Patriarchal Erasure and Manufactured Passivity: Asymmetric Government and News Media Attention to Protests in China

Abstract: Is media attention to protest events gendered, and what is the relationship between gender, media, and protest? Using novel big data from Chinese social media, Weibo, spanning 2010-2017, this study offers the first systematic analysis of gender bias in media selection and description of protests in China and establishes the “gender-protest-media triad.” In accounting for this gender bias, we distinguish between two types of media accounts on Weibo: government and news media outlets. The results indicate that women-majority protests, despite being more violent and risky, are less likely than men-majority protests to receive coverage in both government and news media outlets (media selection bias). Furthermore, when reporting on women-majority protests, government media sources tend to describe them as more passive than men-majority protests (media description bias). Our research establishes the “gender-protest-media triad”: (1) Women participate violently in protests as a reactive response to exploitation and marginalization; (2) Women’s protests are disproportionately underreported and misrepresented in the media; (3) Such patriarchal media bias deprives women protesters of the public attention and resources necessary to pressure institutions for redress of their grievance. This triadic cycle is symptomatic of what we term the “paternalist stability model”: A mode of governance converging patriarchal logics with neo-Confucian stability maintenance, central to the maintenance of patriarchal hegemony in China and throughout the Sinosphere.