A Cluster Analysis of Gender Discrimination in Chinese and Western News Media

This study is a rhetorical analysis of the gendered language both Chinese and Western news media perpetuate in depicting the female Chinese Olympian Ye Shiwen at the 2012 London Olympics. The analysis reveals that both media employ a language that constructs Ye as an immature, childlike being whose achievements are not only unexpected but unnatural. After initially identifying Ye with the doping history of Chinese athletes in the 1990s, Western journalists depicted her as a passive victim of unethical child training programs, described in terms which imply a rhetorical identification with China’s doping history. In its turn, Chinese news media defended the integrity of its Olympic ethos by casting Ye as a dutiful daughter, and innocent child; this construction of her ethos absolves her of blame by denying her agency, effectively placing strict boundaries around her ownership of achievement, boundaries which reflect normalized assumptions of submissiveness as appropriate female behavior. The readiness of both the Western and Chinese media to default to a rhetoric of gender discrimination when norms are challenged demonstrates how the Olympic ideal of surpassing boundaries can still be a closed border for Chinese women.


Introduction
In the introduction, we will elaborate upon the research objectives this study aims to achieve, the research background it is built upon and the materials it examines.

Research Objectives
Drawing upon Kenneth Burke's cluster analysis-an approach to conduct rhetorical criticism, in this article, I aim to explore how the news representations of female Chinese Olympic swimming champion Ye Shiwen in both Chinese and Western news media reveal a discriminatory gender ideology against her achievement.

Research Background
In the 30 th London Summer Olympic Games in 2012, Ye was 16 years old when she won the gold medal and established a world record in the 400m Individual Medley, where she completed her last 50 meters in 28.93 seconds.However, her success immediately raised the suspicion of U.S. coach John Leonard, who was the executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association.According to Leonard (Note 1), Ye must have doped because her speed in the final 50 meters was even quicker than that of the male American swimmer champion Ryan Lochte, a suspicion which was ultimately proved groundless.Olympic Games are for breaking cultural, physical boundaries as expressed in the Olympic motto of "Swifter, higher, stronger".However, the news portrayal of Ye establishes her as constrained by, rather than transcending, strong gender and cultural boundaries.

Theoretical Foundation
As one of the approaches to conduct rhetorical criticism, cluster analysis aims to " [reveal] the repetitive nature of a writer's associational (and terminological) logic" (Blakesley, 2002, p. 103) through the terms that convey similar semantic meanings, which Burke calls the "terministic screens" of the rhetor (Blakesley, 2002, p. 115).In other words, the terminologies we use are "a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality" (Burke, 1989, p. 115;emphasis original).Accordingly, the vocabulary used to describe an athlete will not only reflect the rhetor's attitude, but will in its turn select reality.Meanwhile, the vocabulary deflects the audience's attention from the rhetor's attitude and onto the object (the athlete), so that the athlete herself seems to be the source of the attitude.As Brown (1969) (Blakesley, 2002, p. 103).

Material Studied
As Markula (2009, p. 2) argues, it is "pertinent to analyse how newspaper coverage depicts Olympic athletes in their local, national context, but also provide comparison points regarding the commonalities between the news media in different countries".Accordingly, in this article, I will focus on the depiction of Ye in the Chinese newspaper China Sports Daily (Note 2), and that in the online news coverage of the athlete in two Western outlets, The Guardian and BBC respectively, to examine how "these local reports provide a 'global' reading of the differences and similarities between different nations, their coverage of the Olympics and their representation of women athletes" (Markula, 2009, p. 2).In other words, a rhetorical analysis of the coverage reveals how neither Asian nor British news discourse can disengage from ideologies which marginalize Ye's achievement.
To this end, I will draw upon reportage in China Sports Daily published on July 30, 2012 in the section of Olympic · Arena (Note 3), and that on August 2, 2012 in the section of Olympic · Special Topic (Note 4).As for representative artefacts from Western news media, we will analyze three news articles in the Guardian-"Ye Shiwen's world record Olympic swim: brilliant, or too good to be true?", "London 2012: China's Ye Shiwen staggered the world-even Ryan Lochte", "The monstering of swimmer Ye Shiwen says much about declining' (see Note 5), and "How are teen stars re-writing Olympic record books" in BBC (Note 6).

Research Method
In cluster analysis, a critic needs to first identify the key terms according to the frequency and/or intensity of the key terms (Burke, 1984, p. 232;also see Foss, 2009, p. 66).Then the critic charts the clusters around the key terms that express either a similar or opposing meaning (Burke, 1984, p. 233;also see Foss, 2009, p. 67).Lastly, the critic provides an explanation of how the clusters merge with each other in expressing the rhetor's worldview (Burke, 1984, p. 233;also see Foss, 2009, pp. 67-68).Based on such a procedure of conducting cluster analysis, in the following section, we will explore how the discriminatory gender ideology is being perpetuated against Ye Shiwen in Chinese and Western news media.

Identification of Key Terms
There are four groups of key terms we have identified in both Chinese and Western news reportage based on the principles of frequency and intensity of their occurrence.The first group focuses on portraying Ye Shiwen's immaturity, including the key terms childlike and calm in China Sports Daily, and teenage in BBC's online news.The second group highlights the depiction of Ye's agency, consisting of obedient in China Sports Daily and female in The Guardian.The third group suggests the scale of Ye Shiwen's training, represented by the term colossal due to its intensity.The last group emphasizes the credibility of the suspicion of Ye's doping, with the principal elements being zero evidence and wrong in The Guardian.

Identification and Interpretation of Clusters
In this section, we will identify and interpret the clusters around the four groups of key terms we have identified in the previous section.

Clusters around Key Terms "Childlike, Calm, Teenage"
The first group of key terms portrays Ye's immaturity, including childlike and calm in China Sports Daily, and teenage in BBC's online news.As defined in New Age: Chinese-English Dictionary, the equivalent Chinese term (Note 7) of childlike expresses a type of childishness and naivety of children (Wu & Cheng, 2010, p. 2006).Although China Sports Daily seems to be complimenting Ye on her innocence and simplicity, the clusters "little/small girl" (Note 8), and "incommensurable maturity" (Note 9) around the key term childlike in the sentence "a face that is still with childlikeness" (Note 10) further reveals the media's stereotypical and condescending attitude towards Ye.While "little/small girl" and "childlikeness" communicate a sense of compliment on Ye for her innocence and simplicity, "incommensurable maturity" reveals the media's denial of the maturity Ye has shown at her age, which is a result of what Burke would call her "trained incapacity" (Burke, 1936, p. 14).As Burke further explains, "[w]hile apparently defining a trait of the person referred to, the term hardly did more than convey the attitude of the person making the reference" (Burke, 1936, p. 16;emphasis original).In other words, the symbolic merger that occurs here involves the transformation of praise into blame, which ultimately undermines Ye's ownership of her stable mindset and natural development as an individual.
Similarly, the use of the key term teenage in the BBC news article (Note 11) reveals how Chinese and Western journalism congregate rhetorically in delineating a gendered boundary around Ye.When we read the beginning sentence "Two teenage swimmers are the talk of London 2012 after stunning victories at the Aquatics Centre" in the BBC news article, we can immediately identify the journalist's assumption that young female athletes are not those who "normally" could make remarkable accomplishment as the journalist could absolutely omit the word "teenage" and instead phrase it as "Two swimmers…", or even "Young swimmers", which would be less loaded than "teenage".In other words, the word "teenage", with its implications of incomplete maturity (being a teenager is to live on a border between childhood and adulthood), injects an element of "incongruity" (Burke, 1984, p. 166) into the description.The audience is invited to see the event as remarkable, and from there the door is open for "the remarkable" to become "suspicious", once other negative elements are introduced.As for the clusters around the key term teenage, the word "talk" in the original sentence above invites us to associate it with the word "gossip" or "topic" in amplifying the suspicion of the authenticity of the two female athletes' achievements.Specifically, "talk" introduces the idea of a "buzz" into the statement of fact: the act of talking is more important than a statement of fact.Moreover, "stunning" also suggests something which is not only surprising or remarkable, but potentially unthinkable, or at least hard to take in.In addition to the two clusters, the term "youngsters" in the sentence "When you have 15, 16 and 17-year-old youngsters, they can make huge improvements…", and "how is it possible" and "young" in the sentence 'BBC Sport asked the experts how it is possible for young athletes to improve their personal bests by such huge margins' further reinforce the newspaper's suspicion of younger female athletes' capacity of making significant progress within short period of time."Young" athletes in theory should have potential, but the slight overemphasis introduced through "huge" undercuts the meaning of "possible", making it more about doubt than assertion.Although the former sentence expresses a compliment on the two young female athletes' success, the constant association of youth with the question of "how is it possible" ultimately consubstantiates youth with a lack of credibility in making outstanding achievements.
The gender boundary Chinese journalism demarcates is embodied further when it exploits the key term calm to describe Ye's response to the sports authority's suspicion of the authenticity of her accomplishment.For instance, the newspaper says "Faced with numerous verbal challenges, Ye Shiwen stays calm from the beginning to the end" (Note 12), and "The applause is for the 'calm girl' who has withstood pressure, who has resisted distraction and concentrated on competition" (Note 13).As for the clusters around calm, the newspaper applies clusters such as "withstood pressure", "resisted distraction", and "concentrated on competition" in the above sentence, as well as "cool like a chrysanthemum" (Note 14), which communicates the idea that Ye's "calm", normally a desirable trait, comes to signal something unnatural when associated with accomplishment, due to the implied incongruity of "calmness" and "youth".

Clusters around Key Terms "Obedient, Female"
The second group of key terms focuses on the depiction of Ye's agency, consisting of obedient in China Sports Daily and female in The Guardian.This group reveals that both Chinese and British media consistently associate the concepts of submissiveness with the female gender.For instance, to emphasize women's lacking of agency, China Sports Daily says "She is very obedient about doing housework and works earnestly whenever it is her turn" (Note 15), which is indicating that housework is a female task, while reinforcing the idea of working within set boundaries suggested by "whenever it is her turn".Moreover, the newspaper comments that "but Ye Shiwen usually is very obedient and will help her parents with housework" (Note 16).In this sentence, the word "help" reinforces Ye's "trained capacity (rather than incapacity)" to be an assistant of authorities when needed (in this case, parents).The two instances demonstrate clearly that China Sports Daily identifies Ye's virtues with the performance of roles associated with female children, thereby subordinating her Olympic achievements to conformity with very traditional gender stereotyping.Her primary role as dutiful daughter is subsequently made consubstantial with her performance as an Olympian in the sentence "This little girl never quarrels with coaches and she completes her tasks no matter how much she has been assigned to" (Note 17).Terms such as "parents" and 'coaches' are identified as figures to whom Ye is appropriately submissive; and "she has been assigned to" suggests that Ye always acts according to directions established by authorities.In this case, the key term obedient not only identifies Ye's behavior as an athlete with her submissiveness as a female child, but also subordinate her athletic performance to that ethos.
The implicit gender bias expressed in China Sports Daily reflects the values of "the most prominent background cultural assumption and intellectual tradition in Chinese history-Confucianism" (Rosenlee, 2006, p. 2; editorial change), which assumes that women are subordinate to men within the yin-yang and nei-wai gender distinction system (Rosenlee, 2006, p. 3;emphasis original).According to the yin-yang and nei-wai gender distinction system, "men represent Yang, being bright, strong, positive and symbolised by the sun and the heaven.Women, by contrast, represent Yin, being dark, weak, negative and symbolised by the moon and the earth" (Wu, 2009, p. 70;emphasis original).As for the "nei-wai" relationship, it signifies "a strictly physical segregation of man and woman into two different, conflicting spheres", i.e. "private and public" (Rosenlee, 2006, p. 6).Based on this gender ideology, China Sports Daily consistently portrays Ye on a lower footing compared to that of the male Chinese swimmer gold medalist Sun Yang (Note 18), and delineates her as an obedient child and dutiful daughter.
As for the key term female in The Guardian, it is deployed for comparing male and female competence in sports.To express indirectly a discriminatory attitude towards female athletes, the journalist Andy Bull quotes the sports scientist Ross Tucker's comment on Ye's performance that "The simple question is: 'under what circumstances does a female have the capacity to finish a race as fast as a male?'" (Note 19).This comment reveals explicitly Tucker's gender presumption that female athletes are under no circumstances comparable to males.Moreover, the figures provided by Tucker on female athletes' speed in the 400m Individual Medley compared to that of male in the reportage (i.e."Tucker points out that, on average, female medley swimmers finish the 400m IM in a freestyle time that is between '18% and 23% slower' than that of a top 100m freestyler") (Note 20) further indicates the stereotypical view Tucker holds in evaluating Ye's sports capacity.By employing Tucker's comments on Ye's achievement in his reportage, Bull is indirectly communicating his own bias against Ye.When the clusters around female appear in the context of comparing female athletes with males, the comparison makes a normally positive term negative.After Tucker stated his disfavor with Ye's remarkable achievement, i.e. "… her 100m freestyle leg is disproportionately fast not only by comparison to Lochte, but also her peers, and to the best 100m freestyle swimmers" (Note 21), Bull's immediate and uncritical deployment of Tucker's words into his reportage suggests his own negative attitude towards female athletes' distinguishing performance.This gender attitude manifests itself overtly when we see the clusters underlined in Tucker's further comments on Ye: "To put them in context, consider this: Ye was faster in the final 50m of her own 400m IM than Lochte was in his" (Note 22), and "Ye was 0.17 quicker over the final 50m of freestyle than the man many reckon to be the greatest all-round swimmer in the world" (Note 23).According to Tucker, the male is "greatest", while the female is faster and quicker than the greatest.However, Bull's employment of Tucker's comments is clearly not meant to praise Ye for her accomplishing a remarkable feat by surpassing Lochte; rather, not only is she denied the status of being "the greatest", but her act is made to seem fundamentally wrong.Moreover, when the clusters around female appear in the context of comparing her own improvement Ye has made over time, there is even an ideological denial of her outstanding competence.For instance, Tucker says "If you look at the woman in question, and her biomechanics in the heats, she has a steady, moderately slow, six-beat kick," (Note 24) and "All of a sudden in the Olympic final she turned it up to an eight-beat kick, which any coach will tell you is very difficult to maintain for 25m, much less 100m" (Note 25).This remark reveals a strong boundary Tucker and the newspaper draw with regard to the scale within which women athletes' progress can be considered acceptable.
Thus, the analysis of the two groups of thematic clusters used in Chinese and Western news media explains how the two sources of media congregate in enforcing a gender boundary.However, what distinguishes the portrayal of Ye in the latter is the discriminatory cultural boundary it demarcates.If China Sports Daily merges "female" with "obedience" as part of an ethos of appropriate deference to authority, The Guardian uses 'female' to exclude women from equal standards of performance in the context of sports.

Clusters around Key Term "Colossal"
In the BBC news article "How are teen stars re-writing Olympic record books" (Note 26), the cultural bias is signaled through nuances in the description of the Chinese training program, especially in the key term which suggests the scale of the training, notably colossal.As a result, the reportage "coaches an attitude" which casts Ye's training in a negative light.In the news article, when the 1980 400m Individual Medley silver medalist Sharron Davies explains why Ye could achieve such remarkable success, she says "I watched a lot of the Chinese girls train at Bath University.Every day for nearly two weeks, their work-rate was colossal".Then Davies continues: "Ye is probably one that was targeted when Beijing got the 2008 Olympics and she's had the last 10 years to prepare for this event" (Note 27).On one hand, there is an overemphasis on the duration of Chinese girls' training, where a short time is made to sound incredibly extensive.Then, the suspicion that Ye has been being groomed for 10 years is used to segregate Ye from the other Chinese swimmers.Consequently, Ye, and her training, appear anomalous, even in comparison with her compatriots.Moreover, it is not that Ye is simply a better natural athlete than the other women, or that she may even have trained longer and harder than they did, but the language makes her the object of a selection and training process, rather than an autonomous subject.While the other female Chinese athletes are active, they train, they possess their work rate, Ye "was targeted", and thus is passive.The grammatical structure signals the segregation, which makes Ye seem the subject of a cruel experiment over which she had no control.4.2.4Clusters around Key Terms "Zero Evidence, Wrong" The last group of key terms criticizes the credibility of the suspicion of Ye's doping, with the principal elements being zero evidence, and wrong in The Guardian's news article "The monstering of swimmer Ye Shiwen says much about declining superpowers" (Note 28) by Anna Chen.Chen's article differs rhetorically from the rest of the coverage examined here, since, whereas the previous texts reveal implicit and perhaps subconscious bias against Chinese athletes, Chen's article deliberately explores the racism of that coverage and helps us label the stereotyping that motivates the other Western texts.
In her article, Chen uses the key term zero evidence frequently in criticizing Western sports authorities and the UK press's kneejerk suspicion of Ye's outstanding accomplishment.To demonstrate, Chen says "First off the block was the host nation's BBC commentator Clare Baldwin, who sprinted to the worst conclusion on zero evidence within seconds of Ye's record-breaking win with her loaded comment …" (Note 29), and "He weaselled out of an outright accusation on the aforementioned zero evidence by saying, 'we want to be very careful about calling it doping', but the word was out of his trap and primed for detonation" (Note 30).In addition, Chen employs the cluster "clean" in the sentence "First she was labeled a cheat in front of a global audience and then refused an apology when repeated drugs tests show up clean as a whistle" (Note 31) to further reveal the groundlessness of Western world's suspicion of Ye.In all of these instances, Chen weighs the scope of Western opinion as arrayed against Ye against the lack of available evidence of wrongdoing, to demonstrate that Ye's guilt proceeds exclusively from Western attitudes, rather than from her own actions.
Another key term that reveals Chen's criticism of the "monstering" of Ye is the term wrong used in the sentence "So while China shares a history of doping that lasted from the cold war until the 90s, it's wrong to single it out for suspicion whenever a Chinese athlete comes up with a terrific performance" (Note 32) due to the intensity of this term.The term "wrong" expresses clearly Chen's accusation that Western suspicion of Ye is solely based on the history of doping in Chinese sports field decades ago.As for the clusters around wrong, the two terms "single it out", "terrific performance" in the above sentence, and the two underlined clusters in Chen's further comment that "To pick out one team is ludicrous.There's something else going on here" (Note 33) all express Chen's criticism of the cultural boundary the Western media draws against Ye.In this case, Chen is gradually deflecting the Western audience to ponder the blind cultural bias they are presenting to Chinese athletes.To confirm that the suspicion of Ye is a representation of the persistent bias Western world perpetuates against Chinese athletes, Chen further provided us, in a sarcastic tone, an analysis of the psychology of Western sports experts, who "With accusations of drugs and sci-fi scenarios running out of steam, and the dawning realisation that it's hard work and training that's producing such stunning results" (Note 34), decide, "Let's get them on child cruelty" (Note 35).The opposition within the cluster of "running out of steam" and "dawning realization" on one hand, and the more concrete, affirmative 'hard work and training' on the other, express both Chen's skepticism about Western attitudes and her certainty that Ye's accomplishment is purely based on her own hard work.However, by concluding the statement by saying "let's get them on child cruelty", Chen is criticizing that when the Western media's old arguments about doping run out of steam and are refuted by Ye's hard work and training, journalists and pundits fall back on another body of discriminatory stereotypes, in this case Cold War stereotypes about dehumanized and dehumanizing training programs which victimized children.

Relationships between Clusters
The clusters around the four groups of key terms collectively express a discriminatory gender attitude that undermines and restricts female Chinese swimming champion Ye Shiwen's sports competence and achievements.When she is considered immature and young, she is being denied agency with claiming her accomplishments.When she has proved that she could perform equally well to or even better than experienced and senior athletes, the media's whole suspicion of her ability becomes groundless and wrong.

Discussion
Although Chinese and Western journalism employ different clusters to portray Ye, both media construct Ye as an immature, childlike being whose achievements are not only unexpected but unnatural.After initially identifying Ye with the doping history of Chinese athletes in the 1990s, the Western texts in question depicted her as a passive victim of unethical child training programs, described in terms which make those programs rhetorically consubstantial, in Burke's sense, with China's doping history.In comparison, China Sports Daily defended the integrity of the PRC's Olympic ethos by casting Ye as a dutiful daughter, and innocent child; this construction of her ethos absolves her of blame while denying her agency, effectively placing strict boundaries around her ownership of her achievement, boundaries which reflect normalized assumptions of submissiveness to authorities as appropriate female behavior.The opposing viewpoints thus become rhetorically consubstantial in their turn, as exercises in Burke's "secular prayer" (Burke, 1984, p. 321), a "coaching of an attitude" in which Ye's youth, ethnicity, and gender are recast in language incompatible with a discourse of extraordinary achievement in an Olympic setting, effectively segregating her from a clear identity as an Olympian.In doing so, the superficially different Chinese and Western characterization of Ye ultimately achieve a state of rhetorical identification, where discrimination at once crosses borders, creates a global boundary to athletes like Ye.

Conclusion
In brief, the cultural boundary marked out in portraying Ye in Western journalism is a symbol of the Western world's resistance to acknowledging the validity of other, and especially Asian cultures, in a perpetuation of what Edward Said has famously labelled "Orientalism".As Said (1979, p. 3) puts it: I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could [examine Orientalism as a discourse] without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism.In brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action.This is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally determines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in) any occasion when that peculiar entity 'the Orient' is in question.
This paper has shown that the perpetuation of stereotypes based on gender is an important element in the survival of Orientalism as an attitude in the West, making it doubly hard for Asian women to have their outstanding achievements recognized.Since, as I have demonstrated, an athlete like Ye already faces forms of discrimination in the Asian press, her case represents all the challenges that female Olympians from China experience in seeking recognition for their accomplishments.As Burke (1984, p. 184) remarks, when "identification and division ambiguously put together, … [we] cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and [we] have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric"-a thesis that applies very well to this situation.While gender and race are used to introduce division into how people see Ye, superficially unlike perspectives become identified in maintaining those divisions.A rhetorical analysis not only helps us see how the media consciously and unconsciously manipulates identification and division to maintain discredited viewpoints, but it also helps us understand and articulate how those attitudes violate the Olympic spirit, which is about breaking down barriers in the pursuit of excellence, as the motto "Swifter, higher, stronger" indicates, and meanwhile leave Ye, an Iron lady, locked outside the golden barriers of global public opinion.
states, by tracing the "clusters of words and images and the listing of the elements in a work according to such generalizations as 'what goes with what', 'what versus what", and 'from what to what'" (p.38), cluster analysis enables us to identify only what is present but also what is absent