We investigated how two English-language newspapers – Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP) and the mainland China Daily (CD) – portrayed key social actors (police, students, protesters, and governments) during the Occupy Central/Yellow Umbrella movement. We examined emotional valence, arousal, and dominance characterizations in 1,180 news articles via a multilevel, multivariate outcome regression and critical discourse analysis. The findings reveal that emotional sentiments associated with students and protesters in SCMP were generally more positive than in CD but that this was reversed for the police and the government. Whereas SCMP deployed personal stories to construct a humanized image of protesters and students, CD relied on expert authority, rhetorical questions, and imagined scenarios to convey empathy towards Hong Kong residents, creating a villainized image of protesters. Our mixed-methods approach reveals how SCMP and CD portrayed students differently via the discursive frames of “optimistic dreamers” and “powerless scapegoats,” respectively.
2014 “Hong Kong Students to Boycott Class to Protest China Curbs on Democracy.” Reuters, September 21, 2014. [URL]
Barboza, David
2015 “Alibaba Buying South China Morning Post, Aiming to Influence Media.” The New York Times, December 11, 2015. [URL]
Bennett, Samuel
2019 “Values as Tools of Legitimation in EU and UK Brexit Discourses.” In Discourses of Brexit, ed. by Veronika Koller, Susanne Kopf, and Marlene Miglbauer, 17–31. London: Routledge.
Benjamini, Yoav, Abba M. Krieger, and Daniel Yekutieli
2006 “Adaptive Linear Step-Up Procedures That Control the False Discovery Rate.” Biometrika 93 (3): 491–507.
Bertsekas, Dimitri P.
2014Constrained Optimization and Lagrange Multiplier Methods. Cambridge, MA: Academic Press.
2008Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bradley, Tamsin
2009 “Religion and Globalisation.” Globalizations 6 (2): 265–279.
Cabalin, Cristian
2014 “The Conservative Response to the 2011 Chilean Student Movement.” Discourse 35 (4): 485–498.
Cabrejas-Peñuelas, Ana B., and Mercedes Díez-Prados
2014 “Positive Self-Evaluation versus Negative Other-Evaluation in the Political Genre of Pre-Election Debates.” Discourse & Society 25 (2): 159–185.
Ceron, Andrea, Luigi Curini, and Stefano M. Iacus
2016 “First-and second-level agenda setting in the Twittersphere: An application to the Italian political debate.” Journal of Information Technology & Politics 13(2): 159–174.
China Daily
2017 “About Us: China Daily’s Print Media.” China Daily. Accessed January 31, 2020, [URL]
Chen, Xinran Andy
2016 “Cultural Framing in Social Movements.” Virginia Review of Asian Studies 181: 1–20.
Fendler, Lynn
2006 “Others and the Problem of Community.” Curriculum Inquiry 36 (3): 303–326.
2014 “How the Umbrella Became a Symbol of the Hong Kong Democracy Protests.” The Guardian, September 29, 2014. [URL]
Hollander, Barry A.
1996 “Talk Radio.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 73 (1): 102–113.
Kennedy, Peter
2008A Guide to Econometrics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Khosravinik, Majid
2009 “The Representation of Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Immigrants in British Newspapers during the Balkan Conflict (1999) and the British General Election (2005).” Discourse & Society 20 (4): 477–498.
Konstantopoulos, Spyros
2008 “The Power of the Test in Three-Level Cluster Randomized Designs.” Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness 1 (1): 66–88.
Kottasova, Ivana
2015 “Alibaba buys South China Morning Post.” CNN Business, December 11, 2015. [URL]
Lakoff, George
1991 “Metaphor and War.” Peace Research 231, 25–32.
Lee, Chin Chuan
2010 “Bound to rise: Chinese media discourses on the new global order.” In Reorienting global communication: Indian and Chinese media beyond borders, ed. by Michael Curtin, and Shah Hemant, 260–283. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
Liu, Lihua
2010Interpersonal Rhetoric in the Editorials of China Daily. Bern: Peter Lang Publishing.
MacKinnon, David P., Chondra M. Lockwood, and Jason Williams
2004 “Confidence Limits for the Indirect Effect.” Multivariate Behavioral Research 39 (1): 99–128.
Mann, William C., and Sandra A. Thompson
1988 “Rhetorical Structure Theory.” Text: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 8 (3): 243–281.
Martin, Denis-Constant
1995 “The Choices of Identity.” Social Identities 1 (1): 5–20.
Martin, J. R. and White, P. R. R.
2005The Language of Evaluation. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan.
Mey, Jacob L., and Hans J. Ladegaard
2015 “Discourse, Democracy and Diplomacy.” Word 61 (4): 319–334.
Miglbauer, Marlene, and Veronika Koller
2019 “The British people have spoken” In Discourses of Brexit, ed. by Veronika Koller, Susanne Kopf, and Marlene Miglbauer, 86–103. London: Routledge.
Musolff, Andreas
2017 “Metaphor, Irony and Sarcasm in Public Discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 1091: 95–104.
Naeem, Waqasia, and Muhammad Shaban Rafi
2019 “Linguistic Realization of Legitimation of Power by Zia ul Haq and Pervez Musharraf during the Afghanistan Wars.” Journal of Political Studies 26 (1): 31–57.
Nightingale, Alastair, Michael Quayle, and Orla Muldoon
2017 “It’s just heart breaking: Doing Inclusive Political Solidarity or Ambivalent Paternalism through Sympathetic Discourse within the ‘Refugee Crisis’ Debate.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 27 (2): 13–146.
Nuolijärvi, Pirkko, and Liisa Tiittula
2011 “Irony in Political Television Debates.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2): 572–587.
Öztürk, Nazan, and Serkan Ayvaz
2018 “Sentiment Analysis on Twitter.” Telematics and Informatics 35 (1): 136–147.
Phillips, Tom
2016 “Mysterious Confession Fuels Fears of Beijing’s Influence on Hong Kong’s Top Newspaper.” The Guardian, July 25, 2016. [URL]
Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak
2009 “The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA).” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (2nd ed.), ed. by Ruth Wodak, and Michael Meyer, 87–121. London: Sage.
Reyes, Antonio
2011 “Strategies of Legitimation in Political Discourse.” Discourse & Society 22 (6): 781–807.
2007 “Legitimation in discourse and communication.” Discourse & Communication 1 (1): 91–112.
Van Leeuwen, Theo A.
2008Discourse and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Warriner, Amy Beth, Victor Kuperman, and Marc Brysbaert
2013 “Norms of Valence, Arousal, and Dominance for 13,915 English Lemmas.” Behavior Research Methods 45 (4): 1191–1207.
Wenzl, Nora
2019 “This is about the kind of Britain we are.” In Discourses of Brexit, ed. by Veronika Koller, Susanne Kopf, and Marlene Miglbauer, 32–47. London: Routledge.
Wodak, Ruth
2001 “The Discourse Historical Approach.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. by Ruth Wodak, and Michael Meyer, 63–94. London: Sage.
Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf De Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and K. Liebhart
2009The Discursive Construction of National Identities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Yin, Liangen, and Wang Haiyan
2010 “People-centred myth: Representation of the Wenchuan earthquake in China Daily.” Discourse & Communication 4 (4): 383–398.
Zappavigna, Michele
2019 “Ambient Affiliation and #Brexit.” In Discourses of Brexit, ed. by Veronika Koller, Susanne Kopf, and Marlene Miglbauer, 48–68. London: Routledge.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. 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.