"Getting onto the property ladder" : discursive construction of housing policies in British Hong Kong Governor's address and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Chief Executive's policy address

Abstract

Hong Kong is the world’s most expensive city to buy a home (Taylor, 2019). Following the sustained protests in Hong Kong since 2019, there has been a saying that housing may be “the core issue behind people’s dissatisfaction and unhappiness” (Lim, 2020, p. 110). Consequently, the confidence of Hong Kong citizens in the credibility of the government is undermined. Some people even compare the existing government with pre-1997 colonial government, trying to gain insights into the governance prior to the handover. In the backdrop of this, the idea of policy analysis arises. In this study, a text-informed analysis on the discursive construction of housing policies of the British Hong Kong Government (1992-1996) and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government (1997-2001) was conducted. The whole corpus comprised 11,480 words (6,447 words for Governor’s Addresses and 5,033 words for Policy Addresses). Utilizing the ‘dialectical-relational approach’ of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992, 2003; Richardson, 2007), the lexico-grammatical resources employed by the two governments at the textual level were counted and described based on Hyland’s (2005) Stance and Engagement Framework and Log-Likelihood Ratio. The linguistic choices were then analysed in the discursive-practice level. Finally, the extent to which the linguistic choices reflected the voice and positioning of the two governments at the social-practice level were also examined. The findings showed that there was an underuse of Stance markers in Governor’s Addresses and an underuse of Engagement markers in Policy Addresses. The underlying reasons could be attributable to four areas: attaining social stability, comforting the public’s emotions in the run-up to 1997, boosting the public’s confidence right after the handover and the Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa’s character and style.