Why does distant suffering matter? Discursive domestication in Chinese mainstream media and social media on the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum

This study examines how distant suffering is domesticated across Chinese mainstream media and social media through the case of the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. Existing research has largely focused on media representations and audience responses to mediated suffering events, paying less attention to commemorative spaces and users’ digital participation in non-Western contexts. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of mainstream media texts and Xiaohongshu posts, this study identifies three institutional domestication strategies, namely emotional, familiarizing and moral domestication, and shows how social media users re-domesticate commemorative meaning through affective resonance, geopolitical reframing and everyday spatial practices. The findings reveal that social media participation neither simply accepts nor rejects institutional narratives but produces a negotiated field of meaning shaped by platformed affect, contemporary geopolitical imagination and urban spatial consumption. By conceptualizing this process as participatory re-domestication, the article extends the study of distant suffering from media events to commemorative spaces, showing that spatial encounters with distant suffering do not automatically generate cosmopolitan empathy but are filtered through local platform practices and ideological structures.