Foreigners' archive: contemporary China in the blogs of American expatriates

Abstract

This study scrutinized blogs written by American expatriates in twenty-first-century China. The primary objectives were to explore how China is represented in such blogs and to understand the discursive processes through which the American bloggers utilize the blogging technology to narrate their perceptions of the Chinese realities. Drawing on the postcolonial and discursive perspectives, we have determined that the blogs examined here consist of a distinct discursive space of cultural representation and contestation. They were also interpreted as a digital extension of conventional Euro-American travel writing as they share with the genre a set of rhetorical conventions and face the same set of problems of representing the cultural Other. These assumptions guided the discourse analyses of the blogs, written by three American individuals. The study revealed that the bloggers used three prominent metaphors to convey their perceptions of contemporary China, which echo the conventional Western knowledge of the country. During the process, the bloggers were concerned with the Chinese censorship of the internet and they faced challenges from the nationalistic Chinese readers.

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