Narratives of the Hong Kong Sovereignty Transfer

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.