To de-empathise or not, that is the question: understanding de-empathy in Chinese television literature

Abstract Prior studies have extensively examined narrative empathy and negative empathy, which primarily concern the readers’ affective engagement with fictional characters. This study shifts the focus to discourse from reader response by conceptualising de-empathy as a strategic stance that resists full emotional alignment while maintaining social intelligibility within television literature. Drawing on the excerpts from six works of contemporary Chinese emotional television literature, this study examines how the internal factors drive de-empathy into external linguistic manifestations. Accordingly, three strategies of de-empathy (affective, behavioural, and cognitive) have been identified through the lens of linguistic analysis, which illuminate how emotion ( ganqing ), relational expectations ( renqing ), and moral evaluation ( deqing ) are discursively negotiated. By pinpointing the discursive patterns and the underlying affective and moral norms, the study offers insight into the modulation of emotional distance in television literature narratives. Moreover, the findings above also invite reflection on the applicability of the de-empathy framework to broader literary and media contexts, highlighting its potential for cross-cultural analysis of affect and interpersonal negotiation.