Revisiting American Orientalist clichés regarding gender and rurality: A topic modelling-assisted discourse-historical analysis of The New York Times’ coverage of rural Chinese women (1980-2024)

The American variant of Orientalism provides an interdisciplinary anchor for discourse analysis, as it facilitates cultural hegemony over the “non-West” through the collusion of power and knowledge within discursive practice, which warrants a revisit. Despite extensive research on American Orientalist views of non-Western women, the representation of rural Chinese women remains largely overlooked. They represent a significant demographic of Chinese women who have undergone socio-economic and political changes in China, greatly enriching global understanding of gender, geography, and culture. This corpus-assisted discourse study combines Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling with the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) to examine the Orientalist discursive construction of rural Chinese women in <i>The New York Times</i> (1980-2024). Findings indicate a persistent Orientalist cliché surrounding rural Chinese women’s “predicaments” in intimacy, crime, healthcare, and employment, which are sustained by ahistorical perspectives on kinship-based social structures in China, critiques of Chinese governance from a humanitarian angle, and “pseudo-feminist” rhetoric on “third-world women.” These oversimplified discourses overlook the intersectional context of gender issues, which encompasses global capital flows and class distinctions. Instead, these gender issues are reduced to a mere medium for the dichotomies between China and the United States, as well as the evolving geopolitical interests of the latter in international relations.