Narratives of the Hong Kong Sovereignty Transfer

The Pragmatics of Language and Ideology in the Taiwanese and Chinese English-Language Press
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-26400-4
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: 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.

Zielgruppe

Academic

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lams, Lutgard

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Soziolinguistik
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Kommunikationswissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Fremdsprachenerwerb und -didaktik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

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.