Beware of the dogs: a contrastive discourse analysis of national identities and discrimination in Hong Kong andChinese newspapers

Abstract

A notice carried in the Apple Daily depicting people from mainland China as locusts and a Peking University professor’s use of the word dogs to describe people in Hong Kong were among several incidents which brought to global attention conflicting ideologies of national identity and discriminatory practices among certain groups in Hong Kong and mainland China. As newspaper texts ‘constitute a sensitive barometer of sociocultural change’ (Fairclough, 1995, p.52) this dissertation investigated the coverage of these incidents in two Hong Kong papers (the SCMP and the Standard) and two Chinese papers (the China Daily and the Global Times) by analyzing a corpus of 279 texts to find evidence whether the papers reproduce or resist discrimination and/or promote certain ideologies of national identity. To ensure the validity of the study a triangulation of analytical methods was used. This study utilizes approaches to textual analysis from the ‘dialectal-relational’ framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1993, 2003, 2009; Richardson 2007), corpus linguistics and Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Kövecses 2002). The findings show that while there was no overt evidence for conflicting ideologies of national identity or of discrimination toward the general population of Hong Kong or mainland China, all of the papers to some degree appear to discriminate against women from mainland China who come to give birth in Hong Kong. It was concluded from this that to some extent the papers reflect the interests and concerns of the status quo who desire a smooth integration of Hong Kong into mainland China.