Probing Social Identity Bias in Chinese LLMs with Gendered Pronouns and Social Groups

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing applications, raising concerns that they may reflect and amplify social biases.We investigate social identity biases in Chinese LLMs using Mandarinspecific prompts across ten representative models.Our evaluation compares ingroup ("We") and outgroup ("They") framings across 240 social groups salient in the Chinese context, using a two-tiered measurement framework that assesses both sentiment and toxicity.The prompt design explicitly accounts for linguistic properties of Mandarin, including the distinction between the default plural pronoun 他们 and the explicitly feminine plural 她们, enabling a controlled comparison of social identity framing effects.Across models, we observe systematic ingroup-outgroup asymmetries, although their expression differs across measurement dimensions.In particular, instruction tuning often reduces sentiment asymmetries, while toxicity gaps remain more persistent.Moreover, the feminine-marked plural 她们 is associated with higher toxicity than the default plural in several models.Our study introduces a language-aware evaluation framework for Chinese LLMs and shows that (i) social identity biases previously documented in English also manifest in Chinese and that (ii) Mandarin-specific linguistic structure can reveal bias patterns that are not directly observable in English-only settings.