Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Lutgard Lams
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
ISBN:  

9781032264004

ISBN 10:   1032264004
Pages:   302
Publication Date:   18 November 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: a brief introduction captures the reader’s attention by showing the relevance of studying earlier discourses on the future of Hong Kong (both in Chinese and Taiwanese media accounts) in view of the latest political developments in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Part 1, Theory, Methodology and contextualisation of the narratives Chapter 2 Wider socio-political context comprises two sections: (1) “From Hong Kong to SAR” ; (2) “From ROC to Taiwan”. with Chinese characteristics'. Chapter 3 (“Situational context of the media narratives: media ecology in Taiwan and China”) bby which started negotiations on their own terms with the Chinese leadership. The second subsection on the Chinese Official Discourse on the Sovereignty Transfer introduces the reader to the narratives’ discursive struggle between ""Asian values"" and ""Western liberal philosophies represented as universal values"", competing for hegemonic power in meaning construction. It especially looks into the official Chinese position, articulated in official speeches, on the handover for comparative purposes with the various viewpoints in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Chapter 4 Discourses on the Handover Chapter 5 Constructed media reality: one event, multiple interpretations Part 2: Empirical text analysis This part forms the analytical part of the book and provides the main findings of the empirical analysis of all Hong Kong-related articles within the corpus. It is divided into two chapters. Chapter 6 Methodological approach outlines Chapter 7 Findings: scanning the spectrum of narratives Epilogue A general conclusion synthesizes the main observations and reflects on the method of a comparative language-pragmatic analysis to tease out the power of the journalistic pen.

Reviews

“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.

Author Information

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.

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