Gender Role Represented in Official Media: Communist Legacies and the Gap between Rhetoric and Reality

The question addressed in this paper is how the mainstream media reproduced and participated in reshaping gender discourse before and after the transformation in Russia and the Peoples Republic of China, selecting People's Daily and Rabotnitsa from 1980 to 2000 as research objects and conducting both quantitative and qualitative analysis. In general, both countries have gone through the centralised state market economy reforms and suffered the impact of free market consumerism and commercialization with these. As a result, women's aesthetic is more diversified, but it also strengthens the sexual gaze of women's bodies. There are more new occupations, but women also face great challenges when a depression or labour surplus occurs. Meanwhile, the legacies inherited by the two countries also differed to some extent. Russia experienced a more violent and comprehensive onslaught of ideas, where consumerism and commercialization were more directly reflected in the mass media, and the social gender order took on a state of tug-of-war between the traditional, communist and emerging identities, while China's reform has eroded the legacies in a more insidious and slow manner. Semiotics management remains in the hands of the Party, but economic and social liberalization are not only influencing people's..