Cover not available
Article 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. 37–59

The politics of fear in Hong Kong protest representations

A corpus-assisted discourse study

ORCID logo | The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
| Sun Yat-sen University

This study gives a corpus-assisted discourse study of the representations of 2019 Hong Kong protests in the New York Times. With the corpus-analytic tools Wmatrix and Wordsmith, it examines both the dominant patterns in its representations and the specific strategies used. The findings suggest that while NYT still draws on the traditional patterns in its representations of Hong Kong protests, it deviates from the protest paradigm in its representations of concerned parties. Meanwhile, emotion discourse has emerged as a distinct strategy in its representations. This is most revealing in the emotion of fear, and a close analysis of its use in its context has revealed its role in the construction of concerned parties and the distrust of Hong Kong people towards the Chinese government.

Keywords: protests, Hong Kong, corpus-assisted discourse study, emotion, fear
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Emotion in news discourse and the politics of fear
  • 3.Corpus-assisted discourse studies
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Data
    • 4.2Analytic methods
  • 5.Findings
    • 5.1General analysis of key SMCs
    • 5.2Analysis of key emotion SMCs
    • 5.3Analysis of the lemma fear*
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 5 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.21019.liu
References
Altheide, David
2003 “Notes towards a politics of fear.” Journal for Crime, Conflict and the Media 1 (1): 37–54.Google Scholar
2006 Terrorism and the Politics of Fear. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Altheide, David, and R. Sam Michalowski
1999 “Fear in the news: A discourse of control.” Sociological Quarterly 40 (3): 475–503. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Paul
2006 Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London and New York: Continuum. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, Majid KhosraviNik, Michał Krzyżanowski, 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 & Society 19 (3): 273–306. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bednarek, Monika
2008 Emotion Talk across Corpora. London: Palgrave. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 “Investigating evaluation and news values in news items that are shared through social media.” Corpora 11 (2): 227–257. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bhatia, Aditi
2015 “Construction of discursive illusions in the ‘Umbrella Movement’.” Discourse & Society 26 (4): 407–427. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bondi, Marina
2007 “Key-words and emotions: A case study of the Bloody Sunday inquiry.” In Discourse and Contemporary Social Change, edited by Norman Fairclough, Guiseppina Cortese and Patrizia Ardizzone, 407–432. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Chan, Debby, and Ngai Pun
2020 “Economic power of the politically powerless in the 2019 Hong Kong pro-democracy movement.” Critical Asian Studies 52 (1): 33–43. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cheng, Winnie
2013 “Corpus-based linguistic approaches to critical discourse analysis.” In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, edited by Carol Chapelle, 1353–1360. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Cheng, Winnie, and Phoenix Lam
2013 “Western Perceptions of Hong Kong Ten Years On: A Corpus-driven Critical Discourse Study.” Applied Linguistics 34 (2):173–190. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, Norman
1995 Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Flowerdew, John, and Rodney Jones
2016 “Occupy Hong Kong: Historicizing Protest.” Journal of Language and Politics 15 (5): 521–528. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Galtung, Johan, and Mari Holmboe Ruge
1965 “The structure of foreign news: The presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crises in four Norwegian newspapers.” Journal of Peace Research 2 (1): 64–90. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gitlin, Todd
1980 The Whole World is Watching. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Haarman, Louann, and Linda Lombardo
eds. 2009 Evaluation and Stance in War News. London: ContinuumGoogle Scholar
Hardt-Mautner, Gerlinde
1995 ““Only connect”: Critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics.” In UCREL Technical Paper 6. Lancaster: Lancaster University.Google Scholar
Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky
1988 Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.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 1511: 1–48.Google Scholar
L’Hôte, Emilie
2010 “New Labour and globalization: Globalist discourse with a twist?” Discourse & Society 21 (4): 355–376. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson
2003 Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lee, Chin-Chuan, Joseph Man Chan, Zhongdong Pan, and Clement Y. K. So
2002 Global Media Spectacle: News War over Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.Google Scholar
Lee, Chin-Chuan, Zhongdang Pan, Joseph Man Chan, and Clement Y. K. So
2001 “Through the eyes of US media: Banging the democracy drum in Hong Kong.” Journal of Communication 51 (2): 345–365. DOI logoGoogle 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 & Society 3 (3): 341–363. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Li, Cho Kiu
2019 “The Cultural Politics of Fear: The Collective Fear of Communism in Cold War and Post-Cold War Hong Kong (1967–2018).” Unpublishwed PhD thesis, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Liu, Ming, and Cong Jiang
2019 “Constant fear, but lingering nostalgia: British press representations of post-colonial Hong Kong 20 years on.” Discourse & Communication 13 (6):630–646. DOI logoGoogle 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 & Media 361: 100401. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martin, Michael F.
2007 Hong Kong: Ten years after the handover. Washington D.C.: CRS Report for Congress.Google Scholar
Mautner, Gerlinde
2016 “Checks and balances: How corpus linguistics can contribute to CDA.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, edited by Ruth Wodak and Charles F. Meyer, 154–179. London: Sage.Google Scholar
McLeod, Douglas M.
2007 “News coverage and social protest: How the media’s protect paradigm exacerbates social conflict.” J. Disp. REsOL.: 1851.Google Scholar
Morley, John, and Paul Bayley
eds. 2009 Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies on the Iraq Conflict: Wording the War. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pan, Xiaping
2002 “Consensus behind disputes: A critical discourse analysis of the media coverage of the right-of-abode issue in postcolonial Hong Kong.” Media, Culture & Society 24 (1): 49–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pantti, Mervi
2010a “Disaster news and public emotions.” In The Routledge Handbook of Emotions and Mass Media, edited by Katrin Doveling, Christian von Scheve and Elly A. Konijn, 221–236. London and New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010b “The value of emotion: An examination of television journalists’ notions on emotionality.” European Journal of Communication 25 (2): 168–181. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Prentice, Sheryl, Paul J. Taylor, Paul Rayson, Andrew Hoskins, and Ben O’Loughlin
2011 “Analyzing the semantic content and persuasive composition of extremist media: A case study of texts produced during the Gaza conflict.” Information Systems Frontiers 13 (1): 61. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Purbrick, Martin
2019 “A report of the 2019 Hong Kong protests.” Asian Affairs 50 (4):465–487. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rayson, Paul
2008 “From key words to key semantic domains.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13 (4):519–549. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak
2016 “The discourse-historical approach.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 23–61. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Richards, Barry, and Gavin Rees
2011 “The management of emotion in British journalism.” Media, Culture & Society 33 (6): 851–867. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schudson, Michael
1978 Discovering the News. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
2001 “The objectivity norm in American journalism.” Journalism 2 (2): 149–170. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shi, Wei
2019 “Ten Years and the politics of fear in post-Umbrella Hong Kong.” Continuum 33 (1):105–118. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shoemaker, Pamela J.
1984 “Media treatment of deviant political groups.” Journalism Quarterly 61 (1): 66–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shoemaker, Pamela J., and Stephen D. Reese
1996 Mediating the Message: Theories of Influences on Media Content. White Plains, NY: Longman.Google Scholar
Stenvall, Maija
2007 “ ‘Fear of terror attack persists’: Constructing fear in reports on terrorism by international news agencies.” In Discourse, War and Terrorism, edited by Adam Hodges and Chad Nilep, 205–221. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 “On emotions and the journalistic ideals of factuality and objectivity–Tools for analysis.” Journal of Pragmatics 40 (9): 1569–1586. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 “Presenting and representing emotions in news agency reports: On journalists’ stance on affect vis-à-vis objectivity and factuality.” Critical Discourse Studies 11 (4): 461–481. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Teubert, Wolfgang, and Ramesh Krishnamurthy
2007 Corpus Linguistics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A.
1998 Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Van Dijk, Teun A.
2006 “Ideology and discourse analysis.” Journal of Political Ideologies 11 (2): 115–140. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin
2013 “The strategic ritual of emotionality: A case study of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles.” Journalism 14 (1): 129–145. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 “Emotion and digital journalism.” In The SAGE Handbook of Digital Journalism, edited by Tamara Witschge, C. W. Anderson, David Domingo and Alfred Hermida, 128–143. Los Angeles: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wodak, Ruth
2015 The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 “The discourse-historical approach.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 23–61. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer
2016 “Critical discourse studies: History, agenda, theory and methodology.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 1–22. London: Sage.Google Scholar