The Political Function of “Ethnic Unity” Discourse in Ningxia Daily: A Corpus-Based Study of Muslim-Related Reports, 2019–2023

Despite extensive research on national media, provincial newspapers’ role in ethnic governance remains underexplored. This study applies corpus-assisted discourse analysis with NVivo to 761 Muslim-related articles from Ningxia Daily (2019–2023). Findings reveal that economic themes dominated coverage (37.7%) while religious content remained marginal (5.6%), with government sources comprising 55.6% of citations. We theorize “strategic visibility” as selective amplification of state-sanctioned ethnic attributes that differs from suppression or symbolic tokenism by maintaining ethnic presence while reshaping its meaning. This framework advances understanding of how subnational media negotiate integration and cultural recognition in authoritarian contexts.