Traumatizing and healing: How media memorialize the comfort women

Until recently, the story of “comfort women” was more or less suppressed as a kind of national humiliation in China; however, it has received more diverse media attention in recent years. Through the framing analysis of articles on the issue of comfort women in three different newspapers in China, this research examines similarities and differences in media treatment of the topic. While differences in media frames reflect variations in the national, provincial and metro orientations of different newspapers, overall media memorialization of the topic by the three newspapers reveals that the cultural wound is still not healed both on a national and individual level. The paper argues that Chinese media should take the responsibility of crafting new identities for comfort women, in order to help them finally gain respect.