| This thesis examines the speeches of Donald Tsang, the second Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China. The corpus used consists of 46 major speeches delivered by Tsang from June 29, 2005 to December 15, 2006. This paper is presented as a case study of political discourse of an attempt by a political leader to develop a city identity/community's identity.Within the theoretic framework of Wodak's Discourse-historical approach and based on Halliday's transitivity analysis, the present investigation offers a description of the corpus trying to find out what identity for Hong Kong Donald Tsang is in an attempt to construct and represent to the world in his public speeches. In order to better understand the upcoming analysis, Hong Kong context provided ahead serves as the background knowledge for fully comprehension of the corpus. The discursive strategies resorted to in the discursive construction of Hong Kong are described under the established framework. Moreover, the function and effect in constructing Hong Kong's self-image are also interpreted and discussed. The major findings are also explained by referring to the community's social context.The present study offers a new piece of research that testifies the successful application of Wodak's Discourse-historical approach and Halliday's transitivity analysis into the study of the discursive construction of community's identity, applying it to a new context which had been rarely studied. Hong Kong's identity has been approached from a new perspective and this study provides a new means of "seeing through language" by combining the explanation of the historical and social context of the community. Thus, illumination can be achieved for the political leader in composing his discourse on how to represent certain identities for the community. The analyzed linguistic strategies may be good for reference.
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