Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 15, Issue 5, 2016

This article is conceptualised within the framework of a historiographical approach to critical discourse analysis ( Flowerdew 2012 ). It focusses on a critical moment in Hong Kong’s socio-political development, the Occupy movement, and a specific language event, an interview on a local Hong Kong English-language television programme discussing the rationale for the movement. A micro-analysis of the interaction focusses on important features of the historical context, intertextual links, the backgrounds and the roles of the participants, and the argumentations strategies used by them. The article shows how a focus on a critical moment in discourse can shed light on the bigger socio-political picture and how arguments regarding particular topics may reflect larger ideological struggles, the political agendas of different groups, and the ways arguments are constructed dialogically in response not only to the words of interlocutors, but also in relation to prior (and future) discourses.

A mass civil disobedience movement brought Hong Kong’s key business and commercial districts to a standstill in September 2014 when low-key class boycotts coalesced into a wide-scale social movement propelled by thousands of people who flocked to the support of student protestors after an ‘unwarranted’ 87 rounds of tear gas were fired by the police. This paper will explore the discursive construction of this key precipitant ( Kimmel 1990 ), that is a ‘key’ moment, which recontextualised an on-going universal suffrage campaign into an historical event that allowed, “deeply seated structural forces to emerge as politically potent and begin to mobilize potential discontents” ( Kimmel 1990 , 9-10). Drawing on the multi-perspective framework of the Discourse of Illusion ( Bhatia 2015a ) the paper will analyse this key ‘moment’ in Hong Kong’s local memory, which represented one unitary moment of change that transformed the intended course of events. The Discourse of Illusion in this respect will draw on three interrelated components: historicity (one’s habitus as key to the creation of discursive illusions, dealing as it does with the growth and change of perceptions over time); linguistic and semiotic action (subjective conceptualisations of the world give rise to one’s linguistic and semiotic actions, often through dominant metaphorical rhetoric); and the degree of social impact (as language and actions of individuals and groups engender many categories and stereotypes).

The video documentation of police violence against citizens, and the circulation of these videos over mainstream and social media, has played an important part in many contemporary social movements, from the Black Lives Matter Movement in the U.S. to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Such videos serve as both evidence of police abuses and discursive artefacts around which viewers build bodies of shared knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about events through engaging in exercises of “collective seeing”. This article analyses the way a video of police officers beating a handcuffed protester, which became an important symbol of the excessive use of force by police during the Occupy Hong Kong protests, was interpreted by different communities, including journalists, protesters, anti-protest groups, and law enforcement officials, and how these collective acts of interpretation served as a means for members of these communities to display group membership and reinforce group norms and ideological values.

Public opinion not only influences the likelihood of success for a protest movement; images of public opinion can also be used to legitimize or delegitimize a protest. In contemporary societies, opinion polling is the most authoritative way to “measure” public opinion. Yet the meanings of poll findings need to be interpreted and are often contested. Following these premises, this article analyzes the construction of images of public opinion through polling during the Umbrella Movement. The analysis illustrates the discursive strategies involved in selective reporting of opinion polls by newspapers with different political stances. It also demonstrates how poll results were articulated with other assumptions, principles, and discourses to generate claims about the legitimacy or proper strategies of the movement. On the whole, the analysis shows how public opinion, as a discursive category, was brought to bear on the dynamics of the Umbrella Movement through polling and its communication.

The pro-democracy occupation of three commercial and retail areas in Hong Kong that lasted over two months in the fall of 2014 – known as the Umbrella Movement – created a myth of Utopia ( Barthes 1984 [1954] ). In this paper, we track the itineraries ( Scollon 2008 ) and resemiotizations ( Iedema 2003 ) of the protest signage to show how they mythologized the Movement by “branding space”, “regulating and disciplining actions”, and “unifying the voice of protest”. We argue that the semiotic processes and effects involved in the emplacement and widespread distribution of the protest signage were not only key in the mobilization during the Movement but also the emergence and reinforcement of a “new” Hongkonger identity in the long run.