Uncovering Powerful East Asian Women Politicians in News Media

Abstract

This article investigated the media representation of women politicians in mediated political communication in the context of Hong Kong, China. It attempted to supplement the previous feminism scholarship on media representation of women activists, which largely situated in Western contexts, with the example from East Asia. Contrary to the studies worldwide which argued that women politicians were confined to the trivialized topics in news media, this article demonstrated that the East Asian women politicians in Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China which was colonized by Britain, were visible in a larger variety of topics than their male counterparts in newspapers and they were more often directly quoted than the male politicians. Also, the number of editorials women politicians wrote to the mainstream press was significantly higher than the men did. Despite these, those articles the women are in occupied latter sections. A subtler analysis also discovered that the promising trends applied only to a few celebrity women politicians. These findings were based on a content analysis of 946 news articles in four Hong Kong newspapers. The conclusion discussed how the findings could inform readers about the stereotype towards East Asia as a highly patriarchal culture influenced by Confucianism in contemporary mediated political communication.

Keywords: media representation, politics, gender, women in power, celebrity, East Asia