inevitable one. For example, one story depicted a Detroit firefighter who was fired for his
racially offensive gesture of gifting his Black colleagues a watermelon. While this story appeared
in multiple outlets both in WeChat and the ethnic press, most were fluff pieces that sometimes
poked fun at the excessive political correctness of the situation. iAmElection, the aforementioned
WeChat outlet, took the opportunity to unpack the connotations of watermelon in the racial
discourse and its origins in slavery. Even though such stories were few in number, they expanded
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the portrayal of outgroups beyond stereotypes, and reflect a potential basis for cultivating
awareness of outgroups and situating them in broader social and historical experiences.
WeChat also displayed a stronger relational positioning of the coethnic group, compared
to ethnic press. While half of the outgroup stories in WeChat described Chinese Americans in
relation to other groups in some way, this relational lens is missing in as many as 76% of the
outgroup stories in the ethnic press (Table 7). That is to say, a great majority of outgroup stories
in the ethnic press did not mention Chinese Americans together with another minority group, or
did not characterize any explicit or implicit relationship between them (e.g. when describing the
demographic composition of a place).

Table 7. Portrayal of intergroup relations
Ethnic Press WeChat
Absent 76% 51%
Competition/threat 16% 30%
Shared interest 8% 19%

Among outgroup stories, about 30% in WeChat and 16% in ethnic press characterized the
relationship between Chinese Americans and one or more minority groups as one of competition
or threat, with WeChat content contributing significantly to this portrayal (Table 7). Two major
types of competitive relationships emerged from a close reading of these stories. First, consistent
with the prevalence of crime stories in relation to outgroup representation, the recurring theme of
Black or Hispanic perpetrator and Chinese victim was evident in both the ethnic press and
WeChat. These stories foreground a distinct type of encounter between Chinese Americans and
other groups that is rife with antagonism and threat. Although these were often local crime
stories, the coethnic identity of the victim means these stories could resonate with the Chinese
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community in the United States at large and transcend local boundaries. In addition, more than
standalone incidents, these stories sometimes tapped into a cohesive narrative of Asian
Americans being the target of crimes. In particular, several WeChat stories in the sample made
references to a controversial song by YG, a Black rapper, in which he explicitly described the act
of burglarizing Chinese neighborhoods and families. Although first released in 2014, this song
became a focal point of discussion when it resurfaced on WeChat in 2016, and subsequently
drew vehement criticism and protests from first-generation Chinese (Hawkin, 2016; Wang,
2016). The song stirred up a lot of anxiety and anger over victimization, a sentiment that is not
without grounds in reality. For example, Sacramento and San Francisco have documented a high
and rising percentage of crimes perpetrated against Asians in recent years, a trend that some have
attributed to the perception of Asian immigrants as easy targets (Nevius, 2010; Fuchs, 2017). In
some cases, as much as 85% of the physical assaults and robberies involved Asian American as
victims and African American perpetrators (Nevius, 2010). In this way, crystallized in the crime
stories with a Chinese victim and Black or Hispanic perpetrator is a recognizable trope that
foregrounds the sense of threat from other groups of color.
Competitive relationship between Chinese Americans and other minority groups also
manifested in the policy arena, primarily in the context of affirmative action and data
disaggregation. It was here that the relational positioning of Chinese Americans in the racial
hierarchy was most deliberately and emphatically articulated. The sense of competition directly
derives from the framing of affirmative action as a system of “racial quota”, which unfairly
limits and usurps a valued resource that Chinese Americans have traditionally worked hard for as
a minority group to achieve social mobility in the United States. For example, several stories
invoked the idea that Asian Americans need much higher standard test scores than Hispanic and
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African Americans to gain college admissions. By equating test scores with merit and invoking
the unfair “penalty” imposed on Asian Americans, this portrayal of affirmative action
unequivocally pit the high-scoring, deserving Asian Americans against Hispanic and African
Americans, who are taking seats at colleges at the expense of Asian Americans. This articulation
of Asian American’s position is by no means unprecedented; it can be traced back to, and builds
upon, a long history of anti-affirmative action movement (e.g. Poon & Segoshi, 2018), but its
manifestation in WeChat was particularly prominent and stark. The strong anti-data
disaggregation rhetoric in WeChat also contributed significantly to the competitive portrayal of
group relations. Disaggregated data, in this portrayal, would distinguish Asian American groups
that are more disadvantaged socioeconomically, such as Hmong and Vietnamese Americans,
from Chinese Americans, and pave the way for the “preferential treatment” of these groups in
college admissions. This line of argument therefore further distilled the coethnic group boundary
of Chinese Americans, positioning them on the losing side of the equation, with other Asian
American groups joining Hispanic and African Americans as beneficiaries.
Furthermore, in WeChat, the competitive relationship with other minority groups in
policy and politics also intersected with a sense of group position of Chinese Americans as a
neglected lot whose minority status was taken for granted. These discussions often tapped into a
narrative of unequal treatment by a system that practices a double standard and excludes
Chinese/Asian Americans from the category of a disadvantaged minority. Several of the stories
that depicted a competitive relationship between Chinese Americans and other groups invoked
the idea of “White liberals” (baizuo), a derogatory label that derides the political correctness in
the progressive agenda of racial equality and multiculturalism (Zhang, 2017). In this framing,
social justice-oriented policies, as embodied by affirmative action, were seen as an
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acknowledgment of the marginality of host of groups, most prominently African Americans and
Latinos, while Asian Americans – and Chinese Americans in particular – are either overlooked
or sacrificed. It was a common refrain in the argument against data disaggregation that Asian
Americans was singled out for what was seen as a discriminatory policy, while Latinos and
African Americans, protected by political correctness, could not have been subject to such
injustice. An event that supplied particularly strong resources for this narrative, which a number
of stories made references to, was the trial of NYPD police officer Peter Liang in 2016. Liang,
who shot dead an African American man while on duty, received a manslaughter conviction,
which precipitated one of the largest protests by Chinese Americans in recent decades (Fuchs,
2016). Coming on the heels of a series of fatal police encounters that took away African
American lives without any police officers being indicted, Liang’s trial was seen by many as
hypocritical and discriminatory, with his Asian heritage seen as the reason for him being made a
“scapegoat”. A highly complex event, Liang’s verdict prompted divided opinions among
Chinese Americans and brought forth many uncomfortable questions about race relations (Kang,
2016), but for some, it also represented the ultimate exclusion of Chinese Americans, who can be
sacrificed unjustly in order to bring justice to the African American community. This
interpretation characterized the nature of discrimination and disadvantage as experienced by
Chinese Americans as highly specific and a product of the current racialized system, which
serves to elevate the social and symbolic status of other minority groups. Rather than serving as a
common basis for identifying linked fate, this type of discrimination distinguishes and separates
Chinese Americans from the experiences and interests of other minority groups. In this sense, the
composite image of the group position occupied by Chinese Americans is a marginalized
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minority that nevertheless does not share the same perceived benefits of inclusion and equality
allowed of other minorities.
Stories that depicted common ground between Chinese Americans and other minorities
were much more scarce. Here too, WeChat stood out, with 21% of its outgroup stories reflecting
the theme of shared interest and common position as disadvantaged groups, compared to 8% in
ethnic press. These stories drew analogies between the historical and contemporaneous
experiences of Chinese Americans and other groups, and painted these groups as potential targets
of micro-aggression, voter suppression, and hate crime, as well as underrepresentation in
Hollywood, and systemic racism. Some stories also drew parallels between historical treatment
and empowerment of Chinese Americans with the civil rights struggles of other minority groups,
primarily African Americans. While not all these stories explicitly drew a direct line from shared
experiences to shared interests or political goals, some stories did take this extra step. For
example, a few stories discussed why Chinese Americans should support NFL players’ protest of
racism and White supremacy, and how minority groups should be allies of each other at a time of
rising hate crime. Notably, however, on the issues of affirmative action and data disaggregation,
the presence of relational portrayal that highlighted shared interest among minority groups was
negligible in both WeChat and ethnic presses. There was no compelling articulation of how and
why Chinese Americans may find common ground with other minority groups in supporting
race-based considerations for college admissions, or in advocating for more detailed data on a
vastly heterogeneous Asian American population to inform public policy. Since this study only
examined two months in 2017, this is not to suggest that counter-framing on issues of affirmative
action and data disaggregation definitively does not exist within Chinese ethnic media, but that
narratives emphasizing threatened group position overwhelmingly dominated.
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In sum, while ethnic press contained relatively less outgroup stereotype and characterized
intergroup relations with less competition/threat, such a relational lens on the whole was lacking.
In contrast, the sense of group position was much more intensively and extensively developed in
WeChat, with outgroup stereotype and threat as well as commonality and shared goals receiving
more substantive discussion than in the ethnic press. Group relations characterized by
competition and threat dominated on balance, driven by data disaggregation and affirmative
action. But at the same time, WeChat content also contained spaces for highlighting the shared
position between Chinese Americans and other minority groups.

Sourcing and Content Flows (RQ7)
To understand where content comes from in the ethnic media ecosystem, I now turn to
results from the analysis of media sources used in the sample. I explored the pattern of sourcing
by ethnic presses and WeChat separately, as well as the total number of times each media outlet
has been acknowledged as a contributing source. The former analysis illuminated differences in
sourcing practices between ethnic presses and WeChat, as well as who is getting content from
where, while the latter highlighted the top media sources supplying information to the ethnic
media ecosystem.
A total of 348 media sources were cited by this sample of ethnic media stories. Wire
services stood out as the most prominent media sources. Associated Press was the top media
source, significantly utilized by both WeChat and ethnic presses. This is not surprising, as wire
services have been noted as a significant supplier of information for both English media (Weber
& Monge, 2011) and traditional ethnic media (Lin & Song, 2006; Matsaganis et al, 2011). Other
English language media, such as CNN, the New York Times, and Fox News also featured
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prominently as news sources for Chinese ethnic media, which, more generally, speaks to the
authoritative status of these English mainstream media in the wider information ecosystem
(Weber & Monge, 2011; Faris et al, 2016). For ethnic media journalists in particular, whose
work is often constrained by limited access to mainstream institutions and primary sources
(Matsaganis & Katz, 2014), the use of English mainstream media as a source could be an
indispensable newsgathering routine. The prominence of wire services and mainstream English
media seems to extend to content producers in WeChat as well. This signaling to credible news
sources is part of what creates the perception of legitimacy for WeChat outlets, although, as will
be discussed later, taking material from credible news sources by no means translates into
accurate reporting.
Where WeChat outlets and ethnic presses diverged most strikingly in their sourcing
practices was in their use of social media. WeChat outlets tended to draw more from Chinese as
well as English social media, including YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, and
WeChat. These sources ranged from user generated content in the form of posts by ordinary
users, as well as elite actors such as politicians, celebrities, digital influencers, and social media
startups, both on Chinese and English platforms. While it has become a sufficiently mainstream
practice for journalists to source from social media (Moon & Hadley, 2013; Paulussen & Harder,
2015), there is evidence that such practices tend to co-occur with more “personalized, conflict-
oriented, and sensationalized news” (Broersma & Graham, 2013). In particular, WeChat outlets
are much more closely intertwined with Chinese social media, with some stories originating or
directly reposted from other WeChat outlets.

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Table 8. Use of media sources by the ethnic press and WeChat
Ethnic press WeChat
Wire services 19% 14%
English mainstream media 28% 30%
English digital media 3% 6%
English social media 12% 22%
Ethnic media 4% 18%
China-based media 8% 12%
Chinese social media 1% 17%

Relatedly and most notably, the results also revealed that traditional ethnic media,
particularly China Press and Sino Vision, a broadcast television network that has added web
publication to its products, are among the top sources of information in the ethnic media
ecosystem. World Journal was less frequently cited, but still occupied a relatively prominent
position in the long array of media sources (Table 9). While ethnic presses did cite each other as
sources, WeChat outlets displayed a strong reliance on ethnic presses, with as many as 18% of
the WeChat sample attributing content to a traditional ethnic media. On the flip side, there was
no indication of substantial information flow in the opposition direction, where ethnic presses
borrowed or repackaged content produced by WeChat outlets.

Table 9. Top 30 media sources in the Chinese ethnic media ecosystem
Source Frequency Percentage Source Type
Associated Press 381 8.7 Wire Service
Twitter 312 7.2 English Social Media
China Press 213 4.9 Ethnic Media
WeChat 189 4.3 Chinese Social Media
Reuters 177 4.1 Wire Service
CNN 171 3.9 English Mainstream
New York Times 147 3.4 English Mainstream
Facebook 144 3.3 English Social Media
Fox News 93 2.1 English Mainstream
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NBC 87 2.0 English Mainstream
Wall Street Journal 78 1.8 English Mainstream
Washington Post 75 1.7 English Mainstream
China News 69 1.6 China-based
Daily Mail 69 1.6 English Mainstream
Sino Vision 66 1.5 Ethnic Media
Weibo 66 1.5 Chinese Social Media
Instagram 63 1.4 English Social Media
ABC 57 1.3 English Mainstream
Los Angeles Times 57 1.3 English Mainstream
Xinhua 54 1.2 China-based
YouTube 54 1.2 English Social Media
New York Daily News 51 1.2 English Mainstream
Agence France Presse 48 1.1 Wire Service
CBS 45 1.0 English Mainstream
Tencent 39 0.9 China-based
World Journal 36 0.8 Ethnic Media
New York Post 27 0.6 English Mainstream
People's Daily 27 0.6 China-based
USA Today 27 0.6 English Mainstream

The ethnic press appeared to be particularly consequential as a source for local and
coethnic stories. Of the subset of WeChat stories that used ethnic presses as a source, 33% were
local stories and 41% were coethnic stories, compared to 14% and 32% respectively in the
overall WeChat sample. In contrast, 13% of the stories sourced from ethnic presses portrayed
non-Chinese minorities, and 36% were political news, both of which are on par with the
proportions in the overall WeChat sample.
Shifting the analysis from sources to the flow of content itself, I now turn to two stories
that gained attention from multiple outlets in the time period studied to illustrate how the ethnic
media ecosystem functions as an interrelated whole. The first story on the fatal shooting of an
elderly Chinese man in Nashville appeared in all three ethnic presses and 9 out of the 25 WeChat
outlets. All three ethnic presses attributed the information to WKRN, a local Nashville television
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station that first published the story. WeChat outlets picked up the story from ethnic presses
shortly after, mostly citing China Press and World Journal as the source, but also, to a lesser
extent, a few China-based media outlets that have also reported on the story. Four of the WeChat
outlets published the same version of the story, which embellished the reporting from ethnic
presses by adding the following opening paragraph:
“Immigrant Chinese tend to live in ethnic enclaves, which, despite the challenges it
brings to integration, does promise a safer and more familiar environment. However,
there are also Chinese who live in predominantly Hispanic or African American areas.”
This version of the story then went on to suggest that the area where the shooting took place was
“reportedly” 91% African American, and that such areas are by nature unsafe. The content was
identical across the four WeChat outlets, but none credited each other. This version of the story
likely originated from Huaren Life, a major media startup with more resources for content
creation, and was subsequently plagiarized by smaller outlets. In addition, College Daily, the
heavyweight WeChat startup, developed the story more extensively by discussing gang problems
and juvenile delinquency. Although, according to WKRN, no arrests were made until much later,
College Daily cited “police sources” in reporting that perpetrators were Black teens, who may
face a lighter sentence because they are minors.
The second story involved the practice of disaggregating Asian Americans by the
Common Application, a college application system used by many universities, which was
covered by China Press and 8 WeChat outlets. The story originated from a press release by
Asian American Coalition for Education, a group that has been active in anti-affirmative action
and anti-data disaggregation efforts, including the lawsuit against Harvard. The press release
criticized the Common Application for only asking Asian applicants to further specify their
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background as one of 10 Asian subgroups, while not practicing such “micro-classification” for
other racial groups. The basic version of the story, largely summarizing the press release, was
published by China Press and three WeChat outlets. Voice of Chinese Americans and Civil
Rights, two conservative WeChat outlets that have given intense scrutiny over data
disaggregation in the preceding months, jumped on this story and published a series of opinion
pieces decrying the Common Application’s egregious discrimination and the potentially dire
consequences for college admissions for Chinese Americans. Despite the fact that the Common
Application has always used demographic sub-categories, these outlets painted it as a new
practice, the latest in the “dark cloud of data disaggregation” to haunt Chinese Americans. The
story managed to reach a much wider audience when Insight China and College Daily published
three feature articles that largely echoed the alarmist framing and together accumulated 107,495
views. Notably, World Journal and Singtao Daily did not pick up on the press release, nor did
English language media.
These two cases exemplify a few dynamics of the Chinese ethnic media ecosystem that
are key to understanding how it may shape immigrant Chinese politics. While ethnic presses,
English media, and organizations or other entities may serve as the original source for stories,
WeChat outlets, through reposting and replication, can tremendously amplify the reach of a
story. WeChat outlets with sizable audience base certainly play a definitive role in the
amplification of a story, so do the significant number of outlets participating in the
dissemination. It is also possible for WeChat to dominate in driving the visibility and framing of
a story, such as in the Common Application example, where ethnic presses and English media
largely sidelined the story. Secondly, as content flows through the ecosystem, new information
or angle can be added, with the opportunity for distortion and misinformation. In both examples
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above, the basic narrative was rendered in more provocative, emotionally hyperbolic ways as the
story developed and morphed. In a crowded information environment that rewards speed and
attention, replication of sensational, emotionally resonant stories provide the most cost-effective
way of generating content. As seen in the fatal shooting example, outlets copied content
wholesale without attribution. This kind of plagiarism has been known to be rampant within
WeChat, which has prompted various regulatory efforts by the platform (Hu, 2018). But even
with proper source attribution, it could give the illusion of factual reporting, and mask the
editorializing and fabrication that often arise.
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Chapter 6: Discussion

Against the background of an increasing level and particularity of first-generation
Chinese political participation, this study has systematically examined the content and structure
of the Chinese ethnic media ecosystem. In particular, in the context of the existing literature’s
emphasis on the lack of political participation by immigrants and inadequate political
information in the ethnic media they consume, the present study has illuminated a different set of
challenges for immigrant political integration. With the entry of WeChat outlets and the greater
level and specialization of news content focusing on the United States, the challenge resides less
in a deficit in political information. Quite the contrary, as demonstrated by the amount and range
of outlets and content focusing on the United States, first-generation Chinese now have more
opportunities to connect with news and politics about their country of residence. Rather, the
emerging and crucial tendency that this study has revealed is an ethnically specific issue agenda
and interpretation of politics that suggest a fraught relationship with other minority groups.
As shown in the content analysis, the net outcome is a discursive space that elevates
coethnic groups consciousness – the sense that members of the coethnic group share collective
experiences, discontent, and political interests. For one, heightened group consciousness could
serve as a conduit to political participation. As a minority group in the United States, Chinese
Americans’ pathway to political participation often involves group-based awareness of
discrimination and systemic injustice. Research has found that hate crimes and racial
victimization are the factors that most motivate Asian Americans to participate politically (Wong
et al., 2011; Okamoto, 2006). To the extent that these themes are accentuated by WeChat, it
signals the potential of the platform in encouraging interest and action in the political process.
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WeChat outlets also furnish resources for directly connecting first-generation Chinese with the
electoral process and legislative issues, as well as explicitly articulating their political interests.
At the same time, this heightened group consciousness is accompanied by a relational
positioning of Chinese Americans that tends to accentuate the sharp boundaries with other
minority groups. To be sure, racial prejudice – particularly anti-Blackness – has been well noted
within Chinese American and wider Asian American communities, and has origins both in home
country cultures and the historical tensions between Asian Americans and other communities of
color in the United States (Kim, 1997; Park, 1997). To a certain extent, the negative stereotypes
of other minority groups in Chinese ethnic media reflect patterns of intergroup contact and
conflicts. The location of historic Chinatowns near the urban core, the continued flow of low-
income Chinese immigrants to these areas, and the concentration of these immigrants in service
industries such as restaurants, nail salons, and massage parlors continue to intensify their
encounters with other minorities and creates the backdrop for conflicts (Kang, 2010; You &
Zhou, 2018). With the suburbanization of immigrant settlement and the perception wealth
Chinese immigrants are often associated with, there is also a heightened concern over becoming
targeted victims of criminal acts. Insofar as ethnic media capture and highlight events and stories
relevant to the coethnic group, these tensions may inevitably emerge in the coverage. Yet,
negative stereotypes and the trope of Chinese Americans as victims in the hands of Black and
Latino Americans overshadowed positive portrayals of intergroup relations. This imbalance
perpetuates and reifies one particular possible outcome of intergroup contact, and speaks to the
challenge in imagining an alternative relationship between Chinese Americans and other
minority groups.
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More crucially, through the striking attention given to affirmative action and data
disaggregation, WeChat outlets have made group relations a highly salient component of
Chinese American politics, with the potential for producing ideological positions and political
interests that directly pit Chinese Americans against other minority groups. In particular,
affirmative action in college admissions, with its built-in zero-sum calculation, has long been
noted as an issue that detracts from coalitional politics, compared to issues that are more easily
framed and perceived in positive-sum terms, such as ensuring access to health insurance or
language assistance (Vaca, 2004; Ramakrishnan, 2014). The fixation on affirmative action and
data disaggregation in WeChat, and lack of counter-narratives in WeChat or elsewhere, means
that the competitive and antagonistic interpretation of group position can gain particular traction.
With their intense coverage in Chinese ethnic media, it is possible that affirmative action and
data disaggregation could be the first set of political issues that have seized the interest of many
first-generation Chinese. Engagement with the rhetoric of these issues could have lasting
influence on how first-generation Chinese come to understand their political interest and race
relations more broadly.
At the same time, WeChat outlets stood out in producing stories that shed light on
outgroup experiences and their common ground with Chinese Americans. Studies on the
acquisition of racial attitudes by immigrants have affirmed the positive effect of exposure to this
type of narratives. Merenstein (2008), for example, found that immigrants could develop more
positive racial attitudes by learning about the history of race relations in the United States and the
causes of poverty of native-born blacks and other minorities. Despite the dominance of group-
centric interpretations in WeChat, the presence of positive intergroup stories leaves open
contingent opportunities for making race relations more pertinent and favorable for first-
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generation Chinese. It serves as a reminder of the process of ideological contention within a
minority population. Even though minority politics tend to be seen as a collective voice vis-à-vis
dominant social structures, instances of competing group-based ideologies have also been well-
recognized, for example, in the solidarity movement of African Americans (Marx, 1967; Chong
& Rogers, 2005). The low barrier to entry of WeChat enables the emergence of niche outlets and
political discourses on opposing ends of the ideological spectrum (Zhang, 2018). Therefore, a
more nuanced understanding of WeChat’s role in immigrant Chinese politics has to take into
account its capacity for creating a space for multiple expressions of group position and political
interests to compete for visibility.
This brings us to the question of under what circumstances group-centric narratives attain
prominence, and why they may resonate. This study offers some initial basis for making sense of
the weight of such narratives. Much of the conflictual portrayals of minority group relations were
imbued with discontent over the position of Chinese Americans in the racial order.
Asian/Chinese Americans are often overlooked by political parties and politicians and left out of
policy conservations (Wong et al, 2011; Wu, 2016; Chen, 2018). This neglect is particularly
detrimental coming from progressives, who are often seen to represent the interest of
marginalized populations (Ramakrishnan, 2016; Chen, 2018), and can be directly traced to the
discourse in WeChat. The removal of Asian/Chinese Americans from the realm of the
“disadvantaged” and “underrepresented”, in terms of rhetoric and policy, has both stumped the
language for identifying common ground with other minority groups, and produced a sense of
alienation. The data disaggregation debate further produced sharp distinctions between Chinese
Americans and other Asian American sub-groups, with the latter perceived to benefit from the
policy both in terms of tangible resources and symbolic recognition. What we see in WeChat is
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the crystallization of these themes into a particularly reactive and ethnocentric strain of racial
discourse that emphasizes the inferiority of other minority groups and the hypocrisy of the
progressive agenda. This narrative resonates by tapping into and amplifying the sense of
alienation, without recognizing that the experience of Chinese Americans is a product of the
systemic racism in the United States that works to similarly subjugate other minorities.
Some clues for the dominance of group-centric narratives can also be located in the
nature of the Chinese ethnic media ecosystem. As shown in this study, outlets native to WeChat,
although often lacking in journalistic rigor, can attain tremendous influence and reach as news
sources, and potentially eclipse the significance traditionally wielded by the ethnic press. An
editor at the World Journal, in an interview with NBC, acknowledged the mounting challenge in
retaining audiences who now increasingly consume news from WeChat (Fuchs, 2018). Outlets in
WeChat are governed by the logic of social news and the attention economy, which rewards
content that is emotionally resonant and conflict-oriented (Silverman, 2015; Zhang, 2018). A
report by WeChat’s research team released in April 2017 showed the crowded marketplace of
content publishing within the platform. Of the staggering ten million WeChat outlets, 76.1
percent have fewer than 10,000 subscribers (China Tech Insights, 2017). In this
hypercompetitive environment, not jumping on a captivating story means not getting a share of
the attention pie. As seen in this study, narratives that play up tensions with other minority
groups and stoke the anxiety of Chinese Americans have not only been taken up by more
politically focused outlets, but through the participation of local and general-interest outlets in
WeChat, were able to reach a wide audience. This suggests that we have to contend with what it
means to have such a genre of media command so much authority in the structuring of public
attention and framing of issues for first-generation Chinese Americans.
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Yet, this study also found that WeChat outlets draw significantly on content generated by
the ethnic press, suggesting that these legacy news organizations fill a definitive role in covering
– as well as uncovering – news related to the Chinese community in the United States. They
supply original reporting and initial translations of news from wire services and English
mainstream media that WeChat outlets oftentimes use for their own content. In particular, the
ethnic press seems to maintain a strong grasp over local and coethnic content. This is an insight
that can, and does, get glossed over in the hype about WeChat and the visibility it commands.
Findings from this study indicate that while WeChat, by sourcing from ethnic press, enables the
selective amplification of certain types of stories, legacy ethnic media retain considerable weight
as a content provider and gatekeeper in the ecosystem. By considering the ethnic press as a lever
of change for the choices available in the media ecosystem, we could ask what kind stories the
ethnic press could produce more of and emphasize in its content, to facilitate more favorable
stories on intergroup relations and political alliances. As it stands, while the portrayal of
outgroup and intergroup relations is less negative in the ethnic press compared to WeChat, the
overall invisibility of these groups and intergroup dynamics also suggests a missed opportunity
in articulating and shaping the group position of Chinese Americans. Not only does it reinforce
the social distance and affective indifference between Chinese Americans and other communities
of color, but given the intensity of WeChat’s focus on group relations, this absence fails to
challenge or otherwise engage with the dominance of group-centric discourse.
Taken together, this study has revealed that WeChat outlets play a major role in elevating
the level of political discourse and making race relations a salient part of this discourse, while the
ethnic press has largely sidelined questions of intergroup relations. Given the conventional
practice of ethnic media in emphasizing an inward gaze on the coethnic community, WeChat is
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distinct in its pronounced focus on the intergroup relations. Despite the presence of outlets and
narratives favorable for intergroup relations, the prevalence of group-centric discourse could
become difficult to counteract, particularly when aided by a media ecosystem that allows
unaccountable content producers to prevail as news sources, and incentivizes the amplification of
provocative content. When political socialization is conducted within this information
environment, it could fuel a type of politics hinging on more ethnocentric and zero-sum
conceptions of interests, and present significant challenges to the coalitional politics among
minority communities.
Granted, the promises of a “rainbow coalition” have always been frail and contingent
(Oliver & Grant, 1995; Ramakrishnan, 2014). Even so, the conventional wisdom is one of
strength in numbers. As a chief representative from the Organization of Chinese Americans, a
major progressive advocacy organization, said in an interview, “We don’t have enough political
power working solely as ethnicities to move anything nationally. […] Alone, there’s not much
we can do, but together there’s a lot we can do” (Wong, 2016). What we are witnessing now is
the possibility that Chinese ethnic media, particularly WeChat, could challenge this conventional
wisdom by concentrating and intensifying Chinese American political voices and group-centric
political consciousness, thereby creating a sense of shared purpose and efficacy. In actual
numbers too, as the Chinese American population continues to increase in size due to sustained
immigration, they may become large enough to move the needle and change the dynamics of
coalition formation, particularly in parts of the country such as California (Ramakrishnan, 2014).
How the Chinese ethnic media ecosystem drives political engagement, and what kind of politics
it enables, would have important bearings on group relations and political alliances more
broadly.
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Implications
The findings discussed in this study have a few pressing implications. For one, this study
has built on previous works to reinforce the importance of ethnic media (New America Media,
2005; Katz, Matsaganis & Ball-Rokeach, 2012; Kim, Jung & Ball-Rokeach, 2013). The rise of
WeChat makes Chinese ethnic media an even more robust, self-sustained, and preferred source
of news for immigrant Chinese, even for those who are not limited by English proficiency.
Community and advocacy organizations, public agencies, and English-language media, would
benefit from connections with these preferred media outlets to reach particular cultural or
linguistic populations. What this study also demonstrated is the necessity of going beyond an
instrumental use of ethnic media for messaging and outreach, and recognizing its role as a media
system that could decisively shape the politics of a significant group of emerging constituents.
That is, it would be productive to use ethnic media as spaces for listening and understanding
which perspectives and discourses dominate, as well as how and why they do. This study has
pointed to both specific issues and general tendencies/patterns that inform how and why ethnic
media could play an important role for the political group formation of first-generation Chinese
Americans. Such knowledge is often not available to those outside the community, but can be
gained by paying attention to ethnic media. Although language barriers may prevent easy access
to these spaces and perspectives, many – including first-generation Chinese and their 1.5 or
second-generation children – can play the role of translator, both in a linguistic and cultural
sense.
The divergence between the issue agendas in English language media and ethnic Chinese
media, in particular, attest to the need for bridging efforts and communication across these silos
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(Chen et al.; Gerson & Rodriguez, 2017). On one hand, it speaks to the role of ethnic media as a
vehicle for voices and issues otherwise neglected by mainstream media, and for constructing
common cause among its audiences. Ethnic media are able to surface stories and issues of
particular concern to first-generation Chinese that could help mainstream media and audiences
understand the experiences of this group of immigrants (Rong, 2015). On the other hand, the
specificity of ethnic media’s coverage may contribute to a gap in the issue agenda as well as
divergence in public opinion between immigrant Chinese and the wider public. Collaborations
between English language and ethnic media in reporting not only enables the former to uplift
stories they are not telling about immigrant communities, but also help bring more diverse
sources, perspectives, and stories to immigrant audiences.
This study also highlights the need for elevating the visibility of narratives that challenge
group-centric conceptions of politics and bridge group boundaries. Several progressive WeChat
outlets, such as Chinese Americans and iAmElection, have been offering substantial content on
race, racism, and political issues in a way that does not fall back on zero-sum visions of group
relations. They could be leveraged to amplify an alternate articulation of Chinese American
politics that may include, for example, interpretations of affirmative action that acknowledge the
potential for discrimination without diminishing its importance for all minority groups, and
compelling counter-framings of data disaggregation. These outlets have the advantage of being
WeChat natives that are already integrated into, and well-versed in, the platform used by a
sizable existing and potential audience. Especially on issues that could be fraught with tension
and emotions, such as affirmative action and data disaggregation, these outlets also have a long
history of engagement with these issues, and can serve as safe and trusted spaces for coethnic
audiences. Progressive organizations and movements, such as Asian American Advancing
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Justice and Asian Americans for Black Lives Matter, would be well-positioned to collaborate
with, support, and uplift the work of these outlets.
Legacy ethnic media play a persisting role in shaping the information environment for
first-generation Chinese, and should not be discounted when new, WeChat-based players seem to
have seized substantial audience and discursive authority. Although traditional ethnic media
could certainly also adopt an ethnocentric stance, their relative affinity with conventional
journalistic practices make them important vehicles for substantial and verified information for
the immigrant community. Especially on stories and policy issues prone to misinterpretation and
distortion, or being informationally incomplete, the ethnic press could serve as a basis for fact-
checking and verification. In addition, the unique strengths of traditional ethnic press in local
reporting also need to be revisited and reinforced, especially when many issues and events
critical to shaping the group politics of first-generation Chinese pertain to local interactions and
legislations.
In a changing media ecosystem that unhinges notions of what is newsworthy, some have
observed that the explosion in “news” being generated and shared across digital and social
media, and the pursuit of engagement metrics in the attention economy, could lower the bar for
news organizations across the board (Silverman, 2015; Nielsen, 2016). With the increasing
number of information outlets vying for attention, we need to ask how legacy ethnic media have
adjusted their content and audience engagement strategies, whether and how they have
responded to the emerging politics of their audiences, how they can be allies for offering
counter-balancing stories. Partnership between the ethnic press and WeChat outlets could also be
facilitated to leverage the advantage and resources enjoyed by each, which may range from
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journalists, professional know-how, connections with mainstream media and organizations, ties
with online and activist communities, and distribution channels.

Limitations and Future Research
One limitation of the study is the specificity of the time period chosen for content
analysis. The nature of the news content is sensitive to changes in the news cycle and real-world
events. For example, in the two-month period analyzed, a few events may have skewed the
results, including the mass shooting in Las Vegas, and the National Congress of the Communist
Party of China. It is possible that, for example, the amount of coverage on the United States or
on a particular political issue may have reflected these events. As stated in the methods chapter,
constraints in data acquisition have precluded more representative sampling methods such as
constructed week sampling. Recognizing this limitation, I have mostly offered interpretations of
the findings by comparing and contrasting the ethnic press and WeChat (as well as English
language media in the case of the issue agenda) in the same time period. Still, it is worth
emphasizing that rather than drawing overarching conclusions about Chinese ethnic media
content, these findings should be viewed as a contingent aspect of an evolving discursive
environment. Especially in thinking about the impact of Chinese ethnic media on immigrant
politics, the findings presented here signal potentialities more than deterministic outcome.
In addition, by opting for a comprehensive assessment of a cross-section of ethnic media
content, this study cannot do justice to the specific and complex discourses on race in issues like
affirmative action and data disaggregation, which this study revealed to be the most
disproportionately covered issues in WeChat. These coethnic issues have an extended historical
arc that certainly go beyond the two-month period examined, and are intertwined with several
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critical events in Chinese American politics, which come with their own casts, tropes, and
narratives. These issues could have a significant and enduring impact on public discourse and
group formation for first-generation Chinese, and would benefit from a closer examination on
their own terms.
This dissertation is a mapping of ethnic media content and political discourses in broad
strokes, and by no means provides sufficient texture to this complex picture. The increasing
complexity of Chinese ethnic media and immigrant politics present ripe opportunities for future
research, especially given the relative paucity of research on the subject. I devote some space
here to outline several research directions that can be undertaken to advance our understanding
about the intersection of communication and political practices of first-generation Chinese. Some
of these proposed research problems follow directly from the present research and its limitations,
while others stem from theoretical concerns and pressing empirical questions.

Production practices
Beyond the scope of this dissertation is an exploration of the human agency, incentives,
and norms that shape the immigrant media ecosystem. While prior work studying ethnic media
producers has shed light on the production practices of traditional ethnic media outlets
(Matsaganis & Katz, 2014; Shumow, 2014), the content generation and gatekeeping mechanisms
of WeChat outlets are less well understood. It is evident that these outlets do not follow the
journalistic model or self-identify as producing journalism (Yu, 2018), but many questions
remain. For one, it is far from clear who operates these WeChat outlets and what their
backgrounds are. The hiring ads of a few US-focused WeChat outlets suggest editorial staff do
not need to be based in the United States, and that some are expanding by bringing in part-time
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and full-time paid staff. Second, exploring routines and norms of content production would
better inform our understanding of how and why some content is privileged and amplified. What
explicit or implicit rules dictate how content is selected and packaged? To what extent do these
routines and norms exist in the first place? And importantly, how do these routines and norms
diverge across WeChat outlets, or perhaps cohere as a function of the logic of the platform?
Lastly, we also know little about the economic forces shaping the work of these WeChat outlets,
and the power they can accrue as a function of their scale and connections with the ethnic
economy. For example, several local WeChat outlets seem to be owned and run by the same
parent company. Such concentration in ownership has implications for discursive control, as well
as the level and nature of competition in the ethnic media ecosystem.
Relatedly, there is also plenty of room to understand how legacy ethnic media is
responding to the ascent of WeChat, and the particular mode of politics that is emerging within
the Chinese American community. How have legacy ethnic newspapers thought about their
audiences in the context of the current political debates? What particular challenges do ethnic
newspapers face in an environment where WeChat outlets are flourishing and the platform itself
becomes an unavoidable distribution channel? How have they adapted and what thought
processes were behind these decisions? How do the ethnic press and WeChat outlets compete for
audience and advertisers? These questions have direct bearing on the evolving positioning of the
ethnic press, and the potential role they can play in Chinese American politics. At the same time,
they help identify mutual influences ethnic press and WeChat outlets exert on each other, and
opportunities for working together.
In addition, this approach could constitute a form of relationship building with ethnic
media producers. Particularly from the point of view of advocacy and community engagement, it
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provides a way to connect with stakeholders, establish the foundation for partnerships, as well as
understand and account for their voices in designing outreach and intervention.

Networked construction of issues
In a networked ecosystem, the structure and content of communication are not only
shaped by media outlets, but rather, are the product of individuals and groups who share
information bits and co-construct public discourse with their communicative activities (boyd,
2010; Meraz & Papacharissi, 2013). That is to say, research should better account for the
dynamics of distribution and information flow across individuals, groups, and outlets in and
outside WeChat. In particular, chat groups in WeChat constitute a central unit of information
dissemination and discussion (Zhang, 2018). My own observations suggest heated debates and
sparring matches are a staple feature of chat groups, even non-political groups. It could be
especially illuminating to map the networked communication around current issues and debates
that have wide-ranging implications, such as affirmative action and the lawsuits against elite
universities, and opposition to disaggregated Asian American data collection in the 2020 census.
What messages and narratives dominate, in what spaces and through what process? Which
WeChat groups and online communities are central in the dissemination of a particular narrative?
Which cluster of outlets do these narrative originate from? Mapping the actors and discourses in
this networked system could shed light on the process by which particular narratives gain
traction, and inform strategic messaging efforts around specific issues.
Such mapping efforts would not be easy to implement. Although studies of networked
communication have become quite formalized thanks to the availability of both digital trace data
and extraction methods (e.g. Jackson & Welles, 2015; Freelon et al., 2016), these tools would not
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be readily applicable to the Chinese-language media space. I have already discussed challenges
in data extraction for WeChat, but in addition, WeChat is also, by design, a semi-private
platform. Conversations and sharing of news take place in closed, private groups and social
networks that are only accessible by those who belong to these networks. There is no hashtag to
organize a particular topic for participants and the public at large. That is to say, discussions and
participants in WeChat are diffuse, often opaque, and cannot be easily captured at scale.
Therefore, research has to go beyond the usual computational methods for social media
networks, and explore traditional as well as innovative approaches. For example, the
ethnographic method of “following participants and themes” (Marcus, 1995) could start with a
few key chat groups in WeChat, and trace the participants to their other chat groups as well as
online and offline spaces where they learn about or discuss a specific issue. Although necessarily
limited in scale, this approach would contribute toward a nuanced and much needed
understanding of how issues and narratives are constructed and amplified in private digital
platforms.

Local politics and communication ecology
Last but not least, one may shift the lens to the local level, moving from a bird’s eye view
of Chinese ethnic media to the locally specific communication practices of first-generation
Chinese. Many of the issues that are engaging the energy of first-generation Chinese are being
debated and fought over on a local level. A few examples include state bills to disaggregate data
collection for Asian Americans in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, proposed changes to the
specialized high school admissions test in New York, and sanctuary ordinances in places from
California to Maryland. In electoral politics, there are also an increasing number of congressional
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districts where Chinese American candidates are running for office (Hernandez, 2018), as well as
toss-up districts where a significant number of Chinese American voters reside (Ramakrishnan et
al., 2016). The local level is also a productive scale of analysis, as place serves as a vector
differentiating the social and political experience of immigrants, as well as the communication
choices available. Places vary in the concentration of coethnic population (Fieldhouse & Cutts,
2008), intergroup relations (Olive & Grant, 2003), institutional receptivity to immigrants ad
political opportunity structure (Ramakrishnan & Baldassare, 2004; Bloemraad, 2006). In the
current political climate, partisan characteristics of a place could also shape people’s choices to
engage or disengage, as well as their communication choices (Van Duyn, 2018).
Therefore, it is worthwhile to take stock of what communication agents across languages
and multiple levels have become important resources for first-generation Chinese in particular
localities, and how they provide opportunities for engaging with contentious local issues. This
means examining the availability and relative importance of communication resources as well as
what stories are flowing through them. These communication resources may include local and
national English media, Chinese media (in print, online, and in WeChat), even smaller, print-
only publications and newsletters distributed through local Chinese-owned businesses (Zhou &
Cai, 2003), locally oriented WeChat groups for first-generation Chinese in the area, as well as
organizations that may also serve as discursive agents about local issues. Different combinations
of communication resources may be implicated in different attitudes on political issues, and this
may vary across different locales. The advantage of this approach, as demonstrated by a rich
research tradition guided by the Communication Infrastructure Theory (Kim & Ball-Rokeach,
2006) and the related construct of communication ecology (Wilkin et al., 2007; Walter et al.,
2017), is an ecological understanding of the communication dynamics shaping specific
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outcomes. In a hybrid and high-choice media environment, this approach also accounts for the
fact that the resulting exposure to political information and narratives is the product of a
confluence of communication agents and narratives.
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Chapter 7: Conclusion

This study came on the heels of a series of high-profile political activism by first-generation
Chinese and what has been described in the media as their “political coming-of-age” (Huang,
2015). The seeming paradox is, as first-generation immigrant Chinese begin to partake in the
political process more than ever before – and by that measure, more politically integrated – the
particularity of this group has become ever more accentuated, not less. As a Los Angeles Times
writer observed in regards to the recent political activism by Chinese Americans,
“Two distinct camps had formed. The first — familiar to politicians and minority leaders —
contained younger Asian Americans and older immigrants who are typically Democrats
with a history of forming political coalitions with blacks and Latinos to elect Asian officials
and achieve policy goals. The other group, recent immigrants from mainland China and
elsewhere, seem to enter political life only when an issue attracts them.” (Shyong, 2014)
If the first version of politics represents the prevailing – and normative – vision for how
immigrant minorities participate politically, the second version stands out in its stark group
boundaries, and serves as a reminder of the importance of understanding not just why
immigrants do or do not participate politically – a central question for much of the existing
research – but also how they are participating when they do.
As the first systematic investigation of the emergent Chinese ethnic media ecosystem,
this study highlights the distinct discursive dynamics of news content that lend key clues to the
emerging politics of first-generation Chinese Americans. These discursive dynamics could
potentially connect immigrant Chinese more strongly to the political process, while at the same
98
time giving rise to a stronger co-ethnic consciousness that is mired in group-centric thinking and
tensions with other racial and ethnic groups.
Of course, the relationship between media, its publics, and political outcomes is always
entangled. Discursive spaces often at once reflect, engender and bolster certain views and
sentiments. It is difficult to isolate the influence exerted by the Chinese media ecosystem on the
political attitudes and actions of first-generation Chinese. Given the research design, this
dissertation cannot – and does not – attribute instrumentality and causality to the Chinese media
ecosystem. Rather, what this study has argued is that first-generation Chinese politics is
unfolding in a robust and distinctive media ecosystem, one where ethnically specific issue
agenda, coethnic group consciousness, and race relations are acquiring particular relevance.
Given the disproportionate attention to affirmative action and data disaggregation as well as race
relations and discrimination, especially in WeChat, these themes will likely serve as an anchor
point around which first-generation Chinese come to understand and become interested in
American politics. These discursive constructions of group position discussed in this study only
represent a snapshot in time, but may become part of the repertoire of Chinese American
political discourse, through the visibility and salience it has acquired in the Chinese ethnic media
ecosystem.
As a group, Chinese Americans occupy a particularly undetermined position in the matrix
of race, politics, and power. As the nation moves rapidly away from the black–white binary and
into racial politics with multiple racial and ethnic groups, how they interpret group politics will
have important bearings on the fault lines of racial and political struggles in the United States
(Ramakrishnan, 2014; Douthat, 2018). This study has made clear that as the political group
formation of Chinese Americans begin to take shape and continue to evolve, the Chinese ethnic
99
media ecosystem is enabling discursive constructions of this group formation, and will be a
significant force to be reckoned with. The outcome will hinge on how discursive spaces and
narratives can be steered in ways that elevate common ground with other racial and ethnic
groups, and refocus the nascent group consciousness and political interest of first-generation
Chinese around political projects rooted in shared goals across group boundaries.
The capacity to transcend group boundaries to perceive, understand, and negotiate
common interests with outgroups is particularly critical for multicultural democracy. Many of
the most divisive political issues are defined in relational terms and political choices can often be
made through the heuristic of which groups benefit or lose (Nelson & Kinder, 1996). As the
current political climate directs remarkable research attention around the challenge of
communication, polarization, and contentious politics, there is also a need to take seriously the
emerging politics and communication practices of overlooked immigrant populations, and trace
the pathways of their political participation as well as boundaries of their groups politics.

100
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116
Appendix A. Dictionary of Issues and Racial Groups

Issues
Search Terms in English and Chinese
Affirmative action affirmative action
平权法案, AA
Unauthorized
immigration
sanctuary city, sanctuary state, sanctuary law, illegal immigration,
undocumented, unauthorized immigration, DACA, dreamers
梦想法案, DACA, Dreamers, 非法移民, 无证移民, 庇护城, 庇护州
Race relations

White supremacy, White nationalist, White supremacist, Black Lives Matter,
BLM, racial discrimination, racism, hate speech, hate crime
白人至上, 白人民族, 黑命贵, 也是命, Black Lives Matter, BLM, 仇恨犯罪,
种族歧视, 种族主义
Jobs and the
economy
taxation reform, tax cut, unemployment rate, minimum wage
税改, 减税, 税收, 失业率, 最低工资
Gun control gun control
控枪, 枪支控制
Census
disaggregation
data disaggregation
亚裔细分
Climate change climate change, global warming
全球变暖, 气候变化
Female health abortion, reproductive right
堕胎, 生育权
Healthcare Obamacare, healthcare
歐記, 欧记, 健保, 医保
Muslim/Islam ISIS, radical Islam, Islamic extremism, travel ban, Muslim ban
穆斯林, 限穆令, 伊斯兰, 清真, 和平教, 绿教, 禁穆令, 穆斯林禁令, 排穆令,
禁穆, 入境令

117
Racial Groups

Terms with English translation
Non-Chinese
Asian
日裔 (Japanese), 韩裔 (Korean American), 菲律宾裔 (Filipino American)，越裔
(Vietnamese American)，越南裔(Vietnamese American) ，Hmong，苗裔(Hmong) ，
老挝裔(Laotian American)，印裔(Indian American)
African
American
非裔 (African American), 黑人 (Black), 黑墨 (Black and Latino)
Hispanic

拉丁裔 (Latino), 西裔 (Hispanic), 西语裔 (Spanish-speaking), 墨西哥裔 (Mexican
American), 墨西哥人 (Mexicans), 黑墨 (Black and Latino)

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Creator Zhang, Chi (author)

Core Title Political coming-of-age in the era of WeChat: understanding the ethnic media ecosystem and group politics of first-generation Chinese Americans

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 07/19/2019

Defense Date 05/08/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

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Advisor Ball-Rokeach, Sandra (committee chair), Ananny, Mike (committee member), Hollihan, Tom (committee member)

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