Cover not available

Introduction published In: Language, Politics and Media: The Hong Kong Protests
Edited by Guofeng Wang and Ming Liu
[Journal of Language and Politics 21:1] 2022
► pp. 1–16

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required
Introduction

An introduction to the special issue on “Language, Politics and Media: The Hong Kong protests”

 | Hong Kong Polytechnic University
ORCiD logo with link | Shanghai Normal University
Published online: 29 September 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.21056.liu
Abstract
Protests and social movements have become part of Hong Kong’s local politics since the 1970s. However, protests against the proposed extradition bill in 2019‒20 turned out to be the most violent political mass movement in Hong Kong after its return to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. It not only drew wide international attention but also evoked another round of “news war” over Hong Kong (Lee, Chin-Chuan, Joseph M. Chan, Zhongdang Pan, and Clement Y. K. So. 2002. Global Media Spectacle: News War Over Hong Kong. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). This special issue collects six articles which address the representations of the protests in Hong Kong by different parties on different media platforms. Adopting a critical discourse analysis approach, these studies examine discursive strategies employed in media representations of the protests and the ideologies and power struggles at play. It aims to present different perspectives towards the issue and shed light on the complex relations between language, media and politics in the representations of the Hong Kong protests.
Article outline
  • 1.Language, politics and media
  • 2.The protests in Hong Kong and the anti-extradition bill movement
  • 3.Overview of the special issue
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (74)
References
BBC News. “The Hong Kong Protests Explained in 100 and 500 Words.” November 28, 2019. [URL]
Baker, Paul. 2006. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, Majid Khosravinik, Michał Krzyzanowski, Tony McEnery, and Ruth Wodak. 2008. “A Useful Methodological Synergy? Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to Examine Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press.” Discourse and Society 19 (3): 273–306. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boykoff, Jules. 2006. “Framing Dissent: Mass-media Coverage of the Global Justice Movement.” New Political Science 28 (2): 201–228. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boyle, Michael P., Douglas M. McLeod, and Cory. L. Armstrong. 2012. “Adherence to the Protest Paradigm: The Influence of Protest Goals and Tactics on News Coverage in US and International Newspapers.” The International Journal of Press/Politics 17 (2): 127–144. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Button, Mark, Tim John, and Nigel Brearley. 2002. “New Challenges in Public Order Policing: The Professionalisation of Environmental Protest and the Emergence of the Militant Environmental Activist.” International Journal of the Sociology of Law 30(1): 17–32. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cammaerts, Bart. 2012. “Protest Logics and the Mediation Opportunity Structure.” European Journal of Communication 27 (2): 117–134. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. “The Mediation of Insurrectionary Symbolic Damage: The 2010 UK Student Protests.” The International Journal of Press/Politics 18 (4): 525–548. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cammaerts, Bart, Alice Mattoni, and Patrick McCurdy. (Eds.). 2013. Mediation and Protest Movements. Bristol: Intellect Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cheng, Joseph Yu-shek. 2014. “The Emergence of Radical Politics in Hong Kong: Causes and Impact.” The China Review 14 (1): 199–232. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cheng, Winnie, and Phoenix Lam. 2010. “Media Discourses in Hong Kong: Change in Representation of Human Rights.” Text & Talk 30 (5): 507–527. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chiu, Stephen Wing Kai, and Tai Lok Lui. 2000. The Dynamics of Social Movements in Hong Kong: Real and Financial Linkages and the Prospects for Currency Union (Vol. 11). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chouliaraki, Lilie. 2013. “Re-Mediation, Inter-Mediation, Trans-Mediation.” Journalism Studies 14 (2): 267–283. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chung, Hiu-Fung. 2020. “Changing Repertoires of Contention in Hong Kong: A Case Study on the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement.” China Perspectives 31: 57–63. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cottle, Simon. 2008. “Reporting Demonstrations: The Changing Media Politics of Dissent.” Media, Culture and Society 30 (6): 853–872. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Media Discourse. London: Arnold.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fang, Yew-Jin. 1994. “‘Riots’ and Demonstrations in the Chinese Press: A Case Study of Language and Ideology”. Discourse and Society 5 (4): 463–48. [URL].
Flowerdew, John, and Rodney Jones. 2016. “Occupy Hong Kong: Historicizing Protest.” Journal of Language and Politics 15 (5):521–528. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fowler, Roger. 1991. Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gamson, William A. 1995. “Constructing Social Protest.” In Social Movements and Culture, ed. by Hank Johnston, and Bert Minneapolis Klandermans, 85–106. London: Rouledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gamson, William A., and Gadi Wolfsfeld. 1993. “Movements and Media as Interacting Systems.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 528 (1): 114–125. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gans, Herbert J. 1979. Deciding What’s News: A Study Of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time. New York: Phantheon Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ghobrial, Bahaa G., and Karin G. Wilkins. 2015. “The Politics of Political Communication: Competing News Discourses of the 2011 Egyptian Protests.” International Communication Gazette, 77 (2): 129–150. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Greer, Chris, and Eugene McLaughlin. 2010. “We Predict a Riot? Public Order Policing, New Media Environments and the Rise of the Citizen Journalist.” The British Journal of Criminology 50 (6): 1041–1059. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haarman, Louann, and Linda Lombardo. 2009. Evaluation and Stance in War News. London: ContinuumGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hackett, Robert A., and Yuezhi Zhao. 1994. “Challenging a Master Narrative: Peace Protest and Opinion/Editorial Discourse in the US Press during the Gulf War.” Discourse and Society 5 (4): 509–541. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hallin, Daniel C., and Paolo Mancini. 2004. Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2012. Comparing Media Systems beyond the Western World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hart, Christopher. 2014. “Construal Operations in Online Press Reports of Political Protests.” In Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies, ed. by Christopher Hart, and Piotr Cap, 167–188. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hertog, James K., and Douglas M. McLeod. 1995. “Anarchists Wreak Havoc in Downtown Minneapolis: A Multi-level Study of Media Coverage of Radical Protest.” Journalism and Communication Monographs (151): 1–48.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jungherr, Andreas, Harald Schoen, and Pascal Jürgens. 2016. “The Mediation of Politics through Twitter: An Analysis of Messages Posted during the Campaign for the German Federal Election 2013.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 21 (1): 50–68. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krzyżanowski, Michał. 2020. “Normalization and the Discursive Construction of ‘New’ Norms and ‘New’ Normality: Discourse in the Paradoxes of Populism and Neoliberalism.” Social Semiotics 30 (4): 431–448. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krzyżanowski, Michał, Anna Triandafyllidou, and Ruth Wodak. 2018. “The Mediatization and the Politicization of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Europe.” Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies 16 (1–2): 1–14. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ku, Agnes S. 2007. “Constructing and contesting the ‘order’ imagery in media discourse: Implications for civil society in Hong Kong.” Asian Journal of Communication 17 (2):186–200. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ku, Agnes Shuk-mei. 2020. “New forms of youth activism – Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Bill movement in the local-national-global nexus.” Space and Polity 24 (1): 111–117. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lee, Chin-Chuan, Joseph M. Chan, Zhongdang Pan, and Clement. Y. K. So. 2000. “National Prisms of a Global Media Event.” In Mass Media and Society, ed. by James Curran, and Michael Gurevitch, 295–309. London: Arnold.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lee, Chin-Chuan, Joseph M. Chan, Zhongdang Pan, and Clement Y. K. So. 2002. Global Media Spectacle: News War Over Hong Kong. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lee, Francis L. F. 2014. “Triggering the Protest Paradigm: Examining Factors Affecting News Coverage of Protests.” International Journal of Communication 8 (22): 2725–2746.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2018. “Internet Alternative Media, Movement Experience, and Radicalism: The Case of Post-Umbrella Movement Hong Kong.” Social Movement Studies 17 (2): 219–233. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2020a. “Social Media and the Spread of Fake News during a Social Movement: The 2019 Anti-ELAB Protests in Hong Kong.” Communication and the Public 5 (3–4): 122–125. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2020b. “Solidarity in the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong.” Critical Asian Studies 52 (1): 18–32. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lee, Francis L. F., and Joseph M. Chan. 2011. Media, Social Mobilisation and Mass Protests in Post-colonial Hong Kong. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lee, Francis L. F., Edmund W. Cheng, Hai Liang, Gary K. Y. Tang, and Samson Yuen. 2021. “Dynamics of Tactical Radicalisation and Public Receptiveness in Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Bill Movement.” Journal of Contemporary Asia: 1–23. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lee, Francis L. F., Gary K. Y. Tang, Samson Yuen, and Edmund W. Cheng. 2020. “Five Demands and (Not Quite) Beyond: Claim Making and Ideology in Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Bill Movement.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 53 (4): 22–40. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lee, Junghi, and Robert L. Craig. 1992. “News as an Ideological Framework: Comparing US Newspapers’ Coverage of Labor Strikes in South Korea and Poland.” Discourse and Society 3 (3): 341–363. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Liu, Ming. 2015. “Scapegoat or Manipulated Victim? Metaphorical Representations of the Sino-US Currency Dispute in Chinese and American Financial News.” Text and Talk 35 (3): 337–357. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2020. “One City, Two Stories: Competing Discursive Constructions of Postcolonial Hong Kong in Chinese and American Newspapers.” In Working with Discourses: Corpus and Systemic Functional Perspectives, ed. by Josef Schmied, Chenguang Chang, and Matthias Hofmann, 143–160. Göttingen: Cuvillier Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Liu, Ming, and Cong Jiang. 2019. “Constant Fear, But Lingering Nostalgia: British Press Representations of Post-colonial Hong Kong 20 Years on.” Discourse and Communication 13 (6): 630–646. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Liu, Ming, and Jiali Zhong. 2020. “Between National and Local: Identity Representations of Post-colonial Hong Kong in a Local English Newspaper.” Discourse, Context and Media. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Martin, Martin F. 2007. Hong Kong: Ten Years after the Handover. Washington D.C.: CRS Report for Congress.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Martín Rojo, Luisa. 2014. “Occupy: The spatial dynamics of discourse in global protest movements.” Journal of Language and Politics 13 (4):583–598. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mautner, Gerlinde. 2009a. “Checks and Balances: How Corpus Linguistics Can Contribute to CDA.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (2nd Edition), ed. by Ruth Wodak, and Michael Meyer, 122–143. London: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2009b. “Corpora and Critical Discourse Analysis.” In Contemporary Corpus Linguistics, ed. by Paul Baker, 32–46. New York: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McLeod, Douglas. M. 2007. “News Coverage and Social Protest: How the Media’s Protect Paradigm Exacerbates Social Conflict.” Journal of Dispute Resolution (1): 185–194.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McLeod, Douglas M., Hertog, James K. 1999. “Social Control, Social Change and the Mass Media’s Role in the Regulation of Protest Groups.” In Mass Media, Social Control and Social Change: A Macrosocial Perspective, ed. by David Demers, and Kasisomayajula Viswanath, 305–330. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Partington, Alan. 2004. “Corpora and Discourse, a Most Congruous Beast.” In Corpora and Discourse, ed. by Alan Partington, John Morley, and Louann Haarman, 11–20. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Purbrick, Martin. 2019. “A Report of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests.” Asian Affairs 50 (4): 465–487. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shoemaker, Pamela. J. 1982. “The Perceived Legitimacy of Deviant Political Groups: Two Experiments on Media Effects.” Communication Research 9 (2): 249–286. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shoemaker, Pamela J. 1984. “Media Treatment of Deviant Political Groups.” Journalism Quarterly 61 (1): 66–82. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Strömbäck, Jesper. 2008. “Four Phases of Mediatization: An Analysis of the Mediatization of Politics.” The International Journal of Press/Politics 13 (3): 228–246. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thomas, Tanja, and Miriam Stehling. 2015. “The Communicative Construction of FEMEN: Naked Protest in Self-mediation and German Media Discourse.” Feminist Media Studies 16 (1): 86–100. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Trew, Tony. 1979. “Theory and Ideology at Work.” In Language and Control, ed. by Roger Fowler, Bob Hodge, Gunther Kress, and Tony Trew, 94–116. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Uldam, Julie. 2013. “Activism and the Online Mediation Opportunity Structure: Attempts to Impact Global Climate Change Policies?” Policy and Internet 5 (1): 56–75. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. 1991. Racism and the Press. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2011. Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. London: Sage. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wang, Guofeng, and Xueqin Ma. 2021. “Were They Illegal Rioters or Pro-democracy Protestors? Examining the 2019–20 Hong Kong Protests in China Daily and The New York Times.” Critical Arts. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wisler, Dominique, and Marco Giugni. 1999. “Under the Spotlight: The Impact of Media Attention on Protest Policing.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 4 (2): 171–187. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wittebols, James H. 1996. “News from the Noninstitutional World: US and Canadian Television News Coverage of Social Protest.” Political Communication 13 (3): 345–361. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, and Bernhard Forchtner. 2018. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer. 2016a. “Critical Discourse Studies: History, Agenda, Theory and Methodology.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (Third Edition), ed. by Ruth Wodak, and Michael Meyer, 1–22. London: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. (Eds.). 2016b. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Woller, Almut. 2018. “Self-mediation Practices of Arab Anarchists.” In Digital Media and the Politics of Transformation in the Arab World and Asia, ed. by Carola Richter, Anna Antonakis, and Cilja Harders, 35–60. Wiesbaden: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Dymova, A. V., A. I. Zolotaiko & A. P. Chudinov
2025. Hong Kong Protests (2019–2020): The Formation of the Police and Protesters Images in the Chinese Internet Discourse. Vestnik NSU. Series: History and Philology 24:2 ► pp. 74 ff. DOI logo
Mo, Hao
2025. Constructing and framing violent protests in news translation: a narrative analysis of the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Perspectives 33:4 ► pp. 816 ff. DOI logo
Robles, Jessica S. & Bingjuan Xiong
2024. How quotation marks do mockery in online politicized discourse. Journal of Language and Politics DOI logo
Chen, Fu & Guofeng Wang
2023. A topic modeling-assisted diachronic study of “One Country, Two Systems” represented in Anglo-American newspapers. Journal of Language and Politics 22:6 ► pp. 869 ff. DOI logo
sarbunan, thobias
2022. Puttin-ism. SSRN Electronic Journal DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue