Ideological Patterns in Chinese State Media Narratives concerning Issues of Security and Sovereignty

This chapter maps characteristics of official Chinese discourse on security and sovereignty as it has been disseminated in the Chinese state media in the early period of China’s rise. Three critical discourse moments were selected – the 1997 Hong Kong handover, the 2001 US surveillance plane collision with a Chinese jetfighter, and the 2005 anti-secession law—because of their importance for attitudes towards political and cultural identity and their common denominator, national pride and interest. Based on similarities between the three corpora, the study proposes an analytical framework of key discursive strategies in Chinese official discourse about sensitive topics such as Chinese sovereignty to facilitate longitudinal research into continuities in the discourse about the Chinese Self when confronted with the Other. Results indicate that, despite the dramatic change in the Chinese communication climate since the 1990s, content and discursive style of news reports and political speeches in the state media between 1997 and 2005 remained constant when it concerns politically sensitive news items such as sovereignty and security. Therefore, the study offers anchor points that could serve as benchmarks against which new studies into contemporary Chinese discourse can be compared.

ISBN:0415789796

Publication year:2019