Chinese discourses of identity and legitimacy : representations of self and other in the 2019 Hong Kong protests

Abstract

In 2019, Hong Kong witnessed a series of long-lasting and violent protests since its handover to China in 1997. The protests were triggered by the Hong Kong Legislative Council’s (LegCo) attempt to pass a law, which enables transferring fugitives from Hong Kong to jurisdictions with no extradition agreements within the city, such as mainland China. The 2019 Hong Kong protests, or the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement (Anti-ELAB), have reignited a new protest cycle following the 2014 Umbrella Movement. It represents people’s demands for political reforms and produced new meanings of political resistance in Hong Kong, which created a structural challenge and conflict to the official perception of national identity in mainland China and the ruling of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Not surprisingly, this protest triggered responses from the state power of China; it introduced the Hong Kong National Security Law (NSL) in June 2020, effectively keeping defiant voices out of the media and making civil society silent. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as an interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach, this thesis specifically adopts the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), coupled with Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) and other subsets of CDA, to analyse different identities and ideologies established in the 2019 Hong Kong protests by the Chinese state and other civil-society actors on social media. In doing so, the analysis elaborates how such discourses contribute to China's nationalist politics, facilitating the rationalisation of the CCP's legitimacy in political debates. The analysis reveals how the CCP repeatedly portrays the protests as a result of hostile Western forces' interference in China's internal affairs, igniting nationalist sentiments among the Chinese public to legitimise its rule and delegitimise others' counter-narratives. It is expected through CDA, this thesis sheds light on how representations of the Self and the Other bolster the CCP’s orchestration of national identity construction, hence, justifying its political legitimacy in the Chinese context.