Ideological dissonances among Chinese-language newspapers in Hong Kong: A corpus-based analysis of reports on the Occupy Central Movement

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 549-566 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Dezheng Feng

The Occupy Central Movement was the biggest protest in Hong Kong in decades and 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 article 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. In total, 856 concordance lines of the two selected words ‘佔中’ ( occupy Central) and ‘佔領’ ( occupy) were annotated using the Attitude framework. Analysis shows that their attitudes toward 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.

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-144
Author(s):  
Niu Mengdi ◽  

The article is devoted to a comparative analysis of publications by Western media and Chinese media during the period of the unrest and protests caused by an amendment to the “Fugitive Offenders Ordinance” in Hong Kong in the summer of 2019. The relevance is explained by the fact that in the summer of 2019, Hong Kong immediately became the center of attention of the world community and the press. The innovation lies in comparative analysis of Chinese and Western media texts in the aspect of tolerance. The purpose of the study is to identify the reporting frames on Hong Kong protests in different countries (China, the USA, the UK) and analyze their characteristics. The author’s attention is focused on the problem of tolerance / intolerance in the discussing of events in Hong Kong by Western and Chinese media. Content analysis, frame analysis and the method of comparative studies are used in this article. Content analysis of the news reports from The Washington Post, People’s Daily and the BBC website from July to August 2019 was conducted to clarify their tones and directions, as well as the meaning of the metaphors used by journalists. The frame analysis is to identify differences in event assessments, information sources, theme settings, report objects, main subjects and event definitions in the analyzed media. The language features in texts were also compared.By results of the study, we see clear ideological bias and tendentiousness in reports from the Western media, and also the inability to have a tolerant vision. The Chinese media also strongly show peculiarities of ideology and obvious propagandistic tendency. The dogmatism of propagandistic thoughts interferes with objective perception of the situation. Conclusions: mass medias holding different positions, “choosing” and “constructing” social realities in their news reports, painting different pictures and choosing their own perspectives to reflect attitude of the authority towards participants in the movements. In this way, they take completely irreconcilable positions. Keywords: Hong Kong, protest, assessment, reportage, tolerance/intolerance


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-166
Author(s):  
Waikeung Tam

Political blogs have played an increasingly more important role in Hong Kong politics. However, research on this topic remains scarce. This analysis examines how political bloggers in Hong Kong used their blogs to participate in politics through a detailed content analysis of 960 political blog articles published on two major news websites – House News Bloggers and Speak Out HK – during the 2014 Umbrella Movement. This study found that “soapbox” stood out as the most popular function hereof, as political bloggers on both ends of the political spectrum actively used their blogs to influence the legitimacy of the Umbrella Movement in the public discourse. A substantial number of blog articles from House News Bloggers also included the functions of “transmission belt,” “informing readers,” and “mobilising political action.” Finally, only a small proportion of the articles from House News Bloggers and Speak Out HK included the function of “conversation starter.”


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 354-371
Author(s):  
Jermain T.M. Lam

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the results of Hong Kong’s 2015 District Council elections in order to test the repercussions of the Occupy Central Movement. The paper attempts to identify the political implications of the Movement as reflected by the 2015 election results. Design/methodology/approach The methodology used for the paper was to collect election data and conduct data analysis to generalize the political implications of the Occupy Central Movement. Findings The paper found that, first, Hong Kong is still polarized, as most voters were divided into those who supported the Occupy Central Movement and those who opposed it. Second, there is no consensus regarding political reforms, as most voters were split into two antagonistic positions. Third, the activists of the Occupy Central Movement have formed a new political force that attracts voters who demand change. Fourth, the Occupy Central Movement has become a breeding ground that nurtures localism. Research limitations/implications The 2015 District Council elections were a continuation of the Occupy Central Movement. The Movement affected the political balance between the pro-establishment and pan-democratic camps in the 2015 elections and it has shaped the democratization process in Hong Kong. Originality/value The paper was the product of an original research project that examined the results of the 2015 District Council elections to reflect on the implications of the Occupy Central Movement. The paper concluded that the 2015 elections sent important political messages to key political players in Hong Kong.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-137
Author(s):  
Matthew Ming-tak Chew

This study uncovers and analyzes the transborder influence of Stephen Chow’s films in China in the 2010s. This influence takes a form that is new and different from that of the first three fan cultures of Chow’s films. It operates through various online carnivalesque items co-created by Chinese netizens and cultural producers. I document this with an investigation of the online catchphrases, visual memes, and web novels inspired by Chow’s films. One can interpret this new wave of influence as the fourth fan culture of Chow’s films or as a merger between Hong Kong nonsensical culture with the Chinese online carnival. This study’s data come from primary sources including memes and web novels and secondary sources including relevant news reports, online commentaries, and Chinese-language scholarship.


2019 ◽  
pp. 78-103
Author(s):  
S.A. Romanenko

The article is devoted to the analysis of representations about AustriaHungary in Russia in political and publicists societies including Bolsheviks, Social Democrats, liberals (cadets), as well as MFA analysts from February to October. On the basis of the materials on foreign policy and the correlation of revolution and world war, from Russian daily press and journalists, which have not been studied before, the author comes to the conclusion that the representatives of the left flank of the political spectrum had neither information nor conceptually built ideas about the situation in AustriaHungary, about the perspectives for the development of revolutionary processes in the multinational state and its direction and aims. On the other hand, this was also largely characteristic of the moods of the AustroHungarian politicians, whether progovernment or opposition,Статья посвящена анализу представлений об АвстроВенгрии в России в политических и публицистических обществахв том числе большевиков, социалдемократов, либералов (кадетов), а также аналитиков МИД с февраля по октябрь. На основе материалов по внешней политике и соотношение революции и мировой войны, из российской ежедневной прессы и журналистов, которые до этого не изучались, автор приходит к выводу, что представители левого фланга политического спектра не имели ни информации, ни концептуально выстроенных представлений о ситуации в АвстроВенгрии, о перспективах развития революционных процессов в многонациональном государстве и его направленности, а также о том, что они не могли цели. С другой стороны, это было также в значительной степени характерно для настроений австровенгерских политиков, будь то проправительственные или оппозиционные, для которых цели национального движения уже в 1917 году играли гораздо большую роль, чем для русских. Для сравнительного анализа на основе архивных материалов приводятся позиции Министерства иностранных дел (Временного правительства) и Петроградского Совета.


Author(s):  
Harry Nedelcu

The mid and late 2000s witnessed a proliferation of political parties in European party systems. Marxist, Libertarian, Pirate, and Animal parties, as well as radical-right and populist parties, have become part of an increasingly heterogeneous political spectrum generally dominated by the mainstream centre-left and centre-right. The question this article explores is what led to the surge of these parties during the first decade of the 21st century. While it is tempting to look at structural arguments or the recent late-2000s financial crisis to explain this proliferation, the emergence of these parties predates the debt-crisis and can not be described by structural shifts alone . This paper argues that the proliferation of new radical parties came about not only as a result of changes in the political space, but rather due to the very perceived presence and even strengthening of what Katz and Mair (1995) famously dubbed the "cartelization" of mainstream political parties.   Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.22215/rera.v7i1.210


Author(s):  
Jianhua Xu ◽  
Guyu Sun ◽  
Wei Cao ◽  
Wenyuan Fan ◽  
Zhihao Pan ◽  
...  

AbstractThe Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to stigma, discrimination, and even hate crimes against various populations in the Chinese language–speaking world. Using interview data with victims, online observation, and the data mining of media reports, this paper investigated the changing targets of stigma from the outbreak of Covid-19 to early April 2020 when China had largely contained the first wave of Covid-19 within its border. We found that at the early stage of the pandemic, stigma was inflicted by some non-Hubei Chinese population onto Wuhan and Hubei residents, by some Hong Kong and Taiwan residents onto mainland Chinese, and by some Westerners towards overseas Chinese. With the number of cases outside China surpassing that in China, stigmatization was imposed by some Chinese onto Africans in China. We further explore how various factors, such as the fear of infection, food and mask culture, political ideology, and racism, affected the stigmatization of different victim groups. This study not only improved our understanding of how stigmatization happened in the Chinese-speaking world amid Covid-19 but also contributes to the literature of how sociopolitical factors may affect the production of hate crimes.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026327642110120
Author(s):  
Alessandro Jedlowski

On the basis of the results of an ongoing research project on the activities of the Chinese media company StarTimes in Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, this paper analyses the fluid and fragmentary dimension of the engagements between Chinese media and African publics, while equally emphasizing the power dynamics that underlie them. Focusing on a variety of ethnographic sources, it argues for an approach to the study of Chinese media expansion in Africa able to take into account, simultaneously, the macro-political and macro-economic factors which condition the nature of China–Africa media interactions, the political intentions behind them (as, for example, the Chinese soft power policies and their translation into specific media contents), and the micro dimension of the practices and uses of the media made by the actors (producers and consumers of media) in the field.


Politics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitry Chernobrov

Accusations of treason and disloyalty have been increasingly visible in both western and international politics in recent years, from Russia and Turkey, to Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election. This article explores ‘traitor’ accusations in modern politics, with evidence from British and American newspapers for 2011–2016. Besides British and American politics, results reveal reported ‘fifth column’ accusations in over 40 countries. I identify three dominant patterns: authoritarian states describing opposition movements as a ‘fifth column’; suspicion of western Muslim populations as potential terrorists; and the use of traitor language to denote party dissent in western politics. Employed across the political spectrum, and not only by right-wing or populist movements, accusations of treason and betrayal point at a deeper breakdown of social trust and communicate collective securitizing responses to perceived threats.


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