“Beware of the dogs, and the locusts!”: a critical discourse analysis of national identities and discrimination in Hong Kong and Chinese newspapers

Abstract

In the first few months of 2012 there were several incidents which brought to the fore tensions between certain groups in Hong Kong and mainland China. This paper contrasts the coverage of these incidents in two Hong Kong newspapers (the SCMP and the Standard) and two Chinese newspapers (the China Daily and the Global Times) to find evidence of discrimination and/or certain ideologies of national identity. The paper also introduces the theoretical frameworks and analytical tools used in the analysis. Discourse analyses have been carried out on the SCMP and the China Daily previously. Flowerdew, Li and Tran (2002) found some evidence of discrimination in the SCMP’s coverage in the right-of-abode issue in 2002 while Li (2009) found evidence that the China Daily promoted certain ideologies of national identity in its reporting of the American spy plane incident in 2001. However, neither the Standard nor the Global Times nor the incidents in 2012 have been subjected to a similar kind of analysis. This paper has four main parts: (1) an outline of the incidents which were covered by the four newspapers; (2) a brief description of the different theoretical frameworks and analytical tools (Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Grammar, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Corpus linguistics), and an explanation of how they were used; (3) a discussion of the significant findings in the data; (4) a conclusion section which will argue that there was only slight evidence of the reproduction of ideologies of national identity and of promoting discrimination.