Representing Hong Kong Identity in Newspapers:
A Corpus-based Study of ‘Hongkonger’, 2001-2020

Abstract

In the twenty-two years from the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China in 1997 to the months-long political protests sparked by the controversial plan to allow extraditions to mainland China in 2019, Hong Kong’s political changes reached a tipping point and led to an identity crisis for its people. Using Homi Bhabha’s ‘hybridity’ idea as theoretical framework, this study investigates Hong Kong people’s postcoloniality and unveils the complex relationship between Hong Kong’s political movements and Hongkongers’ postcolonial political mind-set.
Due to newspapers’ close connection with local people and politics, articles from five Hong Kong newspapers, namely, Apple Daily (蘋果日報), Hong Kong Economic Journal (信報), Ming Pao (明報), Oriental Daily (東方日報), and Wen Wei Po (文匯報), are examined to focus on changes in the Hongkonger identity between 2001 and 2020, a period covering several iconic post-handover political incidents. A methodology consisting of corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and in-depth interviews is adopted to analyse the material in both qualitative and quantitative approaches, and helps to answer the following three questions: (1) How has the Hongkonger identity been represented by the coverage of political movements by the five case-study newspapers in the sample period? (2) Why was this identity represented in these ways? What are motivating factors that led to such representations? (3) What journalistic strategies have the newspapers adopted when establishing these representations, and why?
By examining the three most conflict-laden political movements in post-handover Hong Kong—the Moral and National Education controversy in 2012, the Umbrella Movement in 2014, and the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill protests in 2019— this study argues that the versions of the Hongkonger identity representations were resulted from Hong Kong people’s political postcoloniality. This postcoloniality intensified the conflicts hidden in the ‘in-between’ Hongkonger identity thereby aggravating mainland China–Hong Kong tensions and eventually bringing the city to a point of ‘no turning back’.