MANIPULATION IN LOCAL NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS REGARDING THE 2017 CHIEF EXECUTIVE ELECTION OF HONG KONG
1. Introduction
Manipulative constructions in newspapers are ubiquitous, especially in editorials where editors are allowed to express his or her opinions. This research sheds lights on discursive and cognitive persuasion carried out by the use of appraisals in editorials from
Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP), South China Morning Post (SCMP) and China Daily
concerning Hong Kong’s 2017 Chief Executive Election.
The election, which took place on 26th March 2017, unveiled the fifth term of chief executive of Hong Kong. The three contenders for the title were Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, John Tsang Chun-wah and Woo Kwok-hing. Unlike presidential elections in many democratic countries, only the 1200 selected Election Committee members were qualified to vote in this ‘small circle ballot’. This voting method had been heavily criticised by many Hong Kong people since the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997.
Three years prior to the election, the central government once proposed an electoral reform granting universal suffrage to all permanent residence of Hong Kong with one condition – the implementation of a screening process of candidates by the central government. The proposal triggered a 79-day occupying protest, known as the Umbrella Revolution, staged by the democracy advocates of Hong Kong to demand for the retraction of the screening procedure. The protest area was eventually cleared by the police and this failed attempt to exert pressure on the central government led to Beijing’s withdrawal of their proposal for general suffrage as a ‘punishment’ for the ‘rebels’ in Hong Kong. Therefore, the voting system of the Election Committee was maintained in last year’s election.
Although the public did not have the right to vote in last year’s election, newspaper media of Hong Kong put tremendous effort in promoting or criticising candidate(s) whose political ideologies did or did not aligned with those of the newspaper companies, in an attempt to influence the decision of the Election Committee members by the popularity ratings of the candidates. Grounding on Martin & White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory, this research will investigate how attitude, graduation and engagement in evaluative constructions helped disseminate the media’s political ideologies by means of ‘positive US and negative THEM’ evaluations and thus facilitate cognitive persuasion to influence the readers’ perceptions of the three candidates in the democracy HKFP, neutral (and vaguely pro-Beijing) SCMP and the pro-Beijing China Daily.
2. Background of the Study 2.1 Pro-democracy and Pro-Beijing
The disagreement between advocates of the two political ideologies in Hong Kong flared up the relentless ‘war of manipulation’ among the city’s newspaper discourse.
The two opposing political ideologies unique to the society of Hong Kong (and China) are the pro-democracy and the pro-Beijing (Chung, 2006). The pro-democracy camp strives for liberalism, such as greater freedom, democracy and autonomy in Hong Kong. In
legislative context, pro-democrats encourage political reform that enables greater involvement of the general public in government’s policy making processes (Hui, 2011). They see the intervention of Chinese authority in internal affairs of Hong Kong as a violation to the ‘One Country, Two System’ principle and an erosion of the city’s freedom and democracy – two of the core values of Hong Kong.
Pro-Beijing, also known as pan-establishment, on the other hand, reckons that the interest of the ‘country’ is as important as the democracy of the city. The pro-Beijing camp encourages the integration of Hong Kong to China, where the notion ‘democracy’ can be a taboo, by supporting social, economic and cultural collaborations between Hong Kong and the mainland. Other than their affiliation to the Chinese communist party, they also play an active role in preserving conservative and traditional Chinese cultural beliefs. In Hong Kong, advocates of pro-Beijing ideologies comprise a majority of legislative councillors and
Election Committees, which means that the camp possesses a determining power in policy-making and government administrations of Hong Kong.
2.2 What is a Chief Executive Election?
The current study reveals the clash of ideologies between the pro-democracy and the Beijing camps as reflected in the discourses associated with last year’s Chief Executive Election. The following section briefly explains the historical and political background of Hong Kong upon which the research is built.
In the summer of 1997, a historic event took place in Hong Kong. The sovereignty of this ‘Pearl of the Orient’ was returned to China after more than a century of British
governance. But the different, if not contradictory, political ideologies adopted by the United Kingdom and the Communist Party of China meant that it will take a considerable amount of time for Hong Kongers to adapt to the new Chinese style of governance.
The official initiation of the handover procedures can be traced back to 1984, the year when the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed. It proclaims the restoration of Hong
Kong to the People’s Republic of China on 1st July 1997, the day when the 99-year lease of New Territories, Hong Kong to the United Kingdom expired. The signature of the United Kingdom has evoked polarised feelings among Hong Kongers. Some were delighted that Hong Kong could finally be ‘returned to the embrace of the motherland’ (a proverb in
Chinese). Some, however, were infuriated by the compromise of Margret Thatcher, the prime minister of the United Kingdom at the time, because Hong Kongers were given no voice in the negotiations of the terms (Herschensohn, 1999). Despite the reassurance from the past president of the Chinese Communist Party Deng Xiaoping that Hong Kong would be operating based on the three principles of ‘One Country Two System’, ‘High Degree of Autonomy’ and ‘Hong Kong People Ruling Hong Kong’ for at least 50 years after the transition of sovereignty, fear was still brewing in the city since China was (and still is) well-known for its unreliability and Hong Kong people were worried that there would be constant political interventions from the Chinese authorities after the handover. They believed that the possible assimilation of Hong Kong into the Chinese system would put at risk the existing social and economic institutions and civil liberty (Chan & Lee, 2013).
The signing of the declaration triggered waves of mass migration of Hong Kongers in the 80s and 90s before the ‘storm’ struck. For those who stayed in Hong Kong, the ceremony on 1st July, 1997 marked a subtle but revolutionary change in their lives. The inauguration of Tung Chee-wah, the first Chief Executive of Hong Kong, under the five-star red flag signified the beginning of a new era. Since then, the head of the city government was no longer the governor delegated by the United Kingdom, but the Chief Executive appointed by the People’s Republic of China.
2.3 Chief Executive and One Country, Two Systems
The Chief Executive is one of the by-products of the concept of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ which gives Hong Kong a special status as one of the two special administrative regions of China. According to Basic Law, the exclusive constitutional document of Hong Kong establishing the principle of ‘One Country, Two Systems’, while the city is still recognised as an inseparable part of China, its capitalist system from the colonial period can remain, rather than adopting the Chinese socialist system immediately after the handover. The idea of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ is applicable not only to economic systems but also to the local legislative, judicial and executive systems. Unlike any other provinces in China, the city government of Hong Kong are empowered to administrate their own internal political affairs. For example, there are only a few restrictions to the local government when it comes
to the formulation of new laws, and local cases are entirely determined by the local courts of Hong Kong.
The person in charge of the overall administration of this ‘autonomous’ government is called the Chief Executive. The Chief Executive of Hong Kong is the most influential
political figure in the region, who enjoys the power of nominating principal officials of the government and approving or returning the bills that are passed by the Legislative Council. Every decision made by them can largely determine the future direction of the city. This is the reason why the general public eagerly awaited a new leader who has familiarity with local affairs so that he or she can devise government policies that truly suit the best interest of the majority. Addressing the public’s concern, the Basic Law, therefore, regulates that every Chief Executive must have resided in Hong Kong for at least 20 years and they are not allowed to have citizenship from any foreign regions or countries.
As is also the case in many other democratic nations, a Chief Executive cannot serve for more than two consecutive terms and each term of office for Chief Executive lasts 5 years, which means that, typically, a Chief Executive ‘election’ takes place in Hong Kong every five years. Yet, there is a nuance between such an election and a democratic election: a Chief Executive is not democratically elected by a majority of permanent residents in Hong Kong. Instead, this top government official is only chosen by around 1200 Election Committees (ECs) who are selected through a ‘Subsector Election’ that consists of around 240,000 eligible voters from nearly 30 professions.
The system of Election Committees has been harshly criticised by the general public in Hong Kong since the handover. Young & Cullen (2010, p. 4) pointed out three concerns to this election mechanism. Firstly, the EC system fails to ‘enfranchise the vast majority of people in Hong Kong’ because the committee is mainly comprised of elites from different sectors. That is why the Chief Executive Election is also called a ‘small circle election’ by many critics. Secondly, as specified in The Basic Law, the system of Election Committee is only supposed to be ‘a transitional selection method’ for the early years of the establishment of Hong Kong SAR, until universal suffrage of Chief Executive election should ultimately be attained. Last but not least, there have been claims that the Election Committee create merely an illusion of choice for ‘Hong Kong’. The demographic of the Election Committees is highly imbalanced in terms of political affiliations. In 2007, the Pro-Beijing camp occupied around 660 out of 800 seats in the committee while the pro-democracy camp could only secured around 140 (Cheng, 2011). The number improved slightly in 2016 when the democracy camp was able to obtain around 325 (out of 1196) ballot papers in the 2017 ‘small circle election’.
Still, the ratio of pro-democracy Election Committee members could not accurately reflect the number of pro-democracy advocates among the general public (which accounted for
approximately two fifth of the population), and the domination of pro-Beijing camp voters in the Chief Executive ‘Election’ was no different from a direct appointment of the Chief Executive by the Communist Party of China because China eventually maintained absolute control of the choice of Chief Executive.
2.4 2017 Chief Executive Elections and Universal Suffrage
In 2014, seventeen years after the handover, the National People’s Congress of China finally proposed an electoral reform of Hong Kong addressing the issues related to the lack of universal suffrage. The framework suggested that the method of universal suffrage could only be implemented in the 2017 Election Selection under one condition: there had to be a
screening of candidates by a ‘broadly representative nomination committee’ before the democratic election by the public. However, with a selection process, universal suffrage will no longer serve any function in the Chief Executive Election because the general public will only be allowed to vote for candidates that are already pre-selected by the Chinese authorities who may bar the entrance of candidates who they consider as threats to China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong.
To China’s surprise, the conditional offer was not widely appreciated by Hong Kong people who had been longing for their voting rights in Chief Executive Elections for almost two decades. Instead, they accused the Communist Party of trying to exploit such a system to impede the participation of democracy candidates and thus to ensure the victory of pro-Beijing candidates. At that stage, Hong Kong people’s tolerance of China’s numerous
attempts of meddling in the internal affairs of Hong Kong had already reached a boiling point, which eventually triggered the 79-day civil disobedience movement ‘Occupy Central’ (also known as the Umbrella Revolution). Participants in this social movement thought the traffic disruption and the economic loss from occupying one of the main roads (Harcourt Road) of Hong Kong could exert pressure on the local government and most importantly, on China to retract the selection process in the 2017 Chief Executive Election. As reflected in one of the slogans in the movement - “I want genuine universal suffrage”, Hong Kong people’s thirst for ‘true democracy’ in Chief Executive Elections rather than the ‘democracy’ as defined by China was unquenchable. However, notwithstanding the mass protest which lasted two and a half months, Beijing refused to re-adjust the framework. On 11th December, 2014, the police started to disperse the crowd of protestors with tear gas and water cannons. The clearance of
Hong Kong’s Harcourt Road signified that the movement had come to an end. Seven months later, the entire proposal of electoral reform by the People’s Congress of China was also turned down by the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, which means that the election method of universal suffrage, once again, could not be implemented and therefore the 2017 Chief Executive Election remained a ‘small circle election’ for the 1200 Election Committees.
Despite the fact that the general public of Hong Kong did not have the right to vote in this controversial 2017 Chief Executive Election, they are still deeply concerned with the possible outcomes of the election for two main reasons. First of all, in December 2016, former Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying announced that he would not be running for a re-election in 2017, which implied a reformation of the Hong Kong government’s cabinet. Nobody could say with certainty about what would be the future direction to which Hong Kong would be heading. In addition, after the Umbrella Revolution, the conflict between the pro-Beijing camp and the pro-democracy camp, the two polarised political parties in Hong Kong, became more and more apparent, which intensified the social division of the city. Everyone in Hong Kong hoped that their future leader could serve the best interest for both groups and mitigate the political tension in this divided society.
2.5 Candidates in the 2017 Chief Executive Election
By the end of the nomination period, three candidates Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, John Tsang Chun-wah and Woo Kwok-hing received sufficient nomination votes to enter the 2017 CE election.
2.5.1 Carrie Lam
Amongst the three, only Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor was openly supported and ‘approved’ by Beijing’s officials and accordingly she received the highest number of 580 nominations from the Election Committees (which are dominated by the pro-Beijing camp) to enter the election. Before she resigned to run her election campaign, Lam worked as the Chief Secretary of Hong Kong, the government’s second in command. During her time in that position, Lam was known for her toughness and forcefulness in administration, which accounts for her lack of approval among public and other civil servants during her election campaign.
In her manifesto, she emphasised political reform that could tackle the long-lasting social division. Dealing with the skyrocketing property prices and the declining
young homebuyers and stipulated numerous measures to boost the economic development of the city. She also promised to provide quality job opportunities for the youth of Hong Kong.
Eventually, she won the election by a landslide with an unprecedented 777 votes. Nevertheless, her victory induced mixed emotions among the public. On the one hand, some were satisfied with her comprehensive manifesto and believed that she could lead Hong Kong to a bright future. On the other hand, some were infuriated by the result. They claimed that her victory could only be attributed to her strong affiliation to Beijing, and that the election outcome did not respect the opinions of Hong Kong’s majority because the winner, Carrie Lam came in second in almost all the popularity polls.
2.5.2 John Tsang
Another contender in the Chief Executive Race was John Tsang Chun-wah, a moderately pro-Beijing candidate who benefitted from his election team’s sophisticated marketing and public relation strategies. Instead of Carrie Lam, Tsang, the former financial secretary of Hong Kong, was voted the most popular candidate among the public in most popularity polls, although he only received the marginal 165 nominations. Regardless of his pro-Beijing background, in the recent years, he tried to reverse his image as a rigid Beijing-leaning government official by openly criticising the former chief executive Leung Chun-ying and publishing insinuating social media posts which slammed the incompetence of the local government. He successfully rebranded himself as a laid-back populist who sided with the pro-democracy camp to fight for the betterment of Hong Kong.
Indeed, his refreshing image helped him to gain a lot of supports from the general public, especially from the youth. However, his manifesto’s orientation towards the needs of the affluent and his pledge to put the enactment of the National Security Law, the
controversial article which puts at risk the freedom of speech of Hong Kong people, back on the political agenda during his tenure turned off the pro-democracy camp. Nevertheless, out of the three nominees, his experience as a government official and his hassle-free character persuaded the public to support him over Carrie Lam and Woo Kwok-hing.
His support from the public eventually earned him 365 votes from the Election Committees, 400 fewer than that of the victor, Carrie Lam.
2.5.3 Woo Kwok-hing
Woo Kwok-hing was known as the underdog of the Chief Executive Election. He was constantly overshadowed by the other two candidates of the election who had extensive
experience in public administration - Carrie Lam and John Tsang. Having the weakest connections with Beijing, Woo entered the race with 180 nominations entirely from pro-democracy committees. As a retired judge of Hong Kong, he established a relatively impartial character and focused on the pro-democracy demographic. He advocated the legislation of Article 22 to bar the Chinese authority from intervening in local affairs of Hong Kong. Yet, his lack of experience in governance transferred most of his nomination votes to John Tsang in the actual ballot, in which he received only 21 votes.
3. Theoretical Background 3.1 Ideologies
This current research uses the approach of critical discourse analysis to unfold the underlying relationship between the political ideology held by newspaper companies and the linguistic features in their newspaper editorials.
Ideology has been a key notion around which critical discourse analysis revolves from the outset (Hodge, 2012). According to Karl Marx, this abstract term, which was used initially to describe the concept in economics, denotes the ruling ideas of a society which correspond to the economic interest of the ruling class (as cited in Raghunath, 1988). This interpretation of ‘ideologies’ built the foundations of numerous studies and research in sociology, law and political science. Van Dijk (1998) expanded the use of this term to represent a cluster of values of a certain group about what is right or wrong, as well as norms about what to do. Unlike Marx’s viewpoint, he did not mention that ideology is merely restricted to the belief and practice of the ruling class. He acknowledges the plurality of ideologies within a society.
On the other hand, Mullins (1972) interprets ideology from a socio-political perspective. He sees ideology as a set of thoughts that are formulated from an individual’s understanding or assessment of past events. These thoughts together construct a broad picture of his or her ‘ideal society’, which will heavily influence their political position, and hence their participation in politics.
Althusser (1971) proposes, individuals who share similar, if not the same, ideological beliefs in a society will develop a sense of identity, a force that knits them together as a concrete collective entity.
Generalising the interpretations from different scholars, the core of one’s political ideology lies on one’s value judgement of the actions done by the government, something that is usually derived from the evaluation of history. Individuals with similar political ideology are usually bonded by a strong sense of identity and sometimes they will even assemble to form a concrete force (such as a political party) to influence the government into constructing a society in alignment with their ideological belief.
Traditionally, political ideologies can be modelled into a dichotomy with left and right as the antithetical opposition to signify the contrast between the ideologies and movements which divide the world of political thought and action (Bobbio, 1993). Lutz (2011)
summarises left-wing ideologies as those which seek to promote greater equality for
individuals in society, including communism, socialism and modern liberalism. In contrast, right-wing ideologies generally refer to the values that favour the existing institution, such as
localism, and accept greater inequalities as natural and expected in society. The left-right wing opposition has been widely adopted by scholars since the last century. However, it has also been heavily criticised. One of the arguments is that the dichotomy is an
overgeneralisation of the modern multi-faceted ideological landscape because the model reserves no space to accommodate some unmarked forms of political ideology. For instance, in the case of Hong Kong, the pan-establishment ideology attempts to perpetuate the
dominance of pro-Beijing power in the government on one hand. On the other hand, it
discourages the spread of localism within the society of Hong Kong. Due to the complexity of the ideology, it cannot be fitted properly into either wing or right-wing. Therefore, a left-right dichotomy is not completely compatible with the political situation of certain places, such as Hong Kong.
3.2 Ideological State Apparatus
In almost every society, pluralism of political ideologies can be found. For example, the presence of North Korean defectors signifies that even in a nation of totalitarianism and blind patriotism, defiance and opposition to the mainstream ideology actually exists. In order to catalyse the actualisation of their ideal society, believers of every political ideology
dedicate themselves to expand the number of supporters of their own ‘camp’, usually by the exploitation of ideological state apparatuses. In Althusser’s (1970) sense, ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) are ‘a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialised institutions such as school,
religion, political systems and media.’ The concept of ISAs was initially used to describe the ruling class’s hegemonic action to disseminate their ideology through embedding their beliefs and practices subtly in the daily operation of private institutions. In the modern era, however, people from other ideological background begin to gain access to some ideological state apparatuses, and hence the transmission of political ideology is no longer a privilege of the ruling class.
3.3 Power and Hegemony
Power and ideological state apparatuses have an inseparable relationship. Van Dijk (1998) states that a group has (more or less) social power if its members are able to (more or less) control the actions and ideologies of the other groups and this ability presupposes a power base of access to scarce social resources such as force, money, fame, status, knowledge and ISAs et cetera. To put it simply, he believes that people from the upper class possess the
power to manipulate the ideologies within a given society. They enjoy not only privileged access to material resources, but also the authority to publicise ideologies which serve their interest or sustain the unidirectional power relation while other members of the society do not. This severe imbalance in power can be called ‘hegemony’. In Carnoy’s (1986) sense, a hegemonic relation consists of a group of powerful controllers who infiltrate their ideologies into different social domains whereas the less powerful, the ‘controlled’, are exposed
consistently and involuntarily to the ‘mainstream’ ideologies. Due to their lack of power, the less powerful can hardly defend their ideologies from the perpetual intrusion of the
hegemonic ideology. Ultimately, their ideologies will become even more insignificant and will eventually be replaced by those of the socially powerful, which are being reproduced rapidly across society. In order to cease the reproduction of the dominating ideologies, Maglaras (2013) emphasises that new intellectuals of the less powerful groups shall have an ambition to change the existing values or culture by the conquest of certain ideological state apparatuses on the societal level. In the situation of Hong Kong, newspaper discourse, as one of the most accessible ideological state apparatus in the region, are exploited by the pro-democracy camp, the relatively-powerless political party, to combat and to reverse the current prevalence of pro-Beijing ideologies across the society.
3.4 Critical Discourse Analysis
Discourse is defined by Fairclough (2003, p.124) as ‘language use which represents aspects of the world – the processes, relations and structures of the material world, the
“mental world” of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and so forth (…) It not only represents the world as it is, but it is also projective (…), representing possible worlds which are different from the actual world, and tied in to projects to change the world in particular directions.’ In other words, he means that discourse is not just a tool for communications, but it is also a tool that shapes the actual world in a particular way to facilitate transmission of ideologies. During the production of discourse, people often embed their values and beliefs in their language use – such as choices of words or orders of word to disseminate their ideologies and change the world in the direction they desire. Many social scientists, therefore, are interested in observing how ideological beliefs are disseminated in discourses subtly. (The relations between
discourse and manipulation will be elaborated in the following section.)
Critical Discourse Analysis is a subfield of discourse analysis which has a primary interest in the way power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context, such as newspapers articles and
political speeches (van Dijk, 2015). The notion ‘critical’ here, according to Wodak & Meyer (2009), does not carry negative connotation. Instead, it refers to the attitude researchers of CDA should embrace when it comes to the study of power relations and ideologies in
discourse. To accurately realise the social functions of a discourse, they opine that researchers should always question the motives behind the use of linguistic resources in the piece of text, even in the ‘ideologically-neutral’ one.
According to van Dijk (2015), Critical Discourse Analysis is not a unified and homogeneous approach of study in the field but it comprises a wide range of methods and theoretical frameworks tailored to the analysts’ research objectives (Alameda-Hernandez, 2008). In the next section, one of the approaches that establishes the theoretical underpinning of most studies in critical discourse analysis will be discussed.
3.5 Socio-cognitive Approach of Critical Discourse Analysis
Van Dijk (1998) proposes to look into the relations of ideology, hegemony and discourse from a socio-cognitive perspective. What is different from other CDA approaches is that van Dijk’s framework takes into account the cognition of the people involved. It is underpinned by a multidisciplinary ‘triangulation framework’ which is composed of three interdependent elements (cognition, discourse and society) to be examined in critical discourse analysis.
In the first part of this section, the element ‘society’ will be discussed. Mostly, this has to do with the identification of micro- and macro- power relations among social groups. Micro-power relations concern with the internal organisation within a particular social group, identified through the everyday interactions of their members. Macro-power relations refer to the power hierarchy external to the group, such as its association with the government or political parties. Like other frameworks of CDA, researchers of the socio-cognitive approach are particularly interested in revealing the effect of macro-power structure on discourse. That is, how a powerful social actor or organisation who has the control over discourse, one of the ideological state apparatuses, exploits such power to implant the ideologies that aligned with the group’s interest into the less-privileged.
Van Dijk postulates that the key tactic wielded by the dominant group is the manipulation of one’s memory. In the following part of this section, the cognition and
discourse (and semiotics) components of the triangulation model will be discussed. Cognition, in van Dijk’s (2015) sense, refers to the mind, memory and the cognitive processes and representations involved in the production and comprehension of discourse. The process of
cognitive manipulation generally involves, first, the control of one’s short term memory (STM), which van Dijk (2006) defines as the ‘location’ where a person decodes and interprets incoming information. This manipulation of STM can be achieved through the production of online, goal directed and hypothetical strategies operating at various levels of discourse structure. Therefore, in this approach, researchers look into how a manipulating agent foregrounds or filters information deliberately (depending on its favourability to the group’s ideologies and interest) in order for him/her to influence the others’ temporary perception of certain entities, groups or subjects. (I will elaborate more on this strategy in the forthcoming section.)
A control over a person’s short term memory can ultimately lead to the control over his or her long term memory (LTM) – the deeply-ingrained autobiographical experience and knowledge as well as the socially shared knowledge, attitudes and ideologies (van Dijk, 2015). Nevertheless, he added that altering or constructing one’s LTM can be a long and challenging process that cannot be easily achieved through single or scattered uses of particular discursive structures. The most effective way to manipulate one’s long term memory is to make use of some extreme, ongoing (or recent) and fear-inducing events, such as terrorist attacks, available to the manipulators as a kind of special manipulative instrument which poses a strong impact on one’s mental model (van Dijk, 2006). He also suggests that a prolonged exposure to a consistent pattern of discursive manipulation can also convert the manipulee’s temporary perception into his or her social cognition. Therefore, in
socio-cognitive approach, researchers also study how consistently and systematic certain discursive pattern are used across different discourses produced by the same social organisation.
3.6 Analysing Newspapers Discourse with the Socio-cognitive Approach
The socio-cognitive approach of critical discourse analysis will be applied to the current research. Human cognition has a pivotal role in the process of discursive manipulation and the triangulation framework can help researchers to analyse systematically the intricate relationship between cognitive manipulation and the use of particular linguistic constructions in newspapers.
In the case of newspaper articles (the research subject of this study), owners of newspaper companies are known as the ‘socially powerful’ who have exclusive control over the scarce ideological state apparatus. Their dominance in social power allows them to freely disseminate and reproduce political ideologies in which they believe, by means of various linguistic resources. Min (1997) elaborates that manipulative strategies in news-producing
processes, such as deliberate selection, interpretation, and presentation of events to audience, are used to facilitate reality in a manner corresponding to the underlying ideologies of the manipulators. In discourse produced by the same newspaper company, a consistent pattern of selection and presentation of information might be adopted in order to pose a permanent influence upon the social cognition of their readers.
3.7 Discursive Strategy: Positive US, Negative THEM
This part focuses on how newspaper publishers present different information in a different manner. Van Dijk (1998) puts forward the ‘ideological square’ which summarises the four closely intertwined discursive strategies employed by newspaper publishers to reinforce their ideologies across a society:
1. Express/emphasise information that is positive about us 2. Express/emphasise information that is negative about them 3. Suppress/de-emphasise information that is negative about us 4. Supress/de-emphasise information that is positive about them
The ideological square classifies social groups into ‘US’ and ‘THEM’. The ‘US’ group symbolises individuals who share the same (political) ideologies whereas the ‘THEM’ group represents the out-group people who contest those values and beliefs. It describes the polarised differences in how newspaper companies subjectively shape information about themselves and the others according to their varying political affiliation. In the present research, we will investigate the manipulation stemming from the positive self-representation and negative others-representation in newspaper discourse of Hong Kong and its persuasive effect on one’s ‘selection’ in the Chief Executive Election.
3.8 Evaluation and Appraisal Framework
According to Hunston and Thompson (2000, p.5), evaluation in discourse refers to ‘the expression of a speaker or writer’s attitude or stance towards, a viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about. (…) It expresses a writer’s or speaker’s opinion and in doing so it reflects and continues to build the ideological system of that person and his or her community.’ O’Shaughnessy & O’Shaughnessy (2004) mention that persuasive effect is always rooted in every use of evaluative language. Therefore, this section will find out the role of evaluation in the manipulation of one’s political ideologies and social cognition through newspaper discourse, with the aid of Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal framework.
Martin and White (2005) define the term ‘appraisal’ as a discourse and semantic system which gives meanings to a text, although the perceived meanings emanating from appraisal might vary when the readers have a different reading position or stance on the issue. The Appraisal Framework is a multidimensional analytical taxonomy which formulates the discourse-analytical investigation on how appraisal resources enact and reinforce identities, negotiate relations of solidarity and power, reproduce and naturalise particular value positions and worldviews (White, 2015: 1). It dissects evaluative constructions into three interacting systems - attitude, engagement and graduation.
3.8.1 Attitude
Attitudinal appraisals involve the expression of one’s positive or negative feelings, including emotional reactions, judgement of behaviour and evaluation of things (Martin & White, 2005: 35). They can be further classified into three sub-systems – affect, appreciation and judgement.
Affect is concerned with the linguistic expressions that describe a person’s
psychological experience, such as she is happy, the air was filled with sorrow and a tense period et cetera.
Appreciation, on the other hand, has to do with the discourse producer’s usually subjective assessment of objects, processes or natural phenomena’s aesthetic attributes, like the magnificent landscape, a boring speech and a good plan.
Judgement, last but not least, is associated with one’s attitude towards a person’s behaviour, for instance the behaviour is rude, the action was forceful.
There are also instances of implicit evaluations, in which attitudinal lexis are absent. As with the comprehension of value-laden expressions, it requires readers to make pragmatic inference that go beyond what is literally said (Benamara, Mathieu & Taboada, 2016). Hence, the understanding of context and tone is also paramount in analysis of evaluative resources.
3.8.2 Engagement
Engagement concerns the way a person is positioned into a discourse with respect to the value position being advanced (Martin & White, 2005: 36). Fundamentally, the analysis of engagement emphasises how writers or speakers play with attributions in discourse to
reinforce their corresponding ideological beliefs and thus construct an effective persuasion. Engagement resources usually have to do with the communicative effects brought about by certain linguistic tools in quotation and allusion, such as projection (I pronounce), modality
(apparently) and adverbials (According to someone…). These lexis illustrate the writer’s distance or engagement to the attributed speech and reflect the his or her degree of confidence and degree of agreement or disagreement in the attributed speech.
3.8.3 Graduation
The third system, graduation, has to do with the degree of evaluations in the two previously mentioned systems. There are two continuums subordinating to graduation - force and focus. Force is about the constructed scale of intensity of the gradable evaluative
resources employed. That is, whether an opinion or claim is raised or lowered by comparatives, superlatives, repetitions and sometimes paralinguistic features (Martin & White, 2005: 37). In contrast, focus deals with ‘the adjustment of the strength of boundaries’ within a non-gradable category by adding signifiers like almost or somewhat to construct the core or peripheral types of things (Martin & White, 2005: 37).
Since the appraisal framework offers a systematic approach to investigate the semantic aspects of discourse elements, it helps unveil the persuasive effect embedded in the meaning of words in discourse, newspapers editorials specifically in this research. First, the study of attitude showcases how information related to ‘US’ and ‘THEM’ is positively and negatively constructed in alignment with the producer’s goal of influencing one’s political ideologies. The examination of engagement and graduation resources provides insights into the overall style and intensity of persuasion adopted in discourse, as reflected in the writer’s degree of affirmativeness and forcefulness in attributions and attitudinal appraisals.
3.9 Previous Studies on Critical Discourse Analysis
Martin & White’s (2005) appraisal theory has been drawn upon by numerous corpus-based critical discourse analysis, including Bartley & Benitez-Castro’s (2016) study on evaluative resources in newspaper articles regarding the issue of homosexuality of Ireland. Their analysis shows that there was a tendency for Irish newspaper companies - Evening
Herald, Irish Post and Irish Independent - to portray the LGBT group derogatively as
‘immoral, evil, corrupt, violent, promiscuous, effeminate and abnormal’ by means of judgement and affect assessments. However, they did not take into account the ideological beliefs supported by the publishers, a determining factor of their appraisals of the LGBT issues. Hypothetically, the more conservative the newspaper company is, the higher the number of negative representation of the homosexuals one can identify in its discourse.
Therefore, their selection of some relatively conservative newspapers in Ireland might influence the result of the study.
Ekawati (2015) applied the same theory into her qualitative research on the attitudinal system reflected in newspaper editorials commenting on the death penalty in Indonesia used by two Australian broadsheets publishers Sydney Morning Herald and Herald Sun. Her result conforms to van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square in that the Indonesian government (the THEM group) were ascribed an inhumane and barbaric (negative) persona and the ‘cruelty’ of the Indonesian state authority was heightened by the leniency and forgiveness of the
Australian government (the US group). In the article, she elucidates that her selections of editorials rather than other sections of a newspaper was motivated by the fact that they are ‘expressions and constructions of editors’ opinion on behalf of an organisation’ and ‘they are about a specific topic of interest that can be the concern of local and international society’. Since the content of editorials contains one’s personal opinions towards current affairs, it might be more persuasive and ideologically-loaded than conventional news articles of an informative nature. Thus, manipulation and persuasion are expected to be more extensive and explicit in this column. This study adopts Ekawati’s selection of newspaper editorials and study how evaluative resources are employed in editorials to re-shape one’s mental model in Hong Kong.
A number of critical discourse analyses to which the ideological square can be applied have been carried out in the context of Hong Kong. One of the most recent studies is Chan’s (2017) corpus-driven analysis on newspaper articles from the ‘pro-democracy’ South China
Morning Post and the pro-Beijing China Daily. Prior to his analysis, he selected seven
keywords in relation to the Umbrella Revolution in 2014 and explored the manner in which the two newspaper companies evaluated those notions. The findings posit that pro-democracy discourses display tolerance to the sporadic disruption to social order resulted from the act of civil disobedience, whereas the pro-Beijing discourse labelled the protest as illegal and condemned the participants for being thoughtless and radical. The framework of keyword analysis can be used not only in corpus analysis, but also in a qualitative study. Its well-structured and goal-oriented features allow analysts to concentrate on the things, events or concepts central to the issues in question.
3.10 Research Questions
Having looked into the more general socio-cognitive approach to the more specific appraisal analytical framework in critical discourse analysis, this research will provide further insights into the following questions pertinent to the theoretical background:
General Research Question: How do the three newspaper companies in Hong Kong manipulate their readers’ positions in the 2017 Chief Executive Election by means of discourse?
Specific Research Question 1: Based on the appraisal framework by Martin and White (2005), how does the use of attitudinal resources (affect, judgement and appreciation) in editorials resonate with the political ideologies of the newspaper company?
Specific Research Question 2: Subsequently, how does the degree of graduation (Martin & White, 2005) of those attitudinal evaluations conform to the newspaper’s political position?
Specific Research Question 3: Finally, how did the writers engage themselves in or distance themselves from the quotations from outside sources vis-à-vis the political affiliation of the newspaper company?
4. Methodology
This section introduces the methodology adopted by the present research to collect first hand data for qualitative analysis predicating on the three research questions.
4.1 Selection of Newspapers
Editorials from three English newspaper companies in Hong Kong – Hong Kong Free
Press (HKFP), South China Morning Post (SCMP) and China Daily (Hong Kong) will be
selected as the research subjects representing the pro-democracy, neutral (relative to China Daily) and pro-Beijing political ideologies of Hong Kong respectively.
Hong Kong Free Press, established in 2015, is a non-profit English language
newspaper aiming to ‘amplify the voices of the voiceless’ and to safeguard the freedom of speech and ‘core values’ of the city (Hong Kong Free Press, 2015). Given their concerns about the liberty of Hong Kong, the newspaper might appeal to the pro-democracy readers primarily.
South China Morning Post, founded in 1903, is Hong Kong’s first newspaper in
record. The newspaper company is ‘committed to informing and inspiring through journalism of the highest standard’ (South China Morning Post, 2018). Recognised for its relatively neutral and impartial position, the Post, nevertheless, became slightly pro-Beijing in
journalistic stance after its acquisition by Alibaba Group, one of the biggest Beijing-leaning financial group in China, in 2016 (Huang, 2017).
The Hong Kong edition of China Daily was founded in 1997, the year of the handover. The vision of this newspaper company is to ‘help the world to gain a good understanding of China’ (China Daily, 2017). Chan (2017) pointed out that the editorial stance of the newspaper ‘closely aligns with the political stance of the Beijing government’.
4.2 Selection of Editorials
The variation in political ideologies among these three publishers gives rise to a ‘war of stance’, in which each newspaper emphasises the good qualities of their own ideologies and the bad qualities of the ‘others’ (van Dijk, 1998; Chan, 2017). This research studies their use of ideologically-loaded evaluative resources in editorials related to the 2017 Chief Executive Election of Hong Kong. The analysis will focus primarily on those published within the following two important periods when the persuasive constructions in discourse were more overt and extensive in order to earn public supports for the political ideologies the newspaper publishers were representing.
The first period starts from the beginning of the nomination period (1st Feb, 2017) to the eve of the Election Day (26th March, 2017). During this period, newspapers devoted themselves to promote and support the nominee who could safeguard the interest of the political affiliation that the newspaper represents explicitly.
The second period is on the week when Carrie Lam’s victory in the Chief Executive race was announced (26th March – 2nd April, 2017). Editorials within this period were the primary platform where editors expressed their opinions about the result and predicted the future of Hong Kong under the leadership of Carrie Lam.
4.3 Data Analysis
Around six editorials concerning the CE Election will be retrieved from each
newspaper company – three of them were be randomly chosen within the first period and the remaining three within the second period.
In an attempt to establish an objective overview and comparison of their distinctive patterns of discursive manipulation, the quantity of word tokens analysed from each newspaper company was maintained around 3750.
Table 1 Total Number of Word Tokens Analysed from Each Newspaper Publishers Hong Kong Free Press South China Morning Post China Daily
3902 3757 3610
After the data collection, a qualitative analysis on the evaluative resources will be conducted. To answer the research questions (concerning the attitudinal, graduation and engagement resources in newspaper editorials) systematically, this study focuses merely on the appraisals and attributions pertinent to the eight chosen themes relative to the Chief Executive Election. These themes comprehensively encompass the event itself (Chief
Executive Election 2017), the location of the event (Hong Kong), the people who are directly involved (i.e. the candidates of the election - Carrie Lam, John Tsang and Woo Kwok-hing) and the parties which might be affected by the event (China, democracy camp, pro-Beijing camp).
For the analysis of attitude and graduation (Research Question 1 & 2), I will extract sentences containing appraisals of the eight selected themes and classify them accordingly. The realised attitudinal evaluations will be further categorised into three groups in relation to the Appraisal Framework – affect, judgement and appreciation (Martin & White, 2005).
Connotation of the evaluative lexis, the implicitness or explicitness of the evaluative effect and the writers’ degree of confidence in the appraisal will be studied in order to find out whether or not the writers constructed ‘positive US, negative THEM’ representations to promote and to reiterate the political ideologies of the newspaper.
To explore the writer’s distance from or degree of engagement in attributions (Research Question 3), I will first identify all instances of quotation (from outside sources) relevant to the Chief Executive Election in the newspaper editorials. I will focus on the writer’s degree of investment in those quotations – as shown in their choice of quoting verbs and the addition of graduation adverbials. Ultimately, I will find out if the writers engaged in or distanced from attributed speech which align with or does not align with the newspaper’s political ideologies.
5. Findings and Discussion
This section summarises the findings, and accounts for the manipulative effect of evaluative resources in Hong Kong Free Press, South China Morning Post and China Daily.
Ideologies of newspapers usually manifest themselves in the attitudinal evaluations in discourses (van Dijk, 1998). The focus of this section is to present the overall manner in which the eight themes were portrayed, either positively or negatively, in the editorials, and to find out whether the data we obtained adhere to van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square, that is the positive US and negative THEM representations of groups.
A total of sixteen newspaper editorials from the three newspaper publishers were analysed, nine of which were released within the nomination period of the 2017 Chief
Executive Election whereas the remaining seven were editorials commenting on the victory of Carrie Lam.
5.1 Attitudinal Evaluations of the Eight Themes
First, I will focus on the attitudinal (affect, judgement and appreciation) devices used by editors to facilitate cognitive manipulations in accordance with the eight chosen themes -
Hong Kong, China, Carrie Lam, John Tsang, Woo Kwok-hing, Pro-democracy, Pro-Beijing
and Chief Executive Election 2017.
5.1.1 General Statistics
The following tables illustrate the number of negative and positive attitudinal evaluations identified in the collected editorials, sorted by their corresponding newspaper companies.
Table 2 Number of Negative Attitudinal Evaluations in the Selected Newspaper Editorials
Theme
Hong Kong Free Press (Pro-democracy)
South China Morning Post (Neutral– Pro-Beijing) China Daily (Pro-Beijing) Hong Kong 11 13 8 China 35 31 0 Carrie Lam 44 22 2 John Tsang 16 18 16 Woo Kwok-hing 3 0 10 Pro-democracy 15 19 44 Pro-Beijing 44 3 0
Chief Executive Election 2017
7 6 0
Table 3 Number of Positive Attitudinal Evaluations in the Selected Newspaper Editorials
Theme
Hong Kong Free Press (Pro-democracy)
South China Morning Post (Neutral – Pro-Beijing) China Daily (Pro-Beijing) Hong Kong 1 3 2 China 1 6 6 Carrie Lam 21 45 100 John Tsang 14 15 3 Woo Kwok-hing 3 2 0 Pro-democracy 3 1 0 Pro-Beijing 7 0 12 Chief Executive Election 2017 0 0 2
In the pro-democracy Hong Kong Free Press, there are 35 negative evaluations of ‘China’ and 44 negative evaluations of both ‘Carrie Lam’ and ‘the Pro-Beijing camp’. They were extensively represented as the culprits responsible for the deterioration of Hong Kong’s autonomy. Also, the editors of HKFP de-emphasised the desirable attributes of these Beijing-leaning parties, with only 6 positive evaluations of China and no positive evaluation of the ‘pro-Beijing camp’ found in the editorials. Yet, there were more than 20 positive evaluations of Carrie Lam – whose competence as the director of Social Welfare Department of Hong Kong a decade ago was acknowledged. Our findings show that ‘Hong Kong’ and ‘Chief Executive Election’ were also given negative portrayals generally. John Tsang received a relatively more neutral appraisals than Carrie Lam did, with 14 of them as positive and 16 of them as negative. ‘Woo Kwok hing’, who appeared in only six instances in the four HKFP editorials, was also given an objective appraisal. Unexpectedly, there were 15 negative evaluations of the ‘pro-democracy camp’, five times than that of the positive evaluations.
In South China Morning Post, the pattern of representations of the eight themes exhibits a high level of resemblance to that of HKFP. The only major differences lie in its significantly fewer negative evaluations to Carrie Lam (22) and the pro-Beijing camp (3) as well as its more frequent positive evaluations of Carrie Lam (45) and China (6).
China Daily showed their overt support to Carrie Lam with around 100 positive
‘John Tsang’ and ‘Woo-kwok-hing’ were negatively evaluated in 16 and 10 instances respectively. Since the pro-democracy ideologies are in contradiction with the pro-Beijing ideologies, the editors of China Daily did not include any explicit positive evaluation of the pro-democracy camp in their discourse. The pro-Beijing journalistic stance of the newspaper was also reinforced by the 6 and 12 positive representations and zero negative representation of ‘China’ and ‘pro-Beijing’. While both HKFP and SCMP remained sceptical about the voting mechanism of the 2017 Chief Executive Election, there are four positive evaluations of it in the editorials of China Daily.
At this stage, my findings suggest that attitudinal evaluations in SCMP and China
Daily corresponded to the ‘Positive US, Negative THEM’ proposition. In Hong Kong Free Press, although the evaluations of the ‘THEM’ group – Carrie Lam, China and pro-Beijing
camp – was mostly negative, the number of negative evaluations of the pro-democracy camp (the US group) was also higher than that of the positive evaluations in its editorials. In the forthcoming section, I will try to validate the general observations in this part by scrutinising the attitude, engagement and graduation evaluative resources in the selected editorials.
5.1.2 Hong Kong
Hong Kong, as the location where the Chief Executive Election takes place, is the first theme to be investigated. This analysis emphasises how the present society of Hong Kong was evaluated before the CE Election and how writers prophesised the future of the city under the administration of Carrie Lam in the editorials.
HKFP (1)
Outgoing chief executive Leung Chun-ying seems to be doing his level best to make it impossible for his successor to follow through on her pledge to heal and unify a bitterly divided Hong Kong.
SCMP (1) And she will need to unite a divided society and establish a more inclusive style of leadership.
In HKFP, SCMP, and China Daily, there are a number of negative evaluations about the current political environment of Hong Kong achieved by means of ‘appreciation’ and ‘judgement’ lexis. Editors from HKFP and SCMP explicitly reviewed the city as ‘bitterly divided’ (Appreciation) and ‘divided’ (Appreciation). In the pro-democracy newspaper
group) was held responsible for Hong Kong’s severe social division resulted from the ‘current’ government’s exclusive political atmosphere in the example.
China Daily (1)
The nominations situation shows that Hong Kong's political rivalry
remains as obvious as ever, which means the next-term SAR government has little chance of winning the two-thirds support for an electoral reform
package that meets all the legal requirements.
Similarly, China Daily used the phrases ‘political rivalry (Judgement)’ to indicate the antagonism and social tension among political parties of the region. This negative evaluation of the present Hong Kong suggests to readers that a drastic makeover of the city government is indispensable in order for Hong Kong to progress through such unwanted conflict.
These negative descriptions of ‘Hong Kong’ in HKFP, SCMP and China Daily opened up the ideological manipulations in action. The negative evaluations first directed readers into focusing on a particular weakness of Hong Kong – such as the social division due to a devoid of democracy (HKFP), the lack of a more inclusive and progressive government (SCMP) and the relentless social conflicts brought about by the radicals from the opposition parties (China Daily). Then, the editors attempted to persuade readers into supporting or opposing a particular chief executive candidates by stating the candidate’s ability or inability to tackle these current problems of Hong Kong. In the following sections, more insights into this kind of persuasion will be provided.
Concerning the future direction towards which Hong Kong is heading under the governance of Carrie Lam, writers from HKFP, SCMP and China Daily held some different opinions.
HKFP (2) No, it’s not a “Ten Years”-style apocalypse, but it’s bad enough.
In pro-democracy HKFP, there is a positive evaluation of the future of Hong Kong – the negation of ‘a “Ten Years”-style apocalypse’ (Appreciation). Ten Years is a film which pictures the human-right and cultural problems with which Hong Kong will possibly be struggling in 2025, if the city’s integration with China continues. At first sight, it seems like the editor of HKFP rejected the possibility that the victory of Carrie Lam, a representative of the pro-Beijing camp (the THEM group), will guide Hong Kong to catastrophes. This positive appraisal was immediately followed by a negative appreciation - ‘but it’s bad enough’ - which
suggested that the victory of Carrie Lam will actually lead Hong Kong to an undesirable future, only not an awfully disastrous one. In this case, the writer shaped Carrie Lam (the candidate supported by the THEM group) negatively by highlighting the possibility that she may cause extreme chaos in the future Hong Kong.
SCMP (2)
In democracies, the people’s voice prevails. In totalitarian states, the strongman dictates. But we’re a semi-democracy under a one-party state. Who dictates? Don’t ask. Just self-destruct. We’re screwed anyway.
The neutral SCMP, on the other hand, also foresaw a bleak future of Hong Kong. It can be reflected by the editor’s use of negative appreciation lexis - ‘one-party state’ and ‘dictates’. Inferred from the social context, these negative appraisals expressed the writer’s disapproval to the fact that the government of Hong Kong was subordinate to China – a country under the dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party. The negative vernacular language ‘We are screwed anyway’ reinforced his thought that the ‘one-party’ ideologies of China would ultimately influence Hong Kong and spoil the city’s autonomy and democracy. In this example, the writer of SCMP tried to represent China negatively by depicting it as the responsible agent who might lead Hong Kong to this undesirable future. These negative representations of Hong Kong’s future could therefore cast an unfavourable light over the candidate whom China supports.
China Daily (2)
This reflects a shift in the government's commitment to a more stable, inspiring and "talent-oriented" environment.
By comparison, the pro-Beijing China Daily’s evaluations of the future of Hong Kong were mostly positive. Attitudinal lexis like ‘stable (Appreciation)’, ‘inspiring (Appreciation)’ and ‘talent-oriented (Appreciation)’ overtly expressed the editor’s confidence in the future development of Hong Kong. The use of ‘a shift’ in the sentence suggested that the policy and the new cabinet formed by Carrie Lam – the CE candidates supported by the pro-Beijing camp (the US group) – could bring the city closer to the positive future with ‘stability’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘talents’.
5.1.3 China
This section focuses on the appraisal of ‘China’. Beijing and the Liaison’s Office of Central People Government in Hong Kong played an essential role in last year’s Chief
Executive election. Their involvement in the process stirred up polarised perception among Hong Kong people.
HKFP (3)
Hong Kong’s 7.3 million people must hope that Chinese leaders eventually wisen up and stop hobbling Hong Kong CEs and their ministers with their blatant interference in the city’s affairs – electoral and otherwise.
HKFP, the voice of the pro-democracy camp, adopted a derogatory tone to assess
people or concepts central to ‘China’ (the THEM group). In the example, the editor negatively evaluated China’s actions in the 2017 CE Elections as ‘interference’ (intensified by the graduation marker ‘blatant’). The word ‘interference’ reiterated that selection of Chief Executive was entirely the business of Hong Kong. China was depicted as the outsider who should not have meddled in and influenced the election process. The negative appraisals ‘wisen up (Judgement)’ and ‘hobbling (Judgement)’ reinforced that interference of Beijing’s officials were unwise and they were impediments to the autonomy of Hong Kong. These evaluations communicated the editor’s disapproval to the Chinese authority (THEM).
SCMP (3) We’ve long been locked in this choking embrace.
The neutral SCMP, on the other hand, wrapped its evaluation to ‘China’ in a metaphor. ‘Embrace’, a human gesture of putting hands around one another to display friendliness, affection and love, was employed to signify the relation of China and Hong Kong, i.e. China as a gracious companion of the special administrative region. Although the metaphorical representation positively evaluated China’s involvement and care for the city’s internal affairs, the negative evaluation embedded in ‘locked (Judgement)’ and ‘choking (Appreciation)’ also remarked the excessive and suffocating attention China had been giving to the city’s government. Addressing both the good intention and the tightness of the
‘embrace’, this evaluative metaphor subtly transmitted the newspaper’s slightly Beijing-leaning ideologies to readers.
China Daily (3)
She could capitalize on this by seeking the central government's help to provide measures that are beneficial to Hong Kong.
The supportive role of China (the US group) to Hong Kong was emphasised in the pro-Beijing China Daily. A positive appreciation - ‘beneficial’ was explicitly used to appraise the communist party’s assistance and guidance to Hong Kong. The editors made use of this positive evaluation of China to persuade readers to appreciate the supportive role of the Chinese government.
Before the Chief Executive Election, there were rumours spreading that the Chinese authority and the Liaison’s Office were exercising their power to convince the majority of the Election Committees (and the public) to vote for Carrie Lam. This analysis explores how editors from HKFP, SCMP and China Daily react to those rumours differently.
HKFP (4)
Beyond the concerted effort to foist Lam on a population that has given her an emphatic thumbs-down, the city has also recently seen, thanks to
Beijing’s increasingly visible hand, an alarming erosion of those core values to which Tsang at least bothers to pay lip service.
In the example, HKFP evaluated the Chinese government (the THEM group) negatively with the judgement lexis – ‘foist’ . The negative connotation carried by ‘foist’ conveyed the editor’s strong disapproval of China’s determination (as reflected by the graduation marker ‘concerted effort’) to impose Carrie Lam on Hong Kong people by all means. The editor of HKFP also used the expression - ‘increasingly visible hand’ to restate Beijing’s more and more apparent intervention in the internal affairs of Hong Kong. This expression can be considered as a negative judgement evaluation because it implied China’s contempt for the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ principle, which ultimately contributed to the ‘alarming’ erosion of core values – freedom and autonomy – of Hong Kong. These negative appraisals aimed at cultivating the negative perception of the THEM group (China) and dissuading readers from believing in their pro-Beijing ideologies.
SCMP (4)
But since Beijing has given more than hints as to its favoured candidate, pan-dems are mobilising public opinion, quite successfully, to draw artificial differences between Lam and Tsang.
Though less pejoratively, SCMP also reviewed China’s overt support for Carrie Lam with negative appraisals. In the example, ‘give more than hints’ (Judgement) is the editor’s irony to mock China’s manipulation of the 2017 CE Election behind the scene. The editor used ‘hints’ – which originally means the indirect expressions of showing the other what one is thinking – to describe Beijing’s overt and excessive publicity campaign for Carrie Lam – the ‘favoured’ (Negative Appreciation) candidate. By this sarcasm, the editor evaluated China negatively by implying its violation of the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ principle to stage Carrie Lam’s victory. This implicit accusation of Beijing is intended to evoke readers’ negative emotion towards China and Carrie Lam.
SCMP, unlike HKFP, did not make use of negative evaluations of China to bring out
the “positives” of the pro-democrats in this example. Members of the pro-democracy camp were said to be manipulating public opinion by drawing ‘artificial difference between Lam and Tsang’. The evaluative lexis ‘artificial (Appreciation)’ implied that the pro-democracy camp was circulating deceptive information about Carrie Lam to put her in a disadvantage. (Further details in relation to the newspaper’s evaluation on pro-democracy will be discussed in later section.) This negative appraisal of the pro-democracy camp’s credibility built up readers’ negative perception of the (ideologies of the) camp. As a side note, since both political groups are assessed negatively on the issue, the impartiality of SCMP is, once again, formed.
China Daily (4)
One of Lam's strengths is the strong support from the central government. (…) She could capitalize on this by seeking the central government's help to provide measures that are beneficial to Hong Kong.
In the example of pro-Beijing China Daily, the writer evaluated the Chinese authorities’ propaganda of Carrie Lam as merely some actions to showcase their ‘strong support’ (Judgement). The use of ‘support’ here downplayed the sense of imposition of Beijing’s publicity of Carrie Lam. He also positively evaluated the overt support that Carrie Lam received as her ‘strength’. On the one hand, it implied the authority’s confidence in her capability. On the other hand, since China was being supportive to Carrie Lam, it opened up a
thought that Carrie Lam could liaise with China – one of the world’s top economies – to provide Hong Kong people a better future. By emphasising China’s propaganda as her strength and reinforcing the benefits Hong Kong people might gain from her victory, the editor of China Daily tried to persuade readers to support their desirable winner – Carrie Lam.
5.1.4 2017 Chief Executive Election
Since the voting mechanism of the 2017 Chief Executive Election was controversial, this part offers insights into the editors’ evaluations of it.
HKFP (5)
Given that scenario, the political atmosphere would be so poisoned that no leader who is human could be expected to bring together the feuding factions of Hong Kong – let alone a figure handpicked by Beijing who trailed her chief rival, former financial secretary John Tsang Chun-wah, by nearly 20 points in public opinion polls leading up to the small-circle election. SCMP (5) We all know that the “small circle” voting process does not have
widespread credibility in the community.
In both HKFP and SCMP, the election was labelled as ‘small-circle’. As neutral as the evaluation might seem, when this appreciation lexis was used to appraise an election, it pointed out that the election did not conform to the nature of an authentic democratic ballot, in which everyone, regardless of his or her political ideology, social position, race or gender, has the right to vote. In the examples, editors in HKFP and SCMP attempted to demonstrate how the system of Election Committees undermines the representativeness of the ballot.
In HKFP, the editor further reinforced the 2017 Chief Executive Election’s inability to represent popular opinion by evaluating Carrie Lam negatively as ‘a figure handpicked by Beijing’ (Appreciation). It conveyed a sense that her victory had already been pre-determined by China before the election started (due to the dominance of the pro-Beijing camp in the Election Committee). Thus, it expressed the editor’s opinion that the election was only a façade to cover the direct appointment of their desired candidate. The purpose of this negative evaluation of the Chief Executive Election was to persuade the readers to exert pressure on the Hong Kong government to implement universal suffrage.
