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Discourse and Cultural Identity 189 Are there any Hong Kong identities? With political pressure from the People Republic of China (PRC) to displace Hong Kong’s autonomy with national agendas, a local discourse gradually crystallized. The search was for an original, native, and local culture with values that its own people shared. Advocates who stalwartly defend these values — political, economic, and social — regard them as being reflective of local identities. Could these vaguely defined values constitute real identities? What is the essence of the Hong Kong identity? How could it be measured? These are very challenging questions. The existence of this identity is, I would argue, strongly suggested by recent social incidents. In 2004–2005, the Hong Kong government proposed Article 23 of the Basic Law, legislation which concerned national security of the region and having strong implications for the freedom of the local people to express opinions about the Chinese authorities. It resulted in controversial public debates about Hong Kong’s autonomy and drew 500,000 people to a public demonstration opposing this PRC-imposed agenda. In general, this political action reflects the importance of certain local core values and an identity which values freedom, rights, fairness and equality. Apart from realpolitik, to further tackle this identity question necessitates explicating the content of identity. This is not just a critical inquiry of identity but also an empirical question that can be examined. It entails an examination of collective reminiscence, social history and concomitant experience of the populace and a kind of documentation of the hidden, subtle but real collective identification of the community. In this process we need to describe what discourses concretely contribute to the formation of that identity. A thick description of the discourse will help us to re-conceive the particular constituents of Hong Kong’s identity and the analysis of social relations and power that are internal to the society (Tolson 1996, 192). 10 Discourse and Cultural Identity: Towards a Global Identity for Hong Kong Anthony Fung 190 Anthony Fung A discourse approach to cultural identity Specifically, this chapter aims to describe the current status and nature of Hong Kong identity by means of studying its social discourse. Within the social discourse, media texts are an essential source of telling people about social meanings projected through language (Bell and Garrett 1998). Not only do texts reflect and influence how culture, politics and social reality are formed but the people’s articulations of these mediated discourses illustrate the values and identities of their own in relation to the social context. From a media discourse approach, there are a number of different disciplinary approaches to analyze the media text. First, semiotics is the study of the social construction and production of signs, and how different signs are systematically combined and used to constitute the meaning of media texts, and finally, to communicate to an audience (Howarth 2000). Second, it is the narrative analysis which researchers use to focus on how the media recounts events that are “logically” connected over time (Taylor and Willis 1999, 67). The deconstruction of the connections and orders thus enables researchers to analyze the relationship between events, parties, and various cultural, economic, and political forces. Third, the common ideological analysis of the media representations helps investigate the ideological patterns and presuppositions (Taylor and Willis 1999, 31). In my study, the pending questions are answered by combining these approaches. First, how do Hong Kong people interpret, produce, and reproduce the mediated — cultural, political, and economic — signs and symbols, and why do they articulate the latter in their own way? Second, what is the relationship between the social narratives and their own identities? Third, what are the perceived ideological forces behind various social and media discourses, and by what discursive or expressive strategies do the local cope with these ideologies? Under the umbrella of discourse analysis, Van Dijk (1998) propounds that there are three major components, namely, social functions, cognitive structures and discursive expression that point to the direction of answering these research questions. Social function is the function of ideologies for groups or institutions within the society. This is designated to the question of why people develop and articulate a particular kind of ideology (Van Dijk 1998, 23). Cognitive structure is about the mental and internal components that structure ideologies as well as their relations to other cognitive structures or social representations. It helps answer the questions of how these ideologies supervise, distort, and transform social beliefs and practices. Last, discursive expression or reproduction...

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