Reporting the Hong Kong handover: A pragmatic analysis of news coverage in comparative Taiwanese/Mainland Chinese perspective

This dissertation explores the dynamics between ideology and language in the ROC/PRC English-language media narratives about the Hong Kong transition from Britain to China in 1997. It applies theoretical frameworks in the areas of Ideology Critique and Discourse Theory while mainly drawing on Linguistic Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis for methodological supports. Of particular interest in our analysis of the Hong Kong 1997 accounts are the various ideological perspectives within Taiwan and how they are translated to the international community via the two English-language papers of that time, the China Post and the China News. For comparative reasons, this study also analyzes the Hong Kong narratives in the PRC government-backed English-language newspaper, the China Daily. It thus not only investigates the role of ideology in the process of meaning generation, but also to what extent international news is domesticated for home constituencies.; As studying meaning in context is the core of what constitutes a pragmatic language analysis, our research provides (a) an (interdisciplinary) wider socio-historical and political contextualization of the Hong Kong handover as well as the media landscape in Taiwan; (b) an account of the situational context of the production/interpretation process; (c) an interpretative analysis that lays bare any portrayal of events in the form of 'common-sense' suppositions. Given that all types of cognitive structures, language, conventions, assumptions and myths intervene between representation and the represented, the dissertation investigates the importance of language in general and the modern political media power in particular in the creation of our perceptions on society. It seeks to trace any legitimation processes drawn from socially approved assumptions, in particular conceptualization patterns about group relations, identity formation, nationalism in the Chinese/Taiwanese context, colonialism, political ideologies like communism and democracy. Our findings demonstrate how discursive constructions of identities are embedded in primarily three large domains of social structures: (1) relations of hegemony; (2) antagonistic constructions of us/them dichotomies; (3) reproduction of myths pertaining to the (a) cultural realm of collective consciousness, (b) political realm of nation-state/nationalism and clashing ideologies, (c) historical realm of the Western colonial presence in China.