When women’s empowerment meets health communication: a critical discourse analysis of the WeChat official account “Health China”

Abstract

Abstract Prior studies have widely investigated women’s empowerment in Chinese social media, but women’s empowerment in new media-based health communication has gained insufficient attention. With an aim to empower female health in a new media-based context of China, this study employs a critical discourse analytic approach to study female empowerment in health communication by focusing on 48 articles in Health China. The results of text analysis demonstrate Health China releases an array of themes, including “female genital organs”, “pregnancy”, “women’s mental health”, “cosmetology”, and “general disease”. The findings also indicate that power, intertextuality, and coherence are employed as discursive practices embedded in Chinese women’s empowerment. The study also sketches out the social-cultural factors, like benevolent sexism, the plummet national birth rate, and the traditional Chinese cultural values, as the primary facilitators of Chinese women’s empowerment in health communication. This study contributes to better empowering health discursive strategies for female-related health communication in China and beyond.