Narratives of the Hong Kong Sovereignty Transfer: The Pragmatics of Language and Ideology in the Taiwanese and Chinese English-Language Press

The present comparative analysis of Chinese and Taiwanese English-language press narratives about Hong Kong’s handover on 1 July 1997, aims to show the power of the journalistic pen and image, generating varying media realities about the same Hong Kong story. It is buttressed by a comprehensive historical, sociological and political contextualization of the media accounts. The three newspapers examined, the China Daily (China), and the Taiwanese papers, the China News and the China Post, are each rooted in their different political beliefs, cultural assumptions, and institutional practices, in short, their ideological positions. Drawing on insights from Linguistic Pragmatics and Critical Discourse Studies, the study identifies discursive processes such as legitimation strategies, group categorization, naturalization of events that operates by presenting fluid processes as fixed truth claims, and privileging some voices over others. It also provides a theoretical model for studying Chinese official discourse about the Self and the Other. The volume shows the benefit of a historical analysis serving as an antidote to recency bias, oblivious to the set conditions that accompanied Beijing’s vague promises to Hong Kongers of political autonomy for 50 years. This book is written for anyone interested in the methodology of text analysis and in the history of and political developments in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Lutgard LAMS is Professor of Media Discourse Analysis and Intercultural Communication at KU Leuven Campus Brussels (Belgium), where she heads the Brussels Center for Journalism Studies and the Chinese Discourse Studies workgroup. Using insights from critical discourse analysis and language pragmatics, she explores linguistic aspects of meaning generation in spoken and written journalistic discourse. She has published extensively on media discourses in and about the Chinese region, strategic narratives in political communication, and media framing.