The Cost of Inauthenticity: Emotional Labor and Burnout among Belarusian Journalists in Chinese State Media

• In Event: 50209 - Directions in the Sociology of Emotions

Abstract

This study examines how inauthenticity—rather than emotional labor itself—becomes the primary source of psychological strain for Belarusian and Russian journalists working in Chinese state-controlled media. While emotional labor is often associated with workplace stress, its effects are not universal but shaped by cultural expectations. In China, deep acting—the internalization of prescribed emotions—is embedded in Confucian relational ethics and perceived as a moral responsibility. However, for Western-oriented Eastern European journalists, whose professional identities emphasize authenticity and self-expression, deep acting was not a means of workplace adaptation but an enforced emotional discipline that eroded their sense of self, leading to identity conflict, exhaustion, and mental health struggles.
Grounded in six months of participant observation, document analysis, and twenty in-depth interviews, this study reveals that emotional conformity in ideologically driven workplaces disproportionately affects foreign professionals whose emotional habitus conflicts with imposed norms. Unlike their Chinese colleagues, for whom emotional regulation aligns with cultural values, these journalists experienced deep acting as coercive, creating a profound dissonance between professional expectations and personal identity.By integrating Hochschild’s emotional labor theory with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, this paper demonstrates that the psychological cost of inauthenticity is not a universal consequence of emotional labor but a culturally contingent phenomenon. These findings challenge dominant emotional labor theories, which often assume distress results from emotional regulation itself rather than from a mismatch between workplace norms and personal identity. This research calls for a reevaluation of emotional labor expectations in globalized workplaces, emphasizing the need for policies that acknowledge cultural differences without compromising mental well-being. This study contributes to broader discussions on emotional labor, cross-cultural workplace dynamics, and the psychological consequences of ideological conformity in state-affiliated media.

Author

• Viktoryia Sliaptsova, University of South Florida