Negotiating Harmony via Strategic Emotion: Pragmatic Identity Construction in Chinese Televised Mediation

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.