Narratives of the Hong Kong Sovereignty Transfer: The Pragmatics of Language and Ideology in the Taiwanese and Chinese English-Language Press(Routledge Studies in Chinese Discourse Analysis)

This comparative analysis of Chinese and Taiwanese English-language press narratives about Hong Kong’s handover on 1 July 1997, buttressed by a historical, sociological and political contextualization of the media accounts, shows the power of the pen, generating varying media realities about the same Hong Kong story. 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 by presenting fluid processes as fixed truth claims, and privileging some voices over others, and 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 fifty 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.

Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTION: Discourse Power and Struggle over Meanings PART I: Theory and Contextualization of the Narratives Ch1: Theoretical Foundations Ch 2: Historical Contextualization of the Narratives Ch 3: Media Ecologies in Taiwan and China in the 90s Ch 4: Discourses on Hong Kong and the Handover Ch 5: The Constructed Media Reality: Diverging Media Narratives in the Anglo-American Sphere and the Chinese, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese Chinese-language Media Perspectives PART II: Empirical Analysis: Decoding the Kaleidoscope of Meanings Ch 6: Research Design Ch 7: Findings: Scanning the Spectrum of Narratives Ch 8: Building a Theoretical Framework for Studying Chinese Discourses on Identity, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building EPILOGUE: Understanding the Present through the Prism of the Past APPENDIX: Chronology of Events Prior to the Hong Kong Sovereignty Transfer (1955–1997) References Index

About the Author :
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.

Review :
“A deep dive into English media’s divergent narratives of the reversion of Hong Kong to Chinese rule. Lams’ meticulous research contrasts China’s monolithic view of the villain/victim framework of Sino-British relations over the entire 156 years of the colonial period with the differences and convergences within Taiwan’s pluralistic media, pointing out that constructed myths of national and cultural identity can be demystified only by keeping an open but critical attitude toward alternate versions of reality. She addresses the question of the meaning of meaning as perceived by different audiences.” Dr. June Teufel Dreyer金德芳, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Miami “The geopolitical dynamics having hit up between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan, attention must be paid to not only what leaders on both sides of the Strait say but also the tone, nuances and subtle underpinnings of these discourses. No expert is better-placed than Lutgard Lams in revealing the inner workings and rhetorical quirks of political utterances coming from the propaganda-prone administration of the Chinese leadership, as echoed in the Chinese state media accounts. In this volume, the author returns to the late 1990s to explore the variations in perspectives about the Hong Kong handover, not only between Chinese and Taiwanese newspapers, but more importantly, between the Taiwanese media outlets. The linguistic analysis of the Taiwanese newspapers reveals the growth of a pluralist society with various positions toward issues of cultural and national identity. By revisiting the Chinese discourses of those days, Lams connects present-day realities of Hong Kong to the opaque Chinese discourses uttered in the 1990s about Hong Kong’s future. Rich in scope, offering discourse-analytical guidelines besides insights into Hong Kong and Taiwan history, including media ecologies, this book is a must read for anyone interested in Chinese linguistics, discourse and media analysis, PRC-Taiwan relations and Chinese and Asian studies.” Dr Willy Lam, Senior China Fellow at Jamestown Foundation, a foreign-policy think-tank in Washington D.C., professor of Chinese politics, history and foreign affairs at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 2007 to 2022, and professor of China studies at Akita International University in Japan from 2004 to 2007.