The Occupy Central Movement was the biggest protest in Hong Kong in decades and induced an unprecedented division of opinion in society. Reports about the event in local Chinese media were remarkably diverse in stance and attitude. To grasp the ideological dissonances and their linguistic construction, this paper explores a corpus of 120 reports on the Occupy Central Movement from four major Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong, to wit, Apple Daily, Ming Pao, Oriental Daily News and Ta Kung Pao, which include 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 employing the Attitude framework. Analysis displays that their attitudes toward the event form a continuum from supportive, through neutral, to antipathic. The attitudes do not only 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 strengthening the attitudes of their readers.