Abstract

In an increasingly globalised media environment, news discourse has become a significant arena for constructing representations of women across national borders. Despite the increasing international visibility of Chinese women and the growing body of relevant research, their representation in European media remains relatively underexplored. This study examines how Chinese women are discursively constructed in two major French newspapers, Le Monde and Le Figaro, between 2005 and 2025. Combining corpus-assisted discourse analysis with van Leeuwen’s (2008) social actor representation framework, the study analyses co-occurrence patterns, strategies of nomination and categorisation, and the distribution of activation and passivation in the representation of Chinese women. The findings show that these representations cluster around four major semantic domains: sports, marriage and family, migration, and commerce and consumption. Narratives of individual achievement tend to be realised through nomination and activation, whereas topics associated with social problems are more often framed through categorisation and passivation. This asymmetry produces a representational paradox: individual Chinese women are selectively highlighted, while Chinese women as a collective are more often problematised and constructed as a generalised Other. The study demonstrates how seemingly neutral linguistic choices participate in the ideological construction of gendered and cultural otherness.

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