Constructing Moral Boundaries Across Media Systems: Media Narratives of Chinese Transnational Soldiers in the Russia–Ukraine War

• In Event: Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 7. Identity, moral boundaries, & nationalism

Abstract

This study examines how different media systems construct moral boundaries surrounding Chinese transnational soldiers participating in the Russia–Ukraine war. Existing scholarship has emphasized macro-level analyses of interstate relations, while paying limited attention to the micro-level experiences of Chinese civilians who joined the conflict as Russian mercenaries or Ukrainian volunteers. Drawing on cultural pragmatics, the study conceptualizes media narratives as forms of social performance through which moral meanings are produced, contested, and evaluated. Terms such as “mercenaries” versus “volunteers,” “sacrifice” versus “death,” and “heroes” versus “cannon fodder” illustrate how symbolic boundaries distinguish morally legitimate from illegitimate subjects.

To analyze these moralized performances, the study integrates cultural pragmatics with civil sphere theory and the notion of a global civil sphere, highlighting how binary moral codes such as justice/corruption or sacrifice/self-interest structure public evaluation. Chinese transnational fighters are inserted into asymmetrical performance arenas shaped simultaneously by global civil sphere discourses and China’s fragmented civil sphere, where state media tightly regulates political sensitivities and limits coverage. The corpus includes approximately 30 textual reports and three investigative videos produced by independent journalists and international media, as well as state media reports on peacekeeping forces and prewar representations of mercenaries as illegitimate violence.

Using qualitative interpretive analysis, the study focuses on actor coding, motivational attribution, moral evaluation, and boundary construction. It demonstrates how investigative journalism makes visible the lived conditions, emotional experiences, and moral dilemmas of Chinese fighters, thereby supplementing and challenging state-centered narratives. By revealing how media systems unevenly activate and reconfigure global civil sphere norms, the study contributes to scholarship on transnational soldiers and highlights the symbolic power of media in defining which lives are deemed worthy of visibility, sympathy, and commemoration.

Author

• Yifan Liu, University at Albany, SUNY