Words make worlds: The discursive construction of poverty in China’s digital sphere

This paper explores how poverty is discursively framed on Chinese digital platform amid rising socioeconomic inequality and the expanding influence of public narratives on social media. Drawing on corpus-assisted discourse-historical approach, this study investigates discursive strategies in the most widely read poverty-related articles on WeChat and examines the way poverty is constructed. The results show that poverty discourse functions as a powerful legitimation tool that reinforce existing power relations by categorizing and stigmatizing the poor, individualizing the causes of poverty, and mitigating structural critique. Nevertheless, power dynamics are also negotiated and contested as resistance discourse emerges despite stringent content regulation. The findings further reveal how poverty discourse operates as a constitutive mechanism that shapes public cognition and emotional engagement, thereby influencing broader societal perceptions of poverty in China.