A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of Taiwanese students’ sentiments toward Asianphobia on the news amid Covid-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has fuelled the latest surge of anti-Asian hate. Raising Taiwanese university students' awareness about the dangers of racism has never been more important. This study draws on a class activity about media discourse, particularly on the representations of xenophobia and other forms of intolerance toward Asians during the pandemic. The self-created corpus was based on the students' collected news articles (119,375 words) and their feedback on the topic (14,641 words). The theoretical framework grounded on corpus-driven discourse analysis was used to investigate linguistic evidence of exclusion, discrimination, and racist discourse against the Asians and Chinese. This research also set out to understand the Taiwanese students' attitudes and concerns about the discourse circulated in the media. The web-based text analysis program Voyant Tools was employed to identify keywords, frequency, collocations, and word patterns in context. The findings revealed a high occurrence of the labels, "Chinese virus," "kung flu," "Asian virus," and "yellow peril"--framing representations of the Chinese and Asians which spiked up during the pandemic. These epithets further mitigate the Chinese as the source of the virus. The repetitive use of such referencing stigmatizes the Asian community, and further constructs the notion of in-/out- group where Asians make up the out group-- the ones to be avoided. The findings also showed the students' strong sense of national pride echoing the slogan "Taiwan can help," calling themselves "Taiwanese," and categorizing themselves as "Asian," but disassociating from the "Chinese mainlanders." This study provides an insight to the Taiwanese's perception of identity, where racial dilemmas run deep as they are ethnically related, historically, and geographically connected. What lies underneath is a sense of fear for their own safety as they carry their race on their face.