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South-North Cultural and Media Studies

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Were They Illegal Rioters or Pro-democracy

Protestors? Examining the 2019–20 Hong Kong
Protests in China Daily and The New York Times

Guofeng Wang & Xueqin Ma

To cite this article: Guofeng Wang & 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, 35:2, 85-99, DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2021.1925940

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CRITICAL ARTS
2021, VOL. 35, NO. 2, 85–99
https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2021.1925940

Were They Illegal Rioters or Pro-democracy Protestors?

Examining the 2019–20 Hong Kong Protests in China Daily
and The New York Times
Guofeng Wang and Xueqin Ma
Foreign Languages College, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The 2019–20 Hong Kong protests have attracted more attention Hong Kong protests; critical
from the international media than its previous mass movements. discourse studies; corpus-
The Chinese government and the Trump administration have assisted; framing; ideology;
engaged tit-for-tat on this matter, but few studies have compared China Daily; The New York
Times
how the media in China and US have represented the issue. With
the hypothesis that the dominant ideology in a given society
interweaves with news framing and language use in news
discourse, this paper uses the approach of corpus-assisted critical
discourse studies to examine how China Daily and The New York
Times have constructed the protests, with the findings that they
framed it in different ways. As the leading official English-
language newspaper of China, China Daily communicated to the
world the Chinese government’s baseline on this issue that the
solution to this political movement, which finally turned into
illegal riots, should be found under the “one country, two
systems” framework. In contrast, The New York Times highlighted
the pro-democracy aspect of the movement which was to fight
against China’s control over Hong Kong, which might indicate
journalistic practice in US has gone astray from the professional
norms it set up in the nineteenth century and is as politically-
driven as that in China.

Introduction
Hong Kong has faced multi-faceted political and social challenges since it was returned to
China from 155 years of British colonial rule on 1 July 1997, when it was promised that
Hong Kong would maintain its own political, legal, and economic system for at least 50
years. However, the last two decades has witnessed increasing economic and political
conflicts in Hong Kong, which resulted in several mass movements such as the 2005
migrant protest, the 2010 democracy protests, the 2014 Umbrella Movement (also
known as “Occupy Central”), the 2016 Mong Kok civil unrest, and the still occurring
2019–20 protests.
These movements have put Hong Kong under the spotlight of international media, but
news reports on these movements by the media are implicitly or explicitly divided, if not
polarized, in stance and in attitude. Therefore, comparative studies on how the

CONTACT Guofeng Wang [email protected]

© 2021 Critical Arts
86 G. WANG AND X. MA

movements were represented by the media is a focus for discourse analysis. For instance,
in the coverage of the “Occupy Central”, Bhatia (2016) found that China Daily and South
China Morning Post both used the discursive tools of temporal referencing, metaphor, cat-
egory-pairings, and recontextualization in the representation of discursive illusions; on
the other hand, Ho (2019) illustrated that these two newspapers deployed the strategies
of predication, nomination, and perspectivization, but portrayed different images of the
Chinese government, the Hong Kong government, the protesters, the students, and
the police. In addition, Feng (2017) revealed ideological divergences in Hong Kong by
analysing concordance lines of two words “佔中” (Occupy Central) and “佔領” (occupy)
in four influential Chinese-language newspapers published in Hong Kong, and concluded
that news reports exacerbated the divergence by reinforcing attitudes of the audience.
However, few researches were conducted on how the media in China and the US rep-
resented these movements, including the current one. On 27 November, 2019, President
Trump approved the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act along with a compa-
nion bill restricting US exports of crowd control devices to the Hong Kong Police
Forces, which was strongly criticized by the Chinese government for its interference in
the internal affairs of China. Then, following The Law of the People’s Republic of China
on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region passed
by the Chinese government on 30 June, 2020, President Trump signed the Hong Kong
Autonomy Act on 14 July, which has led to greater uncertainties as to the future of the
territory, and has caused the Sino-US relationship to increasingly deteriorate amidst the
controversial Sino-US trade disputes. In this context, it would be of interest to investigate
how the 2019–20 protests were represented by the media in the two countries as the
Chinese government condemned the protestors for breaking laws while the Trump
administration applauded it for the protestors’ fighting for democracy.
It is widely acknowledged that news discourse is seldom a value-free reflection of the
facts (Fowler 1991; Van Dijk 1988), which is often influenced by the dominant ideology of
a given society, particularly when it comes to political issues related to the national inter-
est of a country where a news outlet is located (Lee et al. 2002; Wang 2017). This study
aims to compare how the two country’s influential English-language newspapers, China
Daily and The New York Times, discursively constructed the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests,
and to investigate how language in news discourse reflects, and is influenced by, the
dominant ideologies in the world’s two largest economies which possess different politi-
cal ideologies.

The 2019–20 Hong Kong protests

The continual protests turned Hong Kong into a battlefield of different forces, unprece-
dented in terms of both scale and fierceness. The protests were evoked by a proposal
of amendments to extradition laws by Hong Kong’s Security Bureau in February 2019
in response to the 2018 murder of Pooh Hiu-wing by her boyfriend Chan Tong-kai in
Taiwan, where the two Hong Kong residents were visiting as tourists. The bill was
aimed at establishing a system for case-by-case fugitive transfers between Hong Kong
and regions with which it did not already have agreements including Taiwan and main-
land China (Kuo 2019). However, it was considered by some opponents to be a detrimen-
tal move to the territory’s autonomy and to citizens’ civil liberties (Tang 2019) by
 CRITICAL ARTS 87

opponents from many local communities, who worried that it would give the Chinese
government greater influence over Hong Kong.
On 31 March, the protestors (including many university students) took to the streets in
opposition to the bill for the first time. Despite the demonstrations with hundreds of thou-
sands of people, the Hong Kong government insisted on proceeding with the bill on 9
June. The subsequent protests soon became violent and spread to more districts. With
the escalating conflicts between the protestors, the police, and the Hong Kong govern-
ment, the protesters even put forward five key demands, which were the withdrawal of
the bill, investigation into alleged police brutality and misconduct, the release of arrested
protestors, a complete retraction of the official characterization of the protests as “riots”
(Yu 2019), and Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s resignation, along with the introduction of
universal suffrage for election of the Legislative Council and the Chief Executive. The gov-
ernment finally withdrew the bill on 23 October, but refused to concede on the other four
demands. The protests continued with an increasing number of clashes between the
police and the protesters who resorted to radical measures like throwing petrol bombs
to confront the police. Until March 2020, the protests became less frequent with the
spread of the pandemic COVID-19, however, the problem is far from being solved
because the protestors continue to fight for the other four demands.
In the protests, the Chinese government aligned with the Hong Kong government in main-
taining the order in Hong Kongwhile the protestors accused the police’s misconductin the
intense standoffs. The pro-Beijing camp supported the Hong Kong government in promoting
the bill, although it made a U-turn when the government withdrew the bill (Griffiths 2019).
They condemned the use of violence by the protesters and maintained their support for
the Hong Kong Police Force. However, many lawmakers from the pan-democratic camp
assisted the protesters in various scenarios and did not split with the protesters when vio-
lence escalated.

Existing norms and practice of China’s official media and US media

When it comes to the comparative study of news reports published by China Daily and The
New York Times, it is a necessity to understand the differences between the two different
journalism systems in the socialist society of China and the capitalist society of US, particu-
larly, the differences regarding the norms and practice of China’s media and US media.
Generally speaking, China’s official media are considered as politically driven, which
has its origin from the Russian communism (Wu, Huang, and Liu 2014). One of their
main roles is to communicate the politically correct information to the audience in a
formal and harmony-driven reporting style (Wu and Hui 1997). As for China Daily, the
leading official English-language newspaper of China, its mission is to inform the
English-speaking world about developing social trends in China as well as to report on
the official positions of the Communist Party of China and the Chinese central govern-
ment (Liu 2015; Wang and Ma 2021). In addition, a survey conducted on China’s domestic
news reporting to CNN between May 1988 and December 1992 showed that official
English-language news media of China steadily became more politically and socially posi-
tive after the 1989 pro-democracy movement (Yu 1997).
Different from China’s official media, US media such as The New York Times are known
for their liberal stance (McQuail 1994). They are perceived by some researchers as more
88 G. WANG AND X. MA

market-driven for profits by catering to the interests of the public (Watson 1998, 86), or as
more professionally-driven to seek truth and serve the civil society by placing high values
on objectivity, neutrality, and fairness in a critical and balanced news reporting style (Wu,
Huang, and Liu 2014). However, when it comes to an international event that concerns
one’s home country, it is natural that journalists tend to support and legitimize their
own national claims and actions in accordance with the presumed interests of the
nation-state (Cook 1997; Seib 1997).

Ideology, news framing, and language use: a perspective of critical

discourse study
As one of the key terms in critical discourse study, ideology refers to an (often) one-sided
perspective with related mental representations, convictions, opinions, attitudes, and evalu-
ations shared by a specific community (Reisigl and Wodak 2009, 88). In the process of pro-
viding information to the audience, news discourse is unavoidably ideological to varying
degrees, not only because the construction of news discourse involves the journalist’s
“mental models” (Van Dijk 1988), which concerns the journalist’s cognitive representations
of subjective participant experiences, but also because as a member of a specific commu-
nity in a given society, the journalist’s personal perception of a certain event and the world
at large is affected by the dominant ideology of the community he/she belongs to. As Fair-
clough (2015, 64) perceives, the dominant ideology in a certain society originates from the
naturalization of the practices in the dominant class or dominant bloc which are perceived
to be universal or commonsensical. When a journalist narrates a news story about an event,
it is natural that he/she would construct a particular “social reality” (social actions, social
relations, and social identities) consistent with the prevailing perceptions in the society.
The journalist has to face “discursive simplification” (Fairclough 2005, 55), or how to
frame an event, whenever he/she conceives and produces a news story. As for the
notion of framing, Entman (1993, 52) refers to it as selecting some aspects of a perceived
reality and making them more salient in a text, so as to promote a particular problem
definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation/consequence, and/or treatment rec-
ommendation for the event. In this process, one would consciously or unconsciously
highlight some aspects of “social reality” while neglecting others; in other words, one
would frame an event based on both the conventions of news reporting and his/her per-
ception of the event. Centreing on these four elements of framing, different journalists
might depict the same event in different ways according to their personal experiences
and world views, which are cultivated in a given society (Alexander 2010; Haarman and
Lombardo 2009; Touri and Koteyko 2015).
At the discoursal level, to highlight some aspects of an event and to ignore others is
achieved and manifested by the presence or absence of certain language patterns. The
method of corpus linguistics enables discourse analysts to observe the words salient in
co-text by comparing the research corpus with an appropriate reference corpus, and
obtaining the statistically significant keywords which take into account both word fre-
quency and the sizes of two corpora. Liu and Li (2017) conducted a comparative study
on China’s smog in Chinese and Anglo-American English-language newspapers. By cate-
gorizing the first 100 keywords into four elements of framing, they analysed how the issue
was constructed by examining the co-text of certain keywords, and illustrated that
 CRITICAL ARTS 89

Chinese and Anglo-American newspapers converged in representing smog as a kind of

severe air pollution, but diverged in the influence of the smog on Chinese people, and
in the related representations of the Chinese government. It is not surprising that their
findings are consistent with the dominant ideologies of Chinese society and Anglo-Amer-
ican society, respectively.
The formation and dissemination of news reports (for instance, on China’s smog, and
on the Hong Kong protests) means a process of mediating, shaping, consolidating, and
normalizing public perceptions of certain social issues. The formation of news discourse
is influenced by the dominant ideology in a given society, and the dissemination of news
discourse strengthens the existing dominant ideology via a variety of channels. On the
macro level, in a given society, the dominant ideology interacts with general social prac-
tices, on the meso level with how the news story is framed, and on the micro level with
language use.

Data and methods

In order to reveal the “invisible” ideology, the authors attempted to analyse and explain
why certain language patters are found (or not found) in a specific corpus by using the
analytic tools of corpus linguistics. Specifically, this study seeks to answer the following
two questions: (1) On which aspects did China Daily and The New York Times focus respect-
ively in covering the protests? (2) What language patterns did each newspaper employ to
frame the protests in congruence with their respective ideologies in historical and socio-
political contexts?
The first step was to collect the data for this study by using the search words Hong Kong
from China Daily and The New York Times in the electronic database, LexisNexis. The time
period is from 1 February 2019 through 31 March 2020, which records the comparatively
intact course of the protests. Then, the authors manually eliminated news texts irrelevant
to the issue. News reports containing at least two of the four elements of framing (i.e.
problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation/consequences, and treatment
recommendation) were considered relevant to the issue because all four elements are not
always present in a specific news report (Wang 2018). The CD corpus (for China Daily) and
the NYT corpus (for The New York Times) were obtained as shown in Table 1.
The second step was to generate two keyword lists by employing the AntConc 3.5.8 soft-
ware for text analysis (Anthony 2019) to compare the two corpora respectively with one
million news corpus (as a reference corpus) extracted from the British National Corpus
Baby which consists of four one-million-word genre-based subsets (academic, fiction, news-
papers, and conversation). Please note that before that, the authors changed Hong Kong
into HongKong because it is a key term in this study, but to give the readers a more pleasant
reading experience, Hong Kong was used instead of HongKong in the tables and extracts.

Table 1. General information about the two corpora.

CD NYT
Number of texts 461 259
Word tokens 166,191 289,306
Word types 10,046 12,640
90 G. WANG AND X. MA

Table 2. Selected keywords related to problem definition.

CD NYT
Keywords Frequency (Relevance %) Keywords Frequency (Relevance %)
political 275 (82%) political 452 (72%)
illegal 121 (98%) movement 460 (92%)
radical 171 (92%) demonstrations 293 (79%)
radicals 120 (100%)
rioters 290 (100%)

Then, the authors respectively identified the content words in the first 100 keywords for CD
and NYT, and categorized those relevant to the four elements of framing into the corre-
sponding types after examining them in the co-text by using the AntConc functions of con-
cordance and file view. Considering the polysemy of English words, the authors randomly
selected 100 cases of each keyword, and manually annotated them to estimate the degree
of relevance of a keyword in co-text to a particular framing element, denoting as “Relevance
%” in Tables 2–5, with 40% as the minimum threshold for inclusion.
Following the categorization, the third step was to examine concordance lines and col-
locations of some keywords in each category of framing with the purpose of investigating
similarities and distinctions in language use between the two corpora, and to reveal possibly
differing ideologies hidden behind these news texts concerning the Hong Kong protests.

Findings
In the process of categorization, to ensure validity of the study, the two authors identified
the keywords and categorized them, consulting with an experienced discourse researcher
whenever disagreements occurred. A final decision was not reached until all of the three
persons reached a consensus. In the process of categorization, the authors found that the
four high-frequency keywords Hong Kong, protesters, protests, demonstrators, Chinese, and
government were difficult to be categorized because they appeared in all of the four
elements of framing; therefore, these keywords were not included in any of the cat-
egories. In the CD corpus, there are 2,933 instances of Hong Kong, 446 instances of pro-
testers, 317 instances of protests, 150 instances of demonstrators, 325 instances of
Chinese, and 199 instances of government; and in the NYT corpus, there are 3,982
instances of Hong Kong, 2,151 instances of protesters, 1,150 instances of protests, 426
instances of demonstrators, 1,116 instances of Chinese, and 1,246 instances of government.
Apart from that, some of these keywords could be found in both corpora while others
merely occurred in one corpus, as shown in Tables 2–5. Please note that the keywords
shared by the two newspapers are in the upper part of the tables, and in the lower
parts are the keywords that are not shared by them. All of the keywords in Tables 2–5
were ranked respectively according to their keyness.

Problem definition
Table 2 shows the selected keywords related to problem definition in the two newspa-
pers. The CD corpus and the NYT corpus shared Hong Kong, protestors, protests, demon-
strators, and political in this regard.
 CRITICAL ARTS 91

Table 3. Selected keywords related to causal interpretation.

CD NYT
Keywords Frequency (Relevance%) Keywords Frequency (Relevance%)
extradition 150 (94%) extradition 350 (90%)
bill 180 (84%) bill 630 (88%)
democracy 142 (89%) democracy 553 (78%)
Taiwan 134 (66%) Taiwan 216 (60%)
China 700 (68%) China 1,600 (72%)
mainland 166 (54%) mainland 728 (60%)
freedom 163 (86%) pro- 571 (94%)
anti- 191 (86%) party 434 (62%)
US 611 (54%) communist 298 (58%)
human 244 (76%) territory 340 (64%)
rights 181 (84%) demands 254 (94%)

The authors examined these words in co-text, and found that both of the corpora
defined the Hong Kong protests as a political mass movement featuring demonstrations
and protests in the street. The noticeable difference between the two corpora exists in
that there are two negative evaluative words in the CD corpus, illegal and radical, both
of which belong to the sub-category of Judgement (i.e. one’s attitudes towards behav-
iour) according to Martin and White’s theory of Appraisal (2005, 52). To see what these
two adjectives were used to modify, the authors then further examined their immediate
collocates (the first position on the right of the word) respectively, and the results show
that illegal (121 instances) was generally used to modify the destructive acts of protesters,
and radical (171 instances) was used to modify protesters (96 instances) and demon-
strations (19 instances). One sample sentence was chosen as follows:
Extract 1: Their deeds make them more suitable for the word “rioters” than “protesters”, and it
is time the local police of Hong Kong held them responsible for their illegal deeds. (“True
Hong Kong lovers are patriots”, China Daily, 6 August, 2019)

Extract 1 is the first instance of rioters, which appeared in China Daily on August 6, 2019
after some protesters removed a national flag from a flagpole near Tsim Sha Tsui Star
Ferry Pier and tossed it into the harbour. In this statement, the protestors were declared

Table 4. Selected keywords related to moral evaluation/consequences.

CD NYT
Keywords Frequency (Relevance %) Keywords Frequency (Relevance %)
violence 668 (98%) violence 356 (96%)
violent 381 (97%) violent 207 (97%)
people 767 (78%) people 1,145 (72%)
public 359 (58%) public 429 (70%)
city 660 (58%) city 875 (72%)
police 1,044 (90%) police 2,193 (95%)
officers 206 (90%) officers 603 (94%)
media 221 (68%) media 240 (76%)
residents 238 (78%) clashes 215 (95%)
social 245 (75%) tear 427 (97%)
order 260 (80%) gas 454 (97%)
chaos 128(98%)
unrest 136(99%)
stability 114 (62%)
acts 183 (88%)
92 G. WANG AND X. MA

Table 5. Selected keywords related to treatment recommendation.

CD NYT
Keywords Frequency (Relevance %) Keywords Frequency (Relevance %)
country 315 (43%)
systems 204 (41%)
national 254 (41%)
rule 221 (40%)
law 759 (42%)

by China Daily as rioters (i.e. the protest as a riot), and their deeds were defined as illegal.
According to Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, rioters are a crowd of people
who behave in a violent and uncontrolled way when they publicly show their opposition
to a socio-political issue. This statement that was made by the journalist represents the
stance of the editorial board of the official newspaper China Daily and that of the
ruling Communist Party of China.
In contrast with China Daily, The New York Times used 460 instances of movement, of
which the first three collocates were protest (127 instances), Umbrella (77 instances)
and democracy (38 instances), suggesting that The New York Times represented the pro-
tests primarily with relation to the previous mass movements, especially the pro-democ-
racy Umbrella Movement in 2014. One extract was selected as follows:
Extract 2: The civil disobedience celebrated the fifth anniversary of the start of the Umbrella
Movement, a pro-democracy campaign that many see as a precursor to the demonstrations
that have roiled Hong Kong this summer. (“Tens of Thousands Rally in Hong Kong Before
China’s National Holiday,” The New York Times, September 28, 2019)

Extract 2 is a statement that links the protests in the summer of 2019 with the 2014
Umbrella Movement. The New York Times used a noun phrase, a pro-democracy campaign,
as an appositive to clarify the Umbrella Movement as pro-democracy, a positive word
which also belongs to the subcategory of Judgement (Martin and White 2005, 52).
To conclude, generally speaking, China Daily reckoned that protesters’ behaviours
were illegal and conveyed a negative attitude towards the protests while The New York
Times highlighted protesters’ political goal to pursue democracy, indicative of a suppor-
tive attitude towards the protests.

Causal interpretation
Table 3 shows selected keywords related to causal interpretation in the two corpora. Their
shared keywords extradition, bill, Taiwan, China, and mainland suggest that both corpora
represented the protests as caused by the Hong Kongers’ disagreement on the extradition
bill and their demand for democracy. In addition, the two newspapers both revealed that
the bill was proposed because of a criminal case in Taiwan, and would result in criminal
suspects in Hong Kong being extradited to mainland China and Taiwan.
However, another keyword shared by the two corpora, democracy, is more context-
dependent. In the CD corpus, the most frequent collocates of democracy (142) include
pro- (7), freedom (3), and upholding (2); and in the NYT corpus, the most frequent collo-
cates of democracy (553) are pro- (328), greater (30), prominent (3), and limited (3). One
extract for each corpus was selected as follows:
 CRITICAL ARTS 93

Extract 3: Certain forces in the US and Britain have deliberately ignored extreme violence in the
illegal protests and attempted to portray mobsters as campaigners for “freedom, democracy and
human rights”. (“Protests disrupt city’s stability and operations,” China Daily, 23 August, 2019)

Extract 4: Protesters and pro-democracy lawmakers want to protect the high degree of
autonomy Hong Kong was promised when it was returned to China in 1997 under a policy
known as “one country, two systems.” That autonomy is guaranteed until 2047, but the Com-
munist Party and its security apparatus have increasingly encroached on the territory.（“Hong
Kong Protesters Are Fueled by a Broader Demand: More Democracy,” The New York Times,
July 8, 2019）

It can be seen from Extract 3 that democracy together with freedom and human rights
was included in the quotation marks, which indicated the campaigners’ slogans in the
protest. The protests and the protesters were respectively identified by China Daily as ille-
gals and as mobsters, and the protestors’ actions were identified as extreme violence. These
negative evaluative words explicitly signified the state-run China Daily’s attitudes towards
the protest and the protestors. The derogative comments on the protests, the protestors,
and the protestors’ actions were in contrast with the protesters’ slogan, which implies that
what the protestors did in the protests actually violated what they were demonstrating
for, despite their claims for freedom, democracy and human rights. In the meantime,
China Daily directly criticized certain forces in the US and Britain for their purposeful over-
looking of the extremely violent actions of the protestors.
Extract 4 serves as a background for the protests. The noun lawmakers, modified by the
positive Judgment resource pro-democracy (Martin and White 2005, 52), was used to
combine with another noun, protestors, as the subjective of the first sentence, and as
indicative of the pro-democracy nature of the protestors. In addition, the predicate
want to protect the high degree of autonomy was used to once again emphasize the legiti-
macy of their goal. The use of but in the second sentence shows The New York Times’ criti-
cism of the Chinese government’s failure to keep the promise of the “one country, two
systems” doctrine until 2047. Therefore, we can see from this extract that one of the
main causes for the protests was the increasing control of the Communist Party over
Hong Kong, and the protestors and the lawmakers’ pursuit of democracy in reaction to
it. It is worthy of note that the authors found no instances in the NYT corpus to show
The New York Times directly defined the current protests as pro-democracy, but rather
implied it, for instance, in Extract 2, or suggested it as a cause of the protests in Extract 4.
To obtain more from the corpora, the authors further examined the direct collocates of
anti-, and located 70 instances of anti-government and 39 instances of anti-China, with
the findings that China Daily believed that the goal of the protests was to make Hong
Kong independent, and the protestors’ demands for democracy, freedom, and human
rights were viewed as a mere shop sign, which was secretly backed by overseas organiz-
ations, mainly from the US. This is in sharp contrast with the stance of The New York Times,
which viewed the mass movement as partly attributable to the Chinese government’s
intervention into Hong Kong.

Moral evaluation/consequences
Table 4 shows selected keywords related to moral evaluation/consequences represented
by China Daily and The New York Times. The two corpora both emphasized the violence in
94 G. WANG AND X. MA

the protests, which can be seen from shared keywords such as violent, violence, police,
officers, and people. Violence is one of the direct results of the confrontational conflicts
between the protestors (mainly young people) and the police (including police officers)
in the city of Hong Kong, which was reported in detail by the local and international
media.
The differences between the two corpora are visible in Table 2 as well. China Daily
emphasized residents, acts, social, order, stability, chaos, and unrests while The New York
Times highlighted clashes, tear, and gas. China Daily emphasized the protests’ effects
on the normal life of residents, social order, and stability in Hong Kong. In contrast, The
New York Times focused on the clashes between the police force and the protesters by
highlighting the tear gas used to deal with the protestors. The following two extracts
were selected to illustrate their differences in this regard.
Extract 5: Those Hong Kong residents whose lives have been disrupted by the intensifying
violence of intimidation — instigated and organized by those hoping to use Hong Kong as
a means to destabilize the nation — will be glad when life returns to normal. (“Intensifying
violence in Hong Kong calls for tougher line to restore order,” China Daily, 4 November, 2019)

Extract 6: Members of the largely leaderless movement had called for the demonstration at
the airport after a night of clashes on Sunday, during which the police fired tear gas inside
one subway station and chased protesters down an escalator in another. (“Over 150 flights
canceled as Hong Kong Airport is flooded by protesters,” The New York Times, 12 August,
2019)

In Extract 5, China Daily represented residents in Hong Kong as victims of the

destructive effects of the protests by using a series of negative words such as disrupted,
violence, instigated, and intimidation, destabilize, and showed their hope for normal life.
In contrast to China Daily’s emphasis on the negative effects of the protests on daily
life in Hong Kong, in Extract 6, The New York Times depicted the police violence in the pro-
tests by using the police as the actor who performed the aggressive actions (fired tear gas
and chased protestors) in a demonstration at the Hong Kong airport. In this way, the vivid
detail description of the conflicts between the police and the demonstrators implied the
cruelty of the Hong Kong police when confronting the unarmed protestors.

Treatment recommendation
Table 5 shows the selected keywords related to treatment recommendation in the corpus.
The authors found that the CD corpus included five keywords, but the NYT corpus did not
include any keywords in this regard, which may imply that The New York Times did not
care much about the solution to this problem.
Although the keywords concerning treatment recommendation were not available in
the NYT corpus, The New York Times did include sentences relating to a solution to the
protests. The authors selected one extract from each corpus as follows:
Extract 7: Of course, the recent happenings, including the violent demonstrations, in Hong
Kong should prompt us to analyze the problems and shortcomings in the implementation of
“one country, two systems” and take effective measures to ensure it is implemented both in
letter and spirit so as to guarantee the SAR’s steady and sustained development. (“It’s time
Hong Kong residents helped police end violence, restore order,” China Daily, September
23, 2019)
 CRITICAL ARTS 95

Extract 8: “If the current difficulty in some way is caused by a failure of political reform, then we
should consider bringing back political reform,” Mr. Tong said in an interview. (“Hong Kong pro-
testers are fueled by a broader demand: More democracy,” The New York Times, 8 July, 2019)

Extract 7 shows that China Daily suggested reconsidering how to implement the “one
country, two systems” doctrine after violence reoccurred and escalated in the Hong Kong
protests. The collective noun us was used here to include the Chinese government, the
mainland people, the Hong Kong government, and the Hong Kong citizens (including
protestors). It did not recommend specific measures to cease violence but emphasized
the country’s basic principles, and the goal of Hong Kong’s steady and sustained develop-
ment. In this way, China Daily aimed to reunite various parties in the protests, and called
on all parties to sit down and exercise restraint in support of the peace and prosperity of
Hong Kong.
In contrast with China Daily, the authors found that, after carefully reading all the news
texts, The New York Times did not suggest how to solve this problem directly, but instead
used the strategy of perspectivization (Reisigl and Wodak 2009, 95) by quoting from con-
cerned people. Extract 8 is a typical example, which cited from Mr. Tong (a lawyer and
member of the Chief Executive’s top advisory body, the Executive Council), who
advised to continue to carry on political reform to end the turbulence in Hong Kong.
Apart from the quotes from the official, the authors found that The New York Times also
cited from the protestors’ suggestions to end violence, i.e. the five key demands.

Discussion
After analysing the keywords related to the four elements of framing in co-text, it can be
concluded that both corpora represented the 2019–20 protests as a political movement
caused by the disagreement on the extradition bill proposed by the Hong Kong govern-
ment, which finally resulted in violence. The main differences lie in that China Daily
labelled the protests as illegal, and the protestors as rioters, whereas The New York
Times suggested the protests as a pro-democracy movement against the Communist
Party’s excessive control over the territory. In addition, China Daily highlighted cata-
strophic impacts on the territory’s social order and stability, and called on all of the con-
cerned parties to solve the problem under the “one country, two systems” doctrine; in
contrast, The New York Times emphasized the clashes between the protestors and the
police, and implied political reform as a possible solution. As Flowerdew (2012) suggested,
a historiographical approach to critical discourse analysis enables the researcher to under-
stand discourse in a larger historical and socio-political context. Specifically, interpreting
news discourse within its specific historical and socio-political contexts of production
helps to understand “what has changed over time and what has stayed the same” (Flow-
erdew and Jones 2016, 522), which may allow the researcher to have a deeper insight of
why certain language patterns are present or salient in specific discourses.
As the official English-language newspaper of China, China Daily’s representation of
the protests was largely shaped by the official stances of the Party. Since 1990s, “Stability
overrides everything” has become a mantra of the country to bolster its rapid economy
growth (Schoenhals 1999; Wong 2004). When a crisis occurs in China, it is a common prac-
tice in official Chinese-language newspapers to legitimize the Chinese central
96 G. WANG AND X. MA

government’s actions by emphasizing the importance and necessity of sustaining social

stability in order to create a friendly environment for economic development (Wang
2020). In Chinese, “繁荣” (prosperity) and “稳定” (stability) are usually used together
in China’s official discourse, for instance, in a government work report. As for Hong
Kong, Constable (2009) concluded from his study on the 2005 migrant protest that
only if the protesters’ demands did not threaten the wider economic interests of
Hong Kong would the government allow peaceful protests. Debby and Ngai (2020)
argued the angle that the 2019–20 mass movement was at first an emerging economic
resistance movement, aiming to generate alternative political resources in an acutely
imbalanced bargaining structure between the protesters and the Hong Kong govern-
ment. However, this is likely only part of the story. “Stability” means not only a sine
qua non for the territory’s prosperity and development, and more importantly, as far
as Hong Kong is concerned, it means “one China”, China’s territory integrity, and full
sovereignty. Therefore, it is understandable that that the words such as stability and
order are salient in these news discourses, and that China Daily highlighted the “one
country, two systems” framework that was put forth by the belated former Chinese
leader Deng Xiaoping to then reach an agreement with the former British Thatcher
administration. “One China” and the maintenance of stability manifest the central gov-
ernment’s steadfast stand on “one China” and its main governing principles.
On the other hand, The New York Times’ extensive coverage of the protests was very likely
influenced by the “anti-communism” and “anti-China” ideology it has been exposed to
since the Cold War (Stone and Xiao 2007). Violent resistance in Hong Kong had been antici-
pated before Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997, and the prediction that “a world center
of democratic capitalism” would be sooner or later transformed into “an authoritarian
socialist system” has since its handover never faded away in foreign media (Smith 2003,
525). In the news reports published by The New York Times in the present study, the
authors found altogether 259 instances of Communist Party, one of which was specifically
modified by the Judgement resource (Martin and White 2005, 52) authoritarian when intro-
ducing the background of Hong Kong’s return. The sentence is as follows:
Extract 9: In recent weeks, the protesters have increasingly called for direct elections,
drawing into focus the deep-seated anxiety among many in Hong Kong over the recent
erosion of freedoms promised in 1997 when Britain returned the city to Chinese control,
under the authoritarian Communist Party. (“Hong Kong’s Approach to Protesters: No More
Concessions,” The New York Times, July 19, 2019)

We can see that the Judgement authoritarian, an immediate collocate with Communist
Party, was made by the journalist(s), which shows the journalists’ and the newspaper’s
negative attitude towards the ruling party of China. This long-standing stereotype
could be considered as the ideological basis for the US’ (including The New York Times’)
support of human rights and the democracy movement in Hong Kong. What is equally
worthy of note is that the usage of authoritarian with Communist Party seemed a “set
phrase” in this regard, therefore, the ideological underpinnings eventually become “invis-
ible” to the audience with the naturalization of this collocation (Fairclough 2015, 113).
Therefore, in this broad background of the US society, it is not difficult to understand
The New York Times’ emphasis on anti-China, anti-communism, and tear gas used by
the Hong Kong police.
 CRITICAL ARTS 97

Except for ideological reasons, The New York Times’ highlighting of the fierce conflicts
between the police and the protestors might be utilized out of economic considerations.
Unlike the state-run China Daily, The New York Times as a commercial newspaper has to
make a profit to survive in the market in an era of declining press (Hallin and Mancini
2004). The dramatic representations of “media spectacle” is an effective means to
arouse the audience’s interest in news stories (Kellner 2003), who might feel as if they
were watching a live-action Hollywood movie. Therefore, the vivid descriptions of the
conflicting scenes in the series of news stories (i.e. The New York Times’ emphasis on
clashes) not only add journalistic objectivity to the news discourse, but also become a
strategy of the press to attract their target audiences willing to pay for the news.
However, since the protests are still proceeding amidst the spread of the novel coro-
navirus and the Sino-US trade disputes, only time will tell when the protests will end
and how this crisis will be resolved. The issue of Hong Kong now seems to have
become more complex since the passing of the national security law by China and the
two Hong Kong acts signed by President Trump because it is difficult to anticipate
their effects on political, economic, trade, financial, monetary, and other areas in Hong
Kong in the future. In addition, the passing of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democ-
racy Act was viewed by some critics as a change in the US policy on Hong Kong, and a
major point of leverage which the US may use to engage a rising China, such as the
issue of Taiwan (Liu and Cai 2020).

Conclusion
This comparative corpus-assisted discourse study of the representations of the 2019–20
Hong Kong protests by China Daily and The New York Times contributes to the under-
standings of the 2019–20 Hong Kong protest as represented in the newspapers in
China and the US. More importantly, it helps us to gain a deep insight into how the domi-
nant ideology is imbedded in news framing and language patterns in news discourse. The
analysis of certain keywords in co-text reveals the divergence of the two newspapers in
terms of their ways of framing news and their use of language patterns. As the leading
official English-language newspaper of China, China Daily communicated to the world
the Chinese government’s baseline on this matter that the solution to this political
mass movement, which finally turned into illegal riots, should be viewed under the frame-
work of “one country, two systems”. In contrast, whereas The New York Times highlighted
the pro-democracy aspect of the movement which was to fight against China’s control
over the territory under the dominant anti-China and anti-communism ideology, which
might indicate journalistic practice in US has gone astray from the professional norms
it set up in the nineteenth century and is as politically-driven as that in China.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
The writing of this article was supported by the National Social Science Fund Project of China [grant
number 17CYY065].
98 G. WANG AND X. MA

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