Abstract
Using the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong as an example, this article explores the construction of discursive illusions in the South China Morning Post’s (SCMP) coverage of the event under discussion. More specifically, the article investigates how a multi-perspective analytical approach, namely that of the discourse of illusion, can allow a closer look at how and to what extent abstract constructs with significant social implications are discursively formed. In this respect, the framework draws on three interrelated components: historicity (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 certain linguistic and semiotic actions, often through metaphorical and dominant rhetoric) and the degree of social impact (as language and actions of individuals and groups engender many categories and stereotypes). The analysis reveals the use of various linguistic and rhetorical tools, including insinuation, temporal referencing, metaphor, recontextualisation and (re)framing by the SCMP, the most prominent English newspaper in Hong Kong, in its creation of multiple identity categories.
Keywords
Introduction
Hong Kong was thrust into the international spotlight in 2014 when a mass student boycott brought some of the busiest streets of Hong Kong’s key business and commercial districts to a standstill. What were anticipated to be low-key week-long class boycotts staged by citywide university and secondary school students, spearheaded by the student groups Scholarism and the Hong Kong Federation of Students, grew into a large-scale social movement that paralysed the city for more than two months. On September 28 at 1:45 a.m., after two years of discussion and public consultation on the proposed Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP), the civil disobedience movement kicked off. Originally planned for 1 October, which would have been the 65th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Occupy Movement, led by its founders Benny Tai Yiu-ting, Chan Kin-man and Chu Yiu-ming, captured the momentum brought forth by the student boycotts, and thousands who flocked to their support after 87 rounds of tear gas were fired against them by the police, announcing that ‘an era of civil disobedience [had] begun’ (Benny Tai Yiu-ting).
What started off as mutual concern about the future of Hong Kong on the part of students, the Occupy founders and their sympathisers, coalesced over two months into the illusive Umbrella Movement, seen by many as the result of years of pent-up frustration about the disintegrating identity of Hongkongers, spurned by a lack of true universal suffrage. Several distinct ‘discourse clans’ (Bhatia, 2015) surfaced over the course of two months as a result of a protest movement that was increasingly labelled ‘leaderless’, and ‘too idealistic’ in its ambitions, including the police force, student protesters, Occupy supporters, the Beijing Government, the local government and anti-occupy protesters, giving rise to competing discourses that further enabled the creation of various discursive illusions. Drawing on the framework of Discursive Illusions (Bhatia, 2007, 2008, 2015), this article will analyse in particular the discursive creation of the Umbrella Movement, through the representation of some of these discourse clans in the coverage of the South China Morning Post (SCMP), Hong Kong’s largest and oldest (established 111 years ago) English language newspaper (www.scmp.com).
Discursive illusions as conceptualisation of reality
Our subjective and objective perceptions of reality, the dual realities that we inhabit, have for a long time been the subject of interest (cf. Hart, 1929; Hume, 1970). Kant (1970) argued that our minds actively participate in the construction of our realities, including structuring society, building relationships and making sense of our experiences. This process of construction involves the creation of a coherent, though subjective, reconstruction of the external world, partly by drawing on sensory data (Russell, [2002] 2003), but also on a whole gamut of past experiences, sensations, cultural ideologies and understandings (cf. Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Bhatia, 2007, 2008, 2015; Van Dijk, 1993).
In this regard, our conceptualisation of reality becomes a product of history, a result of past knowledge and experiences, and as this repository grows, our conceptualisations too evolve over time, as such ‘reality is not in documents or static things, but only in “the actual run of event in experience”’ (Hart, 1929: 492). This cognitive–social–historical phenomenon Bourdieu (1990) has referred to as habitus, which ‘produces individual and collective practices … in accordance with the schemes generated by history … [that] tend to guarantee the “correctness” of practices …’ (p. 54). He further elaborates that individuals engender a certain cultural literacy that is a ‘set of dispositions which incline agents to act in certain ways … [and which] are regular without being consciously co-ordinated or governed in anyway … [and are further] inculcated, structured, durable, generative and transposable’ (p. 12). These dispositions and mannerisms through which we construct the meaning of reality are structured, and are systematic because they are conceived within the context of our cultural ideologies. This habitus naturalises into our consciousness, thus becoming difficult to discern in ordinary day-to-day activities. This is the way Bourdieu perceives our realities to be created, societies structured and our behaviour determined. However, while the intellectual and ideological action of perceiving the world as it appears in our minds is a largely individual phenomenon, being a social member of the community requires that we objectify our subjective representations in order for them to be deemed legitimate. Borrowing from Berger and Luckmann (1966) in this case, what is legitimate then is what a majority of society consents to, that consent itself is sought through use of various persuasive linguistic means.
Of course, habitus differs with individuals and groups as the practices and beliefs acquired vary with different cultural and socio-political contexts. Habitus, therefore, can prove to be liberating, in the sense that it allows us possibilities in terms of categorisations, regularities, homogeneity and unity, yet at the same time can constrain us by way of its subjective and ideological basis. Our thinking is ruled by our ideologies, which are essentially multifaceted, difficult to define in any precise manner and ultimately discoursed. They have a ‘material existence’ (Simon, 1999: 68) in the form of social practice and also cognitive existence ‘in and through ideas, through the relations of concepts and propositions’ (Simon, 1999). Ideologies are a communal practice, becoming ‘generalized representations that are socially shared, and hence characteristic of whole groups and cultures’ (Van Dijk, 1993: 258), as much as they are individual phenomena.
Our conceptualisations of reality can be interpreted to be subjective precisely for this reason; they are coloured by our ideologies, which are ‘both a property of structures and a property of events’ (Fairclough, 1995: 71). As a result, people seem to inhabit two realities: the subjective reality that we know and construct through our ideological thinking, which is no more than ‘a bundle or collection of different perceptions’ (Hume, 1970: 278), and what ‘the world is, or may be, “outside of and beyond our knowledge”’ (Hart, 1929: 493). These subjective realities are further objectified through the means of collective consent, since the ‘principle of social validation states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct’ (Cialdini, 1997: 199). When our perceptions are objectified, they become all the more real. In addition, it is often a privileged representation of reality, put forward by influential or more powerful entities that are generally the candidate for the process objectification, predominantly through social hegemony (Bhatia, 2015). Authority, power struggles, hegemony and subordination play a large part in the objectifying of a particular representation of reality; in addition, the material means (e.g. choice of language) used in conjunction with control of modality through which the message is passed help achieve collective agreement. Consequently, to accept and partake in the belief, for whatever reasons (including non-resistance), that our subjective and ideological understanding of the world is the only conclusion, can lead to the rise of illusions, as ‘the world of action is nothing more than this imaginary universe of interchangeable possibles, entirely dependent on the decrees of the consciousness that creates it, and therefore, entirely devoid of objectivity’ (Sartre, 1957, in Bourdieu, 1990: 42).
Illusions originating from our subjective realities become the basis of our everyday interactions and belief systems. We convey our ideologies through discursive illusions. Our actions, based on such conceptualisations, can be seen to be motivated and influenced by ‘core weaknesses’ (cf. Vallee, 2000), not always apparent to us since they are part of our conceptual belief system, but innately linked to our emotions, and as such difficult to discern in our everyday lives. These include doubt, despair, laziness, prejudice and fear (see Bhatia, 2015, for a more detailed look at how these weaknesses facilitate the acceptance of discursive illusions).
Depending on their origin, illusions can be of two kinds: individual and collective (cf. Carfantan, 2003). Individual illusions include perceptual and psychological illusions, occurring on a much more personal level. Individual illusions can be comparatively easier to fight through, as there is no pressure to conform. In one sense, individual illusions are much more temporary and much easier to dissolve, and are usually a result of mental or physical deficiencies. This article, however, is not concerned with pathological illness and delusion, but is interested in illusions that are collectively generated. More specifically, the research focuses on the collective illusions that are discursively shaped, whereby the use of particular semantico-pragmatic and lexico-syntactical resources allow, among other things, the concealment of agency, for instance at clause level, which creates illusions in order to diminish their subjectivity in favour of objectivity, thereby giving rise to the complexities of ‘speaker’-hood (Goffman, 1981).
In concerning ourselves with collective illusions (Carfantan, 2003), we are moving away from cognitive reality to social reality. Illusions are collective when they receive endorsement from many witnesses, and are difficult to fight through because they represent what is normative; as mentioned before, objectivity in this regard depends on collective consent. Collective illusions are in fact dominant subjective representations which have been naturalised into social consciousness. More often than not, the creators of such illusions have at their disposal access to relevant communicative medium (e.g. mass media) in order to convey their subjective representations. In other words, illusions arise when the proliferated representations of reality (be it of an event, issue, phenomena, occurrence, etc.) go on to be recognised as the dominant framework within which understanding of that reality operates (Bhatia, 2015).
In this respect, we take our earlier notion of dominant representations and elevate it by arguing that dominant representations of specific instances of reality, proliferated through various multimodalities by ‘voices’ that adhere to authorities with power, go on to constitute the hegemonic discursive framework through which understanding, action and discussion are formed. What is of concern here is not necessarily the falsity or subjectivity of the representations conveyed, but rather the process through which they acquire a status of facticity. For the proponent of the dominant reality, the representation might be believed to be entirely true or intentionally manipulated for unstated purposes, but for the audience, acceptance of the representation is proof that no other alternative is viable or verifiable (see Bhatia, 2015, for a more detailed account of dominant representations). Collective illusions are indicative of how widespread particular representations of reality are in the process of setting standards of what can and cannot be construed as normal and acceptable socio-political behaviour. As such, collective illusions, which stem from subjective representations of reality that are eventually accepted as objective, are relatively difficult to fight through. As Social Impact and Conformity Theory (Tanford and Penrod, 1984) asserts, the power, strength and size that a majority group, or simply a group in power, wields is effective in influencing the thoughts and actions of minority groups.
Illusions, because they are rooted in ideological perceptions, are dynamic, subject to change and dependent on the micro- and macro-context. It is for this reason that illusions become relatively more discernible when they surface within continuously changing contexts, becoming a matter for critical comment. Constantly changing definitions of constructs over time, some of which are metaphorically conceptualised or perhaps even pose challenges to principles of time and space, are encouraged and thus seem to be sustained by discursive illusions (see Bhatia, 2015, for a further account of constructs with natural and dynamic meanings).
The discourse of illusion (drawing on a combination of the Foucauldian and Faircloughian notions of discourse), which is proposed here as an umbrella term encompassing various forms of public discourses – in particular, those associated with politics and media – can be viewed as an attempt by writers or speakers to convince their audiences that the representation of reality that they are putting forward is the correct and objective one. It is an effort by the writer or speaker to induce his or her audiences to suspend their judgements, interpretations and individual repositories of experiences in favour of the writer’s. As indicated earlier, one cannot really access objective reality, and as such, all of one’s discourses can potentially be understood as those of illusion, certainly ideological. Discursive illusions, however, are comparatively more discernible in various domains of society within which the contestation between different representations of reality and the dynamicity with which one’s representations regarding certain constructs can change makes the illusory nature of the discourse more perceptible.
Discursive illusions are thus created through discourse when writers and speakers, through various modalities (such as press conferences, interviews, speeches, news reports and articles, etc.), seek legitimation for their representation of reality. The discourse here itself becomes the modality, the means of influence and a method for attempting to change audiences’ perceptions of the world. Statements and texts produced within the discourse of illusion are not always what they appear to be, but instead contain several layers of intention and ideology, as it were, although this is true of most discourses. It is such ideologies that give rise to contested versions of reality, and consequently, the dynamically changing narrative meanings of complex constructs (see Bhatia, 2015, for a more comprehensive account of the discourse of illusion).
Methodology
Simply defined, the discourse of illusion is the product of a subjective conceptualisation of reality, emerging from a historical repository of experiences embodying various linguistic and semiotic actions, often leading to intended socio-political outcomes. The discourse of illusion can thus be seen as complex and multifaceted, requiring an appropriately integrated methodological approach in order to enable a closer analysis of how it is realised, including the intentions of the producer/actor, the power struggles within social domains, in addition to the socio-political and historical contexts which influence the individual repositories of experience. A combined analysis incorporating dimensions of historicity, linguistic and semiotic action, linked to an account of some of the social effects of these actions, will, it is argued, permit the exploration of the dynamic discursive processes that give rise to those socio-cultural, political, religious and ideological tensions which imbue the discourse of illusion. This article will analyse the chosen data from the perspective of the multidimensional framework of the discourse of illusion, drawing on three interrelated components (see Bhatia, 2015, for a more comprehensive account of the theoretical framework):
Historicity – an individual or group’s habitus is key to the discourse of illusion, dealing as it does with the recontextualisation of past knowledge and experience into present day action, to analyse which the framework draws on the concept of structured immediacy (Leudar and Nekvapil, 2011), focusing on ‘how participants enrich the here-and-now of action by connecting it to the past’ (p. 66), and which I define as the unconscious or conscious reconceptualisation of historical antecedents in an attempt to situate and present specific instances of current reality, often in relation to the future (Bhatia, 2015). In doing so, I also extend here Bourdieu’s notion of habitus beyond individual practice to include collective practices of dynamic discursive entities with evolving repositories of socio-cultural understanding and ideologies.
Linguistic and semiotic action – subjective conceptualisations of the world give rise to an individual or group’s linguistic and semiotic actions, often through metaphorical rhetoric, to analyse which the framework borrows elements of critical discourse analysis (CDA) focusing in particular on critical metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004), which investigates the intention in the creation and diffusion of discursive metaphorical constructions.
Social impact – the language and actions of an individual or group engender many categories and stereotypes, which can be analysed through Jayyusi’s (1984) concept of categorisation that explicates how people ‘organize their moral positions and commitments round certain category identities’ (p. 183).
To enrich the investigation of the three interrelated components of history, linguistic and semiotic action and social impact, which provide an account of the discourse of illusion, a range of lexico-syntactical and semantico-pragmatic tools – keeping the nature of the various discourse analytical models integrated in mind – will be employed, some of which may include temporal references, metaphor, topoi, antonyms, insinuation, contrast effects, recontextualisation, categorisation, positive/negative presentation, identity-construction, framing, cultural models and myths (see Bhatia, 2015, for a more detailed account of these linguistic tools in the context of the discourse of illusion).
This three-pronged approach narrates the process through which discursive illusions are created; as such, the article will take an integrated approach to the analysis of the data, exploring simultaneously how the historical grounding of an entity like the SCMP influences its discourse, and its use of various linguistic tools, in the categorisation of people, groups, moments of action and complete events. The analysis will critically explore the use of tools such as recontextualisation, temporal referencing, metaphor and categorisation in the creation of a dominant representation of the Umbrella Movement.
Data
The data have been taken from the News section of the newspaper, constituting the hard news, often from the front section of the newspaper, and comprising a corpus of approximately 100 articles over the last two months of the movement, from the start of the student boycotts to the beginning of its clear-up in the first week of December 2014. Although a secondary corpus of data comprising news and views expressed in a variety of media sources was also compiled in order to better inform the understanding of the movement and analysis, the primary data were selected from the SCMP for two reasons: it displays a relatively neutral stance towards the government (previously regarded as having a more democratic lean), and according to public opinion (based on a 2010 survey conducted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong) it is the most credible news source in Hong Kong. Since its inception, the SCMP has mostly been regarded as an independent newspaper with a liberal leaning. However, many have noted in more recent years, after Rupert Murdoch bought it in 1987 and since the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the change in its ideological trajectory, marking ‘the beginning of a shift towards a “corporate face” and away from the community service that the paper had always provided’ (Partridge, 2012).
Analysis
The analysis, drawing on the three-pronged approach of the framework, is organised in the following sections: the first section (i.e. Student vs Occupier) explores the representation of the two key discourse clans of students and Occupy Central protestors, who spearheaded the movement, by the SCMP. This section explores the positive and negative representation of these two groups by the SCMP, revealing how the habitus of such a viable, dynamic media entity, drawing on its historical and ideological leanings, categorises various groups in society through its discourse. The second section (i.e. The ‘key’ moment) moves beyond the categorisation of specific social groups to the representation of key moments of action (among the multiple moments that constitute an event), namely the ‘tear gas moment’, that further reconceptualises the socio-political construct, but also, as a result, the participating discourse clans. The last section (i.e. The ‘mini-Tiananmen’) further progresses beyond the representation of more micro-components of a construct, including specific groups and key moments of action, to the representation of the macro-event, and how the metaphorical representation of such events shapes how people view not oly the events, but also the participants of those events.
Student versus occupier
The Umbrella Movement resulted from what has been described by many as years of identity struggle on the part of Hongkongers, coming at the heels of China’s unprecedented rise to power. This has meant that, economically, Hong Kong has been losing its importance as China’s key financial offshore centre to China’s ‘real son’, Shanghai; politically, Hong Kong’s unique ‘privileges since 1997 have always been under the shadow of Beijing’s tough stance and strong political control’ (Ying, 2014), and linguistically, ‘English is no longer Hong Kong’s special weapon … mainland China integrates itself more into the international system … its [Hong Kong’s] status as role model is no longer sustainable, as culture in the region diversifies and becomes more international’ (Ying, 2014).
This identity struggle has to some extent shaped the movement itself, comprising not just the voices of democracy fighters and Beijing loyalists, but also, more complexly, the multiple voices within the protesters themselves. The SCMP in its coverage of the protests illustrates these differences: (Extract 1) (Extract 2) … (Extract 3) (Extract 4) … boycotting
The coverage by the SCMP generates an illusive divide between the ‘students who caught a face full of pepper spray’ (Extract 1) and despite which they ‘seized the moment’ (Extract 4) and the OCLP founders who are implied to have started a ‘guerilla movement’ (Extract 2) which ‘youngsters’ and ‘young Hongkongers’ (Extracts 2 and 3) gave focus to. While Extract 1 subtly implies the hard-handedness of the Hong Kong police, illustrating them as active agents in the violence taken against unarmed students, and the media (the SCMP excludes itself from this category by being in the position to pass judgement) is berated for only making ‘the lives of everyone involved more difficult’ (Extract 1), the OCLP founders are accused of leaving the movement ‘with no real leadership’ (Extract 2). In contrast, the SCMP employs words and phrases that fall into a semantic category that depicts defensive action when referring to the students framing the topos of consequence (Wodak et al., 1999; ‘risen to take charge’, ‘given focus to’, ‘starting the campaign’, ‘been on the front lines’, ‘seized the moment’), implying the necessity of student boycotts, with ‘young radicals who became increasingly militant in opposing Hong Kong and Chinese real estate tycoons and Beijing’s intervention in Hong Kong’ (Hung, 2014).
Students have been depicted as key figures in this civil disobedience movement, deserving of praise from all sides: (Extract 5) Speaking at government headquarters yesterday afternoon, Leung said the government ‘ (Extract 6) ‘… (Extract 7) Scholarism’s convener and founder Joshua Wong Chi-fung, (Extract 8) … since (Extract 9) …
The SCMP positively represents the student protestors, in particular their leaders, by establishing their credibility through echoing of their reputation (‘featuring on the cover of … Time’), drawing on their past success (‘Scholarism took a leading role in protests against plans to make “patriotic” national education mandatory’) and juxtaposing these achievements with their youthful optimism and a determination admirable for their age (‘young people’s passions’, ‘Joshua Wong Chi-fung, who turns 18 on Monday’, ‘student leaders’, ‘students caring about current issues’). Positive presentation in this regard influences ‘the myriad of opinions and attitudes We have about Them in more specific social domains’ (Van Dijk, 1998: 25). Criticism directed at the student protestors, often by anti-Occupy protestors, is played down by the newspaper, which chooses to focus mainly on their naivety (‘too gullible and impetuous’, ‘express their concerns in a “peaceful and rational environment”’) rather than the illegal nature of the protest.
In contrast to their positive presentation of the student protestors, the Occupy founders and their followers are more negatively portrayed through the use of various descriptor designators (Jayyusi, 1984), which are used as a way of labelling, since the ‘constituent property or feature of the type is given in its naming, unlike the type constructed by reference to a named group’ (p. 26). Such categorisation can lead to not only a description of certain ‘types’ of people, but also carry with it an ‘ascriptive’ function, thereby depriving an individual, groups or event of ‘explanations and justifications for actions and instead give clues to possible future actions of the individuals’ (p. 28).
(Extract 10) While some students were delighted with the news that the sit-in had started, others said (Extract 11) Suspicions have also been aroused in the (Extract 12) The (Extract 13) He said the (Extract 14) Their efforts –
Extract 10 depicts OCLP leaders and their supporters as ‘hijackers’, recontextualising appeals from student protestors to insinuate that the OCLP movement has been imposed on the student boycotts. Discursive illusions surface in the attempt to outcast OCLP from the student movements drawing on the strategy of ‘criminalisation’ (Lazar and Lazar, 2004), whereby both the verb ‘hijack’ and the use of intertextuality in the quotes provided by students that give a first-hand plea for legal means of resistance (‘Not everyone wants to get arrested by the police’) imply the unlawful nature of OCLP. Intertextuality, or what Fairclough (1992) has referred to as ‘manifest intertextuality’, in this respect, is concerned with how ‘quoted utterances are selected, changed, and contextualized … [when] referring to news actors’ (Youssefi et al., 2013: 1346), conveying a specific subjective representation of reality. As Van Dijk (1995) rightly argues, topics or quotation patterns in news reports may reflect modes of access of various news sources to the news media, whereas the content or form of a headline in the press may subtly influence the interpretation and hence the persuasive effects of news reports among the readers. (p. 10)
This form of outcasting gives legitimate power to one side, the more moral side, over the other, implying they are on the side of the law (Van Dijk, 1995: 10). Furthermore, criminalisation allows any measures taken by the other side (in this case the government, or the local government) to be seen as punishment, as deserved, further giving the moral side legal superiority, since ‘[c]rime and punishment is fundamental to the moral accounting metaphor and ethical legitimisation because “When you disobey a legitimate authority, it is moral for you to be punished …”’ (Charteris-Black, 2005: 188).
This legal metaphor, in the context of the OCLP founders and their supporters, is reiterated many times in SCMP’s coverage of the Umbrella Movement through words and phrases such as ‘put themselves in an unfavourable position’ (Extract 12); ‘civil disobedience movement aimed to coerce the central and Hong Kong governments’; ‘unlawful action’; ‘paralyse core areas’; ‘unlawful intimidating actions’ (Extract 13); ‘blasted by city officials as illegal’; and ‘sparking violence’ (Extract 14). The category-pair of lawful versus lawless can be interpreted as being highly asymmetrical, with the lawful side having the power to pronounce moral judgement on the lawless side, while the ‘other’ side is denied any grounds for explanation; in this case their accounts are largely underrepresented in the newspaper. Such discourses can be used to label opposing clans to suit particular socio-political objectives, thus, often in political debates or polemics between different parties the negatively implicative actions of the opponent are often deprived of explanation-by-grounds and transformed instead into a feature of the opponent’s character … whilst an exactly similar action by one’s own party is provided with an occasioned reason. (Jayyusi, 1984: 28)
In addition to being depicted as unlawful, OCLP is also assigned individual descriptor designators, which categorises them as worthy of suspicion because of their political tactics. Extract 11 creates the illusive category-pair of manipulator–manipulated by illustrating OCLP as ‘mobilizing the young’ as ‘tools’ in order to ‘boost its fight’. This depersonification not only depicts OCLP in a negative manner, but the constant referencing of student protestors as ‘young’ and as simply ‘tools’ in the hands of OCLP denies them merit for their actions as their desires are played down. Both the local and national governments are also depersonified in the metonymic metaphor ‘corridors of power’, insinuating that this is a widespread, general impression not specific to a particular political leader or party, although quoting of a government official, once again, privileges the voice of one discourse clan above another. Extract 14 also boosts student protestors above OCLP protestors as they are deemed more worthy of ‘talks’ with the government, and eventually the first round of talks that were held on the 23rd day of the protests (21 October 2014) was between student leaders and government officials only.
Extract 12 elaborates on the reasons why OCLP ‘failed to mobilise support from the middle class’ (Extract 11) by pegging fault at the ‘lack of communication tools’ that ‘considerably weakened the command of Occupy leaders’, resulting in ‘invisibility’. This was contrasted with reports that emerged the same day about the use of FireChat app being used by student leaders to mobilise their followers, further emphasising admiration for the student activists and derision for OCLP supporters: For [Joshua] Wong and his allies in Hong Kong, the answer was an app that allows people to send messages from phone to phone without mobile reception … After Wong urged his movement to use it, FireChat got more than 100,000 new sign-ups in Hong Kong in under 24 hours. If the Communist party isn’t quite reeling, its opponents’ lives have at least got a little easier. (Bland, 2014)
The discursive construction of these two particular socio-cultural groups illustrates the three-pronged process through which illusions are generated regarding the participants in the movement. First, the influence of habitus of collective practices in the representation of reality surfaces from three different social domains – through the habitus of a viable media entity comprising collective journalistic practices like the SCMP, whose political leanings can be assumed to be reflective of the history of its management group (currently Malaysian tycoon Robert Kuok holds controlling interest). Next, through the habitus of the OCLP group which, over the last two years particularly, through acts of civic referendum and public deliberation, has acquired a certain anti-nationalist reputation for pushing the government to make electoral reforms to meet international standards of universal suffrage, and as promised in Hong Kong’s Basic Law, and further through the shared habitus of student groups who have surfaced as champions of the pro-democratic movement (mainly Scholarism, which was initially formed in 2011 as a pressure group against the introduction of national education in Hong Kong; and the Hong Kong; Federation of Students, the oldest and biggest tertiary student union in the City founded in 1958 to encourage student civic engagement). The past in this case determines current linguistic actions, and we see a resulting social impact in the form of various categorisations that are created. Thus, we see that ‘South China Morning Post … [used] a discourse that was favouring pan-democratic political ideologies, even in unfavourable articles that took a clear stand against the Occupy Central movement’ (Hallberg, 2014: 2). The habitus here determines the proliferation of the legal metaphor, which emphasises the chaotic and illegal nature of OCLP, categorising them as criminal, immoral and manipulative, and student groups as organised and communicative, if a little naïve.
The ‘key’ moment
A third membership category that emerges in SCMP’s coverage of the movement, which is denied grounds for explanation through relatively less representation in SCMP (again being reflective of the traditionally more liberal and community-oriented mindset of the media group), and against which the reputation of student protestors is further boosted, is the Hong Kong police: (Extract 15) The streets of Central and Admiralty (Extract 16) Claims and counter-claims over (Extract 17) On the arrest and handcuffing of Scholarism leader Joshua Wong Chi-fung, a spokeswoman for the Committee on Children’s Rights said: ‘[We] express (Extract 18) … a protest movement that lacks any central leadership and is instead
These extracts create the illusive ‘us’ versus ‘them’ divide, in an ‘attack’ versus ‘defence’ antonym, which categorises the police (and by implication the local government) on one side of the ‘thin blue line’ (Extract 16) and defenceless students on the other. Emotionally charged vocabulary (‘chaos’, ‘shocked’, ‘pitted’, ‘violently’, ‘violence’, ‘revulsion’) creates a negative other-presentation of the police force, the actions of which fall into a semantic thread that insinuates unrequired aggression: ‘police in riot gear fired tear gas’, ‘officers carrying shotguns’, ‘chasing protestors’, ‘heavy-handed policing’, ‘police pushed protestors’, ‘tried to dislodge the umbrellas’, and ‘police suddenly used riot-control tactics to violently clear the area’. Repetition of the terms ‘riot’ and ‘riot gear’ emphasise the heavy-handed attitude of the police in their attempts to deal with unarmed university students as if dealing with criminal mobs, whereas countless walks down the scarred roads of Admiralty, Mong Kong and Causeway Bay by the author had only served to reinforce the civility of the movement.
The ideological complexities that layer the Umbrella Movement are generalised into simplified dichotomies between those who are for and those who are against democracy, between the good and bad. Extract 17 draws on the Committee on Children’s Rights to provide a form of expert testimony, forming the topos of appeal to authority (Wodak et al., 1999), making reference to the UN Convention on The Rights of the Child in order to depict, this time, the police as being guilty of unlawful behaviour. It further attempts to illusively villainise the police through the statement ‘protesters sat in the sun, over a hundred police officers sat in the shade’, the contrast invoking sympathy for the young students, and discrediting the police, as the Committee questions, whether ‘police restraints are genuine’. This can be contrasted with competing views arguing that while the Hong Kong police did commit excesses in their attempt to control the crowds … It is worth noting that the scenario for which the police prepared was not the one that occurred. What was expected was a civil disobedience action in a relatively restricted area with a moderate number of protesters who, following their leaders’ plan, would allow themselves to be arrested. What happened in late September was very different … Instead, they [protestors] sought to maintain control of public thoroughfares, a violation of law, until Beijing and the Hong Kong government made major concessions. (Bush, 2014)
This negative depiction of the police can be further contrasted with more positive representation of the student protestors: (Extract 19) That move led to (Extract 20) Civil engineer Johnny So, 25, volunteering as the ‘sound man’ for the sit-in, said he had borrowed equipment from friends. ‘I took part in this because I couldn’t stomach what was happening’, he said, referring to (Extract 21) ‘As long as Occupy continues, I’ll keep coming after classes’, said Tang Ho-wan, 16, who has attended the protests in Mong Kok and Central since Wednesday. He would make his protest a daily routine because he was (Extract 22)
Student protestors are depicted as defenceless, and therefore, by insinuation, the police as guilty of escalating the protest: ‘movement that promised “love and peace’’’, ‘young local protestors’, ‘met the thin blue line head-on’, ‘umbrellas they were using to protect themselves from pepper spray’, ‘originally peaceful protest’, ‘unarmed student protestors’, ‘lefts dozens injured in ensuing chaos’, ‘government was ignoring students’, ‘revulsion at the use of tear gas against students’, and ‘streams of student clad in white’. The above extracts recontextualise a uniquely civil disobedience movement into a scene of chaos and disorder, instigated by the police. Here, Wodak (2000) mentions the four contradictory tendencies of recontextualisation – namely, staticity versus dynamicity, simplicity versus complexity, precision versus vagueness, and argumentation versus statement and generalisation of claims – which enable the shifting of meanings ‘either within one genre- as in different versions of a specific written text- or across semiotic dimensions’ (p. 192). Thus, with every recontextualisation, meaning becomes an increasingly solid materiality; new meanings are given to content with every change of context highlighting the metaphorised nature of language use, such recontextualisations becoming almost metaphorical (Wodak, 2000), and ultimately as some of them naturalise into public consciousness, giving rise to discursive illusions.
Voices from opposing discourse clans that held the students responsible for stubborn naivety are downplayed in Extract 16 as a mere conflict of opinions (‘claims and counter-claims … will be traded in the days to come’), playing up instead the violence of police actions. A statement from the Professional Teachers’ Union is used to lend credibility to the representation of reality being put forward (‘Without civilians engaging in escalated action, the police suddenly used riot-control tactics … unnecessarily’), the words ‘without’, ‘suddenly’ and ‘unnecessarily’ emphasising again the catalytic role police played in the movement getting out of control.
This can be compared to, as well, the use of phrases such as ‘triggered a wave of public anger’ (Extract 19), ‘united around revulsion at the use of tear gas’ (Extract 18) and ‘Before the umbrellas and the pepper spray, before the pivotal tear gas moment’ (Extract 22), whereby the use of unwarranted force by the police (use of tear gas) became a landmark moment in the timeline of the movement. The proceeding events then came to be seen as the consequence of this moment, recontextualising a proceeding campaign into a historical event, the temporal reference ‘moment’ representing that one unit of change that transformed the intended course of events. In historicising the tear gas moment, the SCMP does not ‘just talk and write about the past. They also bring the past into their activities, by creating settings infused with history for those activities. In this respect, they are concurrently users and producers of histories’ (Leudar and Nekvapil, 2011: 68). The use of tear gas by the police, in Hong Kong’s local memory, is discoursed as a key ‘precipitant’ (Kimmel, 1990: 9) that is a key historical moment that allowed ‘deeply seated structural forces to emerge as politically potent and begin to mobilize potential discontents’ (pp. 9–10).
Sympathy and support is further invoked for student protestors through criticism of the local government that has not only instructed the police to take a heavy-handed approach, but also refuses to give audience to the ‘young local protestors’, instead choosing to continue ‘ignoring the students’ (Extract 20), giving rise to ‘broad dislike of the current administration’ (Extract 18), because many are ‘sick of how the government was shutting the public out’ (Extract 21). The contested representation of pro-democracy student protestors, OCLP supporters, the local authorities and lesser critical representation of the national government becomes symbolic of SCMP’s own conflicted political stance which, pendulum style, swayed from favouring pan-democratic ideologies while continuing to ‘hem and haw between criticism and justifications for controversial local and national government policy … [in] its bit to promote the Beijing diktat in Hong Kong’ (Asia Sentinel, 2014). Again, we see in this particular section how the Umbrella Movement is illusively constructed in the discursively dramatised moment where police used tear gas against students, the use of history here surfacing in the transformation of a current event into a historical moment, which will not only shape the collective habitus of the protestors in the movement as a unique moment of moral transgression, but also shape all related future action. The historicisation of this event through heavily metaphorical rhetoric on the part of the SCMP also gives rise to various illusive categories that ultimately formed part of the dominant discursive representation of the movement, primarily the negative depiction of the police as aggressive and revulsive, but also the student groups as innocent and brave.
The ‘mini-Tiananmen’
The intentions and actions of the different groups involved are also interpreted through the recontextualisation of other socio-political movements, primarily against the backdrop of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Such recontextualisation illustrates how different discourse clans creatively render the meaning of events and issues, making accountable connections between something in the present and something in the past, uniting the two in a figure-ground relationship … [but also if necessary] involve denying historical connections: if one is successful at obliterating elements of the past then something in that past ceases to be consequential and something else can take its place. (Leudar and Nekvapil, 2011: 72)
This has the repercussion of transforming history into an apparatus or tool of sorts, acknowledging that individuals within discourse clans, to whatever socio-political end, can knowing and unknowingly associate or disassociate the here-and-now with the past.
(Extract 23) The (Extract 24) Dawn broke yesterday on a new figure standing outside government headquarters in Admiralty:
Tiananmen has come to represent in Chinese collective memory the socio-cultural collision of ideologies that resulted in the physical collision of opposing forces, as Schwartz (1991) rightly points out: ‘Collective memory’ is a metaphor that formulates society’s retention and loss of information about its past in the familiar terms of individual remembering and forgetting. Part of the collective memory is, in fact, defined by shared individual memories, but only a small fraction of society’s past is experienced in this way. (p. 302)
A direct comparison between the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement and the Tiananmen crackdown is drawn in Extract 23, insinuating a possible future of the movement by drawing on the past, and through use of the temporal reference ‘evolve’. Extract 24 further draws parallels between the ideological cornerstones of the two events through the use of their symbolic props, the term ‘uncanny’ suggesting a deliberate correlation (‘a three-metre statue of a person holding an umbrella and bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Tiananmen Square icon: the Goddess of Democracy’). In doing so, the extract ascribes to the symbolic artefact the values of the Goddess of Democracy, which itself was inspired by America’s Statue of Liberty, and was interesting because it ‘succeeded in annoying the authorities even more than they already had been … [it was] a symbol directly borrowed from the United States … it was alien, it was new, and it was illegitimate’ (Pieke, 1993: 165). From this perspective, social movements and their unique reproduction of space, culture and symbolism are not just carrier vehicles of existing beliefs and ideas, but rather participants in these movements are themselves ‘signifying agents actively engaged in the production and maintenance of meaning for constituents, antagonists, and bystanders or observers’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 613).
The Umbrella Movement is further framed in terms of a ‘colour revolution’ in Extracts 25–27, the process of framing in these extracts representing the movement, its members and their rhetoric in terms of ‘culturally shared beliefs and understandings’ (Garrett, 2006: 204): (Extract 25) The Communist Party’s (Extract 26) ‘ (Extract 27)
The SCMP defines what it means by colour revolution by drawing on ‘various movements in the former Soviet Union’ and the ‘uprisings in the Middle East’, again ascribing to the Umbrella Movement the connotative value of these events that were ‘characterized by mass popular uprisings which led to the non-violent toppling of the incumbent regime and its replacement with one with ostensibly closer ties to the populace’ (Stewart, 2009: 645). Extract 27 uses the ‘West’s’ interpretation of the ‘Hong Kong campaign’ as an endorsement of the correlation drawn with a colour revolution, and on the basis of which Beijing’s actions are predicted, the insinuation being that this is the ‘type’ of group that Beijing is and these are the ‘typical’ actions, typical ‘tone and manner’ expected from them, in the form of the emotive metaphors ‘touched a raw nerve’, ‘iron-fisted response’ and ‘1989 crackdown’. The plea on part of activists (‘activists have urged the media to refrain from calling their actions a revolution’) was framed as part of the topos of threat to freedom (Wodak et al., 1999) playing on the core weakness of fear. Here Smith (1997) explains, ‘when individuals perceive some phenomenon as highly threatening but also perceive themselves as capable of defending themselves against the threat (or as efficacious), they are motivated to protect themselves against the threat’ (p. 273). The evocation of fear helps create illusions, which sustain power asymmetries and create dangerous categorisations.
Categorisation in this respect is multifunctional; it lays ground for future action, amplifies the scale of an event, crisis or support, provides grounds for assessment, helps gain moral superiority and retain legitimate power over others (in this case the West is depicted as morally superior because of their endorsement of Hong Kong’s demand for democracy; Wodak et al., 1999). As Jayyusi (1984) points out, we draw ‘the boundaries of rational membership through the use of a standard of moral membership … persons may organize their moral positions and commitments round certain category identities … [that] demarcate for them the boundaries of practical membership’ (pp. 183–201). We see in this section then that the three-pronged approach in the creation of discursive illusions goes beyond the specific and direct categorisation of particular people and groups, and specific key moments of action, to the reconceptualisation of an entire event. History is drawn on to reframe one socio-political movement in terms of another, assigning through this reframing the associations and values of one movement to another. This results in the metaphorical categorisation of the protest participants as determined and courageous, as fighters and revolutionaries.
Conclusion
This article has attempted to implement a discourse analytical framework to account for the complex construction of the Umbrella Movement, under the concept of the discourse of illusion. The article defined the discourse of illusion as a product of one’s subjective representation of reality, emerging from a historical repository of experiences embodying various linguistic and semiotic actions often leading to intended socio-political consequences. Through this framework, the article made an effort to understand and explain the dynamic discursive constructions of some key discourse clans within the movement. This article investigated the SCMP’s discourses by focusing on the construction of discursive illusions, which were analysed with reference to three interrelated components: (1) historicity (individual and collective habitus as key to the discourse of illusion, dealing as it does with the growth and change of perceptions over time, and for the analysis of which the framework borrowed aspects of Leudar and Nekvapil’s (2011) structured immediacy); (2) linguistic and semiotic action (subjective representations of the world give rise to various linguistic and semiotic actions, analysed through Critical Metaphor Analysis; Charteris-Black, 2004, 2005); and (3) the degree of social impact (language and actions of individuals and groups engender many categories and stereotypes, which were usefully analysed through aspects of Jayyusi’s (1984) notion of ‘Categorisation’). The analysis revealed that the conflicted political stance of the newspaper gave rise to multiple discursive illusions, which represented a singular civil disobedience movement through the categorisation of multiple identities, distinguished by their intentions. The SCMP, through the use of various linguistic and rhetorical tools, including insinuation, temporal referencing, metaphor, antonym, recontextualisation, intertextuality, framing and positive and negative presentation, transformed an ongoing movement into a historical event, characterised by its similarities to preceding political events in China and youth-based leadership.
The framework of the discourse of illusion can be usefully applied to various socio-political constructs, other than the Umbrella Movement, including studies on ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘justice’, ‘tyranny’ and ‘globalisation’, as each construct can be seen as being reflective of the ideological conceptualisations of various discourse clans, and which acts in support of particular socio-political agendas. These constructs are multifaceted; they come to mean different things depending on a range of variables, especially their macro- and micro-contexts. The framework would aid in providing an insight into the discursive construction of these political and socio-cultural conflicts, and perhaps also more generally into what sort of influence the often cyclical nature of these conflicts have had on the current political, social and cultural landscape of society. What the discourse of illusion attempts to bring to light is the struggle between competing narratives offered by competing discourse clans in society in an attempt to conceive and generate a dominant representation of events, a particular hegemonic discourse that, it is hoped, will become associated with the understanding of certain socio-political constructs, in an effort to maintain moral, religious, economic, social or political status quo.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.