YUZE SHA: 'Medical Scapegoating' during COVID-19 [ECR]

This article investigates British media use of the terms ‘Chinese’ and ‘Asian’ during the height of the COVID-19 crisis (January 2020 - February 2022). Using Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis, we integrate insights about attitudinal appraisals, thematic topics, and collocates across a corpus of 100 news articles with a Critical Race Theory-inspired theoretical framework that argues public health crises can revive deeply embedded discourses of racial/cultural inferiority. Although UK news outlets uniformly condemned COVID-19-inspired hate crimes, we show that headlines and stories feature negative portrayals of Chinese and Asian entities (which are problematically conflated). Our analysis of thematic topics and collocates surrounding the terms ‘Chinese’ and ‘Asian’ generates similar results; despite surface-level neutrality, portrayal of Chinese ethnicity is negatively skewed towards association with the causes and consequences of the COVID-19 virus. Uses of controversial racial terms and a blurred line between scientific discussion and conspiracy theories are also detected in the corpus. Overall, our analysis reveals a form of reporting during the COVID-19 crisis in the UK wherein surface level rejection of racialisation masks a form of racialised medical scapegoating. While outwardly rejecting anti-Asian racism, UK news media embedded deep-seated negative stereotypes and xenophobic attitudes within its representational narratives and discourses.

Yuze Sha is a PhD candidate at Lancaster University, focusing on corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and public health communication. Her PhD research assesses the multimodal communication strategies of the NHS regarding COVID-19 policies and public responses on X (formerly Twitter). She is also a Research Assistant for the project titled 'Racism, Digital Discrimination, and Mental Health During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) Communities in the UK' at Swansea University.

MCI’s ECR Workshops are lunchtime seminars held in person at the Manchester China Institute. They seek to bring together students, faculty, and staff who can best provide feedback as Early Career Researchers develop their ideas. Free lunch will be provided.

Host or Publisher The Manchester China Institute