Narratives of the Hong Kong Sovereignty Transfer: The Pragmatics of Language and ideology in the Taiwanese and Chinese English-Language Press

Author: Lutgard Lams
Publication date: 27 February 2026
Publisher : Routledge
Total pages: 330
Price Hardcover:  € 190
ISBN: 978-1-032-26400-4 (hbk)
             978-1-032-26402-8 (pbk: forthcoming)
             978-1-003-28815-2 (ebk)

In “Narratives of the Hong Kong Sovereignty Transfer: The Pragmatics of Language and Ideology in the Taiwanese and Chinese English-Language Press”, Lutgard Lams explores variations in the Taiwanese and Chinese English-language press accounts of the Hong Kong handover, published just before and after the ceremony on 1 July 1997. The volume exposes the ‘struggle for meaning’ engaged in by the various media outlets in their narration of the story of Hong Kong, which, at the time of the handover, had become a site of ideological contestation over which various discursive communities constructed their narratives. In the Taiwanese, Hong Kong, and Chinese cultural and political contexts, the ‘tug-of-war’ over meanings in the public sphere deserves due attention. Through a comparative approach the study identifies distinct ideological positions within the Taiwanese society, not only about Hong Kong but also about Taiwan’s relationship with the PRC. It also provides keen insights into the different perspectives held in the PRC and Taiwan about Hong Kong’s history, the legacy of the British colonizers, sociopolitical realities at the time of the handover, and about Hong Kong’s future. Above all, the book returns to the concrete discourses of the 1990s, articulated by various stakeholders in China, the UK, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, as disseminated in the respective national media outlets, in an attempt to better understand the present state of affairs in Hong Kong through the prism of the past. 

The author’s main focus goes to the different Taiwanese voices, first of all because their perspectives on the handover at the end of the 1990s diverge substantially from the narratives spread by the PRC. The sovereignty transfer was of special interest to Taiwan, given that the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ framework for Hong Kong’s future was originally conceived by the Chinese authorities in the 1980s as a solution to the ‘Taiwan question’. At the time of the handover in 1997, the Taiwanese authorities viewed the policy of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ as a political affront to Taiwanese national security and freedom. Hence, the examination of the Taiwanese positions sheds a welcome light on the wider context of regional politics, and historical, sociocultural and economic conditions of those days. Secondly, while literature abounds on the Chinese media ecology, its evolution and the PRC state-media relations, less research has been carried out on the ideological lines of vision underpinning the Taiwanese English-language media accounts, and the extent to which these display internal variations. This prime attention to the Taiwanese accounts also necessarily involves an in-depth contextualisation of the sociopolitical developments in the Taiwanese society and its media scene in the 1990s. The volume clearly demonstrates how ideological divergences between the Taiwanese papers in those days points at an increasingly outspoken partisan press, bearing witness to the growth of a pluralist society experimenting with democracy, which was further consolidated in the 2000s. The first political power shift happened a few years after the handover, when the DPP broke the KMT’s five-decade-long monopoly on executive power by winning the presidential ticket in the 2000 election. 

Juxtaposed to the textual analysis of the Taiwanese stories, published in the China Post and the China News, is the investigation of the Hong Kong story, as narrated in the PRC newspaper, the China Daily, the CCP’s English-language flagship newspaper. This comparative exercise primarily serves to gauge the official position of the Chinese authorities and to indicate variability in the narrative practices engaged in by the media organisations in both sides of the Taiwan Strait, while all the same accounting for the different media systems in which they are embedded. By incorporating the Chinese perspective, the volume also offers the reader a view of the rationale behind the unwavering Chinese position in sovereignty issues. 

Structurally, the book is divided into two parts. Part I (ch.1-5) outlines its inspirational theories and offers a broad contextualisation to the narratives while Part II (ch. 6-8) comprises the empirical study, the methodological approach, and its findings, and proposes a theoretical framework. These two parts are preceded by an introduction, explaining the rationale for the study, widely resting on the notion of ‘struggle over meanings’, more recently also instantiated by China’s explicit articulation of its ‘right of discourse power’. 

Chapter 1 discusses theories about ideology in media narratives, drawing on insights from Linguistic Pragmatics and Critical Discourse Studies. It demonstrates how these principles and analytical techniques can be applied in the field of media discourse and political communication and offers a handy guide for anyone interested in a qualitative media analysis, based on linguistics. Since a thorough grasp of the background to the handover is essential for a qualitative, in-depth analysis of text and image, the contextualisation section spans chapters 2 through 5, covering the contexts of the handover and the preceding Sino-British negotiations and relations, the Taiwan sociocultural and political scene, the issue of plural identities in Hong Kong and Taiwan (ch. 2 and the Appendix with a full chronology of events related to the handover from 1955 to 1997), the changing media landscape in Taiwan and the media’s role in China (ch. 3), the prevailing international and official Chinese and Taiwanese discourses about the handover (ch. 4),and  media production processes as well as the journalistic profession (ch. 5). 

Research questions and methodological guidelines for the empirical analysis are addressed in chapter 6, followed by chapter 7, detailing the most salient findings and presenting a comparative account of ideology invested in the three corpora. These findings are further fleshed out in chapter 8, proposing a coherent discourse-theoretical framework to grasp the discursive mechanisms at work in the 1997 narratives. This paradigm can inspire further studies investigating official Chinese discourseconcerning matters of sovereignty, security and ideological positioning of the Self and the Other. A conclusion synthesizes the results and wraps up the volume in a reflective coda about the link between contemporary political realities in Hong Kong and the earlier discourses about the handover in 1997.