Negotiating harmony via strategic emotion: Pragmatic identity construction in Chinese televised mediation

Hui Xue and Jiwei Yue
Central China Normal University

This study investigates how mediators in Chinese televised mediation strategically employ emotion to negotiate state-mandated harmony and construct specific pragmatic identities. We integrate sentiment analysis (SnowNLP) with discourse analysis to model emotional discourse and identity construction in six full episodes from The Third Mediation Room. Findings reveal that mediators perform “hybrid pragmatic identities”, shifting across three roles, emotion-driven coordinator (building trust), emotion-regulated facilitator (de-escalating tension), and emotion-integrated balancer (prioritizing communal interest). This role-shifting constitutes staged neutrality, whereby mediators orchestrate their emotional discourse from empathetic negativity (conflict emergence) to enforced positivity (escalation) and finally to performative neutrality (interest coordination), thereby legitimizing state-aligned authority. While intended to resolve disputes, this mandated harmony functions as a cultural-political imperative that restructures communicative boundaries and may sideline genuine emotional reconciliation. The findings contribute to understanding how strategic sentiment operates as a core mechanism in Chinese conflict resolution, with implications for the governance of public discourse.

Publication history

Date received: 11 November 2025

Date accepted: 27 May 2026

Table of contents

In China, mediation functions as a crucial discourse practice for state governance. It operates through mediators’ strategic orchestration of language, identity, and emotion, all directed toward constructing a politically legitimate identity that balances emotional engagement with ideological alignment. This process involves the pursuit of neutrality as an institutionally normative role tied to mediators’ procedural norms (Greatbatch and Dingwall 1989). Within such state-endorsed systems, emotional expression and identity construction are mutually constitutive: the pursuit of normative role expectations (such as neutrality) regulates emotion, while the deliberate management of emotion, in turn, reinforces the performance of such roles, ultimately calibrating discourse to reproduce state-mandated social norms (Jones and Bodtker 2001).

Funding

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Central China Normal University.

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Address for correspondence

Jiwei Yue

Central China Normal University

Luonan Street

Wuhan

China

[email protected]
ORCiD logo with linkhttps://orcid.org/0009-0003-2122-6981

Co-author information

Hui Xue
Central China Normal University
[email protected]
ORCiD logo with linkhttps://orcid.org/0009-0009-8456-7007
 
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