Lutgard Lams – författare

The present comparative analysis of Chinese and Taiwanese English-language press narratives about Hong Kong’s handover on 1 July 1997, aims to show the power of the journalistic pen and image, generating varying media realities about the same Hong Kong story. It is buttressed by a comprehensive historical, sociological and political contextualization of the media accounts. The three newspapers examined, the China Daily (China), and the Taiwanese papers, the China News and the China Post, are each rooted in their different political beliefs, cultural assumptions, and institutional practices, in short, their ideological positions. Drawing on insights from Linguistic Pragmatics and Critical Discourse Studies, the study identifies discursive processes such as legitimation strategies, group categorization, naturalization of events that operates by presenting fluid processes as fixed truth claims, and privileging some voices over others. It also provides a theoretical model for studying Chinese official discourse about the Self and the Other. The volume shows the benefit of a historical analysis serving as an antidote to recency bias, oblivious to the set conditions that accompanied Beijing’s vague promises to Hong Kongers of political autonomy for 50 years. This book is written for anyone interested in the methodology of text analysis and in the history of and political developments in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Drawing on approaches from Linguistic Pragmatics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Social Actor Representation Theory, and Framing Theory, this book critically explores the various linguistic devices and pragmatic strategies that concern meaning generation in the context of Chinese official media discourse.The volume rests on eight chapters that—using different analytical lenses, with either a culture-specific perspective or a cross-cultural one—take language analysis as their point of departure, in order to investigate how meaning is generated in situated discourse, such as media accounts about specific issues within the socio-political, cultural, or economic sphere. Each chapter is empirically grounded, and either focuses on a specific genre, such as the documentary and the press conference, or explores social and political events and initiatives that have been topical in recent years: the Covid-19 and SARS crises, the US-China trade conflict, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and the 2021 Hong Kong electoral system reform.By bringing back the linguistic analysis to the core of the analytical approach, the volume shows the interconnection of text and context, reminding the reader about the key role of language users both on the production and reception side.This book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in the relation between language and politics and, in particular, in understanding meaning-making and meaning-moulding processes in discourses articulated in an official Chinese context aimed both internally and internationally.