“Sensible protesters began leaving the protests”: A comparative study of opposing voices in the Hong Kong political movement

This corpus-based study investigates the discursive presentations of the main social actors in the media coverage of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement circa 2014. In particular, this work compares the strategies deployed by the South China Morning Post and China Daily in depicting the involvement of China, the Hong Kong government, the protesters and the students in the incident. The analysis of word co-occurrences revealed that the discursive portrayals of the social actors were very different in the South China Morning Post and China Daily, and a wide range of discursive strategies were used to construct the social actors, including predication, nomination and perspectivization.