Orchestrating the Family-Nation Chorus: Chinese Media and Nationalism in the Hong Kong Handover

Abstract

Media discourses on events of global significance tend to be seen through the ideological lenses of nationalism, especially in a country such as China in which Communist ideology has been losing its relevance. In this article we examine how China's party-state mobilized a host of political and market forces to orchestrate media coverage of the handover of Hong Kong as spectacular national festivities in a highly reductive and essentialized way. The party media constructed family-nation as a master frame to weave a "news net," centering on various themes of nationalism that transcend ethnic and geographical differences and that bolster the legitimation of the Communist party. Thus, the media link 2 different modes of interpretation by placing a "local" report of the handover in the macrocontext of modern Chinese history. Both the time dimension (historical script) and spatial dimension (social configurations) of this news net reinforce official ideology while accommodating the media's commercial interests. This case study has general implications for the state corporatist practice.