Ideological Dissonances among Chinese Language Newspapers in Hong Kong

What is it about?

The Occupy Central Movement was the biggest protest in Hong Kong in decades and has caused an unprecedented division of opinion in society. Reports about the event in local Chinese media were remarkably different in stance and attitude. To understand the ideological dissonances and their linguistic construction, this paper analyzes a corpus of 120 reports on the Occupy Central Movement from four major Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong, namely, Apple Daily, Ming Pao, Oriental Daily News and Ta Kung Pao, which cover the political spectrum from anti-Beijing to pro-Beijing. 857 concordance lines of the two selected words ‘佔中’ (occupy central) and ‘佔領’ (occupy) were annotated using the Attitude framework (Martin and White, 2005). Analysis shows that their attitudes towards the event form a continuum from supportive, through neutral, to antipathic. The attitudes do not simply reflect the stances of the newspapers, but are strategically selected and designed to legitimize or delegitimize the event. The pattern of attitudes reflects the ideological divergence in Hong Kong society, and at the same time, the news reports also exacerbate the divergence by reinforcing the attitudes of their readers.

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Why is it important?

this study provides an analytical framework to elucidate how stance is realized through choices of attitude, and how these choices construct and legitimize the stance. It enables us to understand the nature and extent of the ideological dissonances among Hong Kong’s major Chinese newspapers through explicit discourse analysis of a dataset of 120 reports. Although the coexistence of different opinions is normal in a democratic society, the polarized stances and the strongly biased reports among mainstream Chinese media in Hong Kong is unusual. The situation is not getting any better in the post-OCM Hong Kong, and voices of ‘autonomy’, ‘selfdetermination’ and even ‘independence’, terms which were previously considered off-limits, have appeared in the media (Flowerdew and Jones, 2016). ‘Only time will tell how the itineraries of discourse initiated by the movement will develop as Hong Kong’s political evolution and relationship with Mainland China continue to be debated’ (Flowerdew and Jones, 2016: 521). However, it is time that mainstream media be more neutral, impartial and objective to restore rationality, dialogue and harmony in Hong Kong politics and society.