Were They Illegal Rioters or Pro-democracy Protestors? Examining the 2019–20 Hong Kong Protests in China Daily and The New York Times

ABSTRACT

The 2019–20 Hong Kong protests have attracted more attention from the international media than its previous mass movements. The Chinese government and the Trump administration have engaged tit-for-tat on this matter, but few studies have compared how the media in China and US have represented the issue. With the hypothesis that the dominant ideology in a given society interweaves with news framing and language use in news discourse, this paper uses the approach of corpus-assisted critical discourse studies to examine how China Daily and The New York Times have constructed the protests, with the findings that they framed it in different ways. As the leading official English-language newspaper of China, China Daily communicated to the world the Chinese government’s baseline on this issue that the solution to this political movement, which finally turned into illegal riots, should be found under the “one country, two systems” framework. In contrast, The New York Times highlighted the pro-democracy aspect of the movement which was to fight against China’s control over Hong Kong, which might indicate journalistic practice in US has gone astray from the professional norms it set up in the nineteenth century and is as politically-driven as that in China.

KEYWORDS:

• Hong Kong protests
• critical discourse studies
• corpus-assisted
• framing
• ideology
• China Daily
• The New York Times

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The writing of this article was supported by the National Social Science Fund Project of China [grant number 17CYY065].