Epilogue

A concluding chapter synthesizes the main results of the empirical study, highlighting the ideological complexity of the handover reports by indicating convergences and divergences between the three corpora and demystifying some of the naturalized narratives. A final coda reflects on the link between contemporary realities in Hong Kong (HK) and the former discourses about the handover and shows how an analysis of historical discourses, through spectacles of the past, can illuminate contemporary points of contention. Indeed, the present condition in which the emphasis is more on ‘one country’ than on ‘two systems’ was already subject to heated debate in the 1997 projections of future scenarios. Linking the findings of the discourse analysis with current conditions in HK, the coda revisits criticism of the early negative media forecasts about HK's future and draws attention to the great consistency in the discursive hedges and delay mechanisms in the legal texts determining HK's future (the Joint Declaration [JD] and the Basic Law [BL]), the Chinese leadership's speeches and the People's Republic of China (PRC) media accounts at the time of the handover. Parallels are drawn with similar examples of the ambiguous Chinese official communication style in more recent legislation, such as the National Security Law, all leaving ample interpretative space.