‘Enough is enough: this cycle of violence has to come to an end’: Practical reasoning in the editorials during the extradition bill crisis of Hong Kong

Abstract

Practical reasoning as an important form of argumentation in politics has received limited research attention in critical discourse studies despite the proposal of an analytical model. Focusing on argument development surrounding events related to the extradition bill crisis of Hong Kong, this paper analyzes 48 editorials published in the South China Morning Post during the crisis period adopting Fairclough’s model. A number of recurrent themes have been identified in the corpus in association with the four argument components within the model – Claims, Goals, Values and Circumstances – which may increase understanding of the social contexts of the extradition bill crisis. It is further argued that, although Fairclough’s model may not capture the arguments in individual editorials comprehensively, the model can be usefully applied to analyze a collection of interrelated editorials to reveal more insights about an ongoing political crisis.

Keywords

Argumentation editorials extradition Hong Kong political discourse

Introduction

The relatively brief political history of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) has been a rocky one to say the least. Even prior to the handover of the territory in 1997, indications of an impending ideological conflict in Hong Kong began to surface, such as the ‘rising exodus of senior officials’ (Cheung, 1997: 729) in 1996. This in spite of the Chinese Central Government’s purported commitment to ensuring continued stability in the Region via a number of concessions provided in the Basic Law (Wong, 2015) along with a promise to continue adopting a non-interventionist approach allowing the market economy to run its course in the territory (Lim and Ping, 2015).

Unsurprisingly perhaps, maintaining this laissez-faire economic approach has become a double-edged sword in the post-handover Hong Kong as free market mechanisms left in place appear to have resulted in an increasingly disparate distribution of wealth and resources (Lim and Ping, 2015). Growing grievances regarding the governance of Hong Kong came to a boil in 2014 when the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) in Beijing decided to place limitations on potential candidates for the Chief Executive position in Hong Kong, leading to 97 days of protests which came to be known as the Umbrella Movement (Flowerdew, 2017).

This was followed a mere 2 years later by the so-called ‘Fishball Revolution’, a spate of politically-motivated violent clashes between protesters and police triggered by a government crackdown on illegal street vendors and the violent reaction of those standing in support of the hawkers (Lhatoo, 2016).

Only five years removed from the Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong once again finds itself in a quagmire of conflict between protesters and the SAR Government. The source of discontent centers around a controversial extradition bill which would allow the central government in China to extradite criminals from Hong Kong to the mainland for prosecution. The ostensible impetus behind the bill came in the wake of a murder case in which a man from Hong Kong murdered his girlfriend in Taiwan, a region with which Hong Kong, like mainland China, lacks an extradition treaty (Victor and May, 2019).

Perhaps now more than ever, the news media plays a crucial role in molding and disseminating prevailing narratives surrounding significant political events. This is especially apparent in the case of recent studies regarding political discourse in relation to the Umbrella Movement protests. Several previous critical discourse analysis (CDA) studies have explored the role of the media in local political discourse from several perspectives. The most typical avenue has been to adopt a corpus-based approach in order to identify opposing ideologies as reflected in different mainstream news publications, for example, (Feng, 2017; Ho, 2019). Feng (2017), for instance, adopts Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal theory in his study, comparatively analyzing authorial attitudes across several major Chinese-language news media outlets encompassing an exceedingly diverse political spectrum. Similarly, Ho (2018) adopts a lexical-based corpus approach in identifying opposing ideological authorial stances from two of the more prominent English news organizations, namely the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the largest English newspaper in Hong Kong, and the Beijing-backed China Daily.

Yet another analytical perspective for analyzing discourse surrounding the Umbrella Movement has been to focus on discursive strategies, for example, (Bhatia, 2015; Chen and Flowerdew, 2019). Much like the previously mentioned studies, Bhatia (2015) constructs a corpus from the articles of a local English newspaper (in this case, the SCMP); yet rather than focus on ideological bias within the lexical choices, the author examines strategies contributing to the construction of ‘discursive illusions’ (2015: 411) as realized in the three dimensions of historicity, linguistic and semiotic action, and social impact. Similarly concerned with discursive strategies in relation to the Movement, drawing data from YouTube, Chen and Flowerdew (2019) explore discriminatory discursive strategies of construction, perpetuation, justification, transformation, and destruction employed by commenters supporting either the Chinese government or Hong Kong protesters. Undoubtedly, all of these studies cast further light on the nature of news narratives characterized by ideological biases realized at the semantic level; yet this focus necessarily precludes such studies from offering an account of the arguments in which these words are identified.

This seems to justify a shift in research focus to the arguments themselves. Walton et al. (2008) focus on evaluating argumentation in terms of its effectiveness as assessed by a series of critical questions which evaluate the argument’s effectiveness according to criteria including inferential validity and defeasibility. Yet in addition to evaluating argument effectiveness, it seems equally prudent to analyze the reasoning process itself. After all, argumentation in political discourse is ultimately based on practical reasoning, a fundamental tool for making actionable decisions. This reasoning process is undertaken through argumentation presented in a series of interconnected components (i.e. claims and premises), and the ultimate course of action decided upon often represents a combination of both theoretical reasoning and the intended goal or desired outcome (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2011). Fairclough and Fairclough (2011) assert that practical reasoning can also be conceptualized within a problem-solution framework in which different relationships among the constituent elements can be emphasized or deemphasized to strengthen the argumentation.

This shift in focus to the practical reasoning underlying the argumentation structure in political discourse represents a new direction for CDA analysis. In the view of Fairclough and Fairclough (2011), there has been little attempt to develop a relatively rigorous analytic framework for analyzing the arguments presented in political discourse texts despite the fact that the effectiveness of these arguments presents potential real world consequences by informing those in power regarding the most viable courses of action. While individuals possessing political power exercise a certain degree of discretion in policy-making, it stands to reason that the available options must first meet certain criteria in terms of their basis in practical reasoning. By developing an analytic framework for evaluating the arguments themselves rather than their linguistic constituents, recurring patterns of argumentation can be identified and the components of the argument can be evaluated both individually within an individual text and comparatively across texts. In theory, this can complement the extrication of data patterns at the lexical level by framing those patterns within the context of the overarching arguments. Moreover, perhaps more importantly, integrating such an approach into the current body of CDA methods can further efforts to standardize the evaluation of the effectiveness of arguments, or in other words, to ‘identify in a more systematic and exhaustive way the possible points of entry for criticizing practical reasoning’ (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2011: 262).

It remains to be seen, however, whether applying this model to other argumentative subgenres of political discourse will offer similar insight into the argumentation structures of such texts. Furthermore, as Fairclough and Fairclough’s (2011) study represents an in-depth analysis of a single report, it cannot identify recurring patterns such as those which may emerge through a comparative evaluation of multiple texts from the same genre. Previous studies (Fairclough, 2016; Fairclough and Fairclough, 2013) have applied this model to analyze argumentative texts such as parliamentary debates, political speeches and online discussion forums. This paper endeavors to explore application of this framework in a yet another argumentative genre within political discourse, namely newspaper editorials, which reflect and influence the ongoing debate regarding current events in society. Evaluating arguments in relation to these events can in turn offer insight into the narratives and broader discourses on which the arguments are based.

The present study will thus examine argumentation structure within editorials in the SCMP commenting on Hong Kong’s recent extradition bill crisis to address the following research questions:

1) To what extent can this model be applied to analyze and offer adequate descriptive accounts of the arguments on extradition bill crisis?

2) What recurrent themes can be identified in these arguments in terms of claims, goals, values and circumstances?

A corpus of relevant editorials beginning with articles discussing the bill prior to its introduction and ending with the announcement of the withdrawal of the bill has been created and analyzed adopting both quantitative and qualitative approaches to identify salient argumentation patterns and evaluate the effectiveness of argument reconstruction. It is found that, although the model can only partially describe the arguments found in the individual editorials, the aggregate analytical results of a collection of editorials including recurring patterns of argumentation and topical themes found using the model can reveal a coherent picture of an ongoing debate on the extradition bill crisis in Hong Kong.

Data sources and analysis

While most of the studies on the recent Hong Kong protests reviewed above draw upon news articles reporting current events as their textual data, the present study focuses on a collection of editorials that construct arguments which likely represent the viewpoints of the newspaper on major political events and contemporary social issues. This genre has been studied by discourse analysts to identify the themes with specific ideological orientation (e.g. Richardson, 2007) and to investigate the politics of self-censorship (Lee and Lin, 2006). Although numerous editorials have been published in the SCMP, few studies have drawn upon this particular data source for discourse analyses since the Occupy Movement.

The editorials are similar to the Pre-Budget Reports analyzed by Fairclough and Fairclough (2011) in that both genres present arguments on important social issues; yet, the editorials differ from the Pre-Budget Reports in two significant ways: (1) the authors comment on a range of social issues, drawing upon and making reference to the latest development and news events; (2) the texts represent fluid and dynamic media coverage in the form a series of editorials often written on contiguous and interrelated social events in contrast to the Pre-Budget Reports, which are relatively more static and published individually on an annual basis. Therefore, it is hoped that a study of editorials which adopts the same model will reveal argumentation patterns and characteristics that, while perhaps dissimilar to those of the Pre-Budget Report, may represent expansion of its scope of application.

The corpus to be analyzed in the present study is composed of 48 editorials published from 8 March to 4 September, 2020, on the extradition bill crisis in Hong Kong. All editorials on this topic in the SCMP since the Hong Kong government proposed the bill in February are identified by screening through the available editorials published during the time period. Although the protests did not end when the government announced its plan to withdraw the bill on 4 September 2019, this event serves as an endpoint for our corpus, as our primary focus lies with the debate on the extradition bill. A small number of editorials that are barely related to the topic have been excluded from the corpus.

When analyzing the editorials, we adopt the model of practical reasoning proposed by Fairclough and Fairclough (2011) to identify the fundamental components proposed in the model including the claims, the goal, the circumstances, the values and the means-goal. To ensure the validity of our analysis, the two authors coded 48 editorials together to identify the components of the arguments and the themes associated with the premises. Inspired by previous theme-oriented discourse analyses, for example, (Roberts and Sarangi, 2005; Zayts and Luo, 2017), we take a data-driven approach to identify emergent themes from the data by closely examining the texts, bearing in mind the immediate societal and genre-specific contexts.

In addition to analyzing the entire corpus to identify recurrent themes for quantitative findings, we also conducted a detailed line-by-line analysis of one editorial to further assess the applicability of the model for studying editorials. While we follow Fairclough and Fairclough (2011)’s practice of identifying only one set of claims, circumstances, values and means-goal when analyzing the corpus, the in-depth analysis of one editorial attempts to provide a more comprehensive account of the arguments found in the editorial.

Common themes found in the editorials

In this section, we first present the findings after analyzing the entire corpus to answer the second research question, that is, what recurrent themes could be identified in these arguments in terms of claims, goals, values and circumstances? To complement the quantitative results indicated within the tables, we also offer examples from our corpus and discuss the themes with reference to the social issues facing Hong Kong during the extradition bill crisis.

As Table 1 indicates, the first two categories of claims (‘stay calm and rational’ and ‘actors fail to compromise’) were identified within nearly 40% of the articles evaluated. This may indicate a genre-specific tendency of the authors to present more general and conservative claims rather than opt for a more sensational approach which is often characteristic of other similar sub-genres such as op eds. This conservative approach can also be identified through the implied onus of responsibility across the claim categories: most of the claims entail the government acting as the agent to take action to resolve the crisis. This tendency is readily apparent in ‘The Hong Kong government must do whatever it can to placate extradition row’, in which the author takes great care to avoid directly assessing the role of protestors in the crisis. Given that the newspaper to some degree depends on alignment with its readership, other than events for which the responsibility unequivocally falls on the shoulders of the protesters, it is likely not in the best interest of the newspaper to potentially alienate readers by emphasizing the role of the general population in resolving the crisis. Instead, the government, with its conventional institutional leadership role and implied agency, is often claimed to be lacking an appropriate response.

Table 1.

Eight themes found among claims identified.

Claims
We should stay calm and rational	10
The political actors fail to compromise/compromise is needed	9
Different political actors should communicate	6
The government should show leadership by acting decisively	5
We should pay attention to the need of a specific group	5
Prioritize social efforts or explore alternative/additional solutions	5
The government must ensure the effective and fair law enforcement	4
We should explore alternative/additional solutions	4
Total	48

The analyses of our corpus also reveal seven themes under the category Goals as part of the Fairclough model with a range of frequencies (as shown in Table 2). The most prominent theme is, unsurprisingly, to restore peace and social order as the extradition bill crisis had seen significantly more violence from both the protesters and the Hong Kong Police compared to the Occupy Movement in 2014. The editorial authors emphasized this goal repetitively in wake of the increasing violence and deteriorating situation (two themes found in the circumstances premises). For example, after the infamous Yuen Long Attack and the incident involving the defacing of the national emblem of China on 21 July 2019, the editorial published the next day was titled ‘Enough is enough: this cycle of violence has to come to an end’.

Table 2.

Seven themes found among goals identified.

Goals
To restore peace and social order	22
To gain political support	11
To enhance communication among different political actors and stakeholders	4
To restore the public confidence on the government	4
To ensure economic growth and prosperity	4
To protect and nurture future generations	2
To ensure the freedom of expression	1
Total	48

Another salient theme is how different political actors including the Hong Kong government and the protesters should gain political support from society at large. This is a recurrent theme that has been echoed throughout the crisis. When the government was trying to compromise with the business community over the proposed legislation, an editorial titled ‘Fugitive law concern remains even after changes for business’ called for further action from the government to address concerns from the legal community in order to gain wider support. One could argue that to gain political support is a means to achieve the urgent goal of restoring peace and social order. Indeed, this also holds true for the other two goals found in the corpus- to enhance communication among different political actors and stakeholders and to restore public confidence in the government- both of which are essential for reestablishing peace and order. On the other hand, the editorials also remind readers of the long-term goals for the development of Hong Kong including to ensure economic growth and prosperity, to protect and nurture future generations and to ensure the freedom of expression, although these goals are less frequently found as a primary focus in the editorials.

According Table 3, compromise and communication were identified as the most frequently expressed values among the articles analyzed. This result is somewhat expected given the polarizing nature of the conflict across society. The implication here is that any feasible solution can only be pursued after the cessation of violence and among good faith actors. It is interesting to note that the realization of many of the other values identified such as the ‘importance of fair law enforcement’ and ‘importance of local economy’ often represent either preconditions for achieving the values of compromise and communication in the case of the former, or an ideal resulting outcome for the latter. This causality is emphasized in ‘It is imperative that all in Hong Kong give peace a real chance’ (August 8th, 2019), in which the author underscores the interconnectedness of relevant values such as fair law enforcement and leadership for achieving peace, and highlights peace as the antecedent of virtually all desirable outcomes for the SAR. After all, without upholding the freedom of expression and addressing the needs of different social groups, communication will inevitably suffer and the implementation and maintenance of effective law enforcement will be severely hindered.

Table 3.

Nine themes found among values identified.

Values
Importance of compromising politically	12
Importance of communication among different actors	7
Peaceful expression of opinions	6
Importance of leadership	6
Importance of fair law enforcement	5
Focus on urgent matters first	4
Importance of the well-being of a specific social group	3
Importance of local economy	3
Importance of freedom of expression	2
Total	48

Table 4.

Five themes found among circumstances identified.

Circumstances
Increasing violence	14
Deteriorating situation	14
Key stakeholders raised concerns	11
Positive development or improvement of the situation	6
Lack of communication due to mistrust and hostility among different stakeholders	3
Total	48

Overlap can be observed in terms of several Goals and Values identified, such as in relation to key concepts such as leadership and communication. In this case, leadership and communication were observed on a cline as relatively tangible Goals on one end, and fairly abstract Values on the other. This cline was frequently observed within the same article. For instance, a concrete goal is presented for improving communication between the government and students, as the writer asserts that the government ‘must try harder to facilitate such discussions’ (‘University of Hong Kong chief shows way to go in political crisis’, July 19th). Yet, the article begins by espousing ‘honest and open dialogue’ (‘University of Hong Kong chief shows way to go in political crisis’, July 19th). A similar pattern can be observed for other similar overlaps across the Value and Goal categories. Even though the Goal is necessarily derived from the Value, a clear distinction between the two should be made as the former is more concrete and closely related to the necessary social actions whereas the latter is more abstract and should be used to guide reasoning about the goals and social actions.

Compared to the other three components, fewer themes are found within the Circumstances identified in our corpus. The most frequent theme is ‘increasing violence’, which, as mentioned earlier, had unfortunately characterized many of the extradition bill crisis protests. Therefore, this theme is commonly found in editorials that have emphasized the goal of restoring peace and social order. A related theme also frequently found is ‘deteriorating situation’ which may also involve increasing violence, but the editorials typically place more emphasis on the recent development of the worsening situation in general. For example, an author of an editorial on 25 July wrote, ‘A dangerous point has been reached for Hong Kong as a result of ever-escalating protests. The city is sliding towards anarchy, law and order being increasingly disregarded’. The editorial was published a few days after the Yuen Long attack and a number of foreign governments issued travel alerts against Hong Kong. The references to recent news events are commonplace in our corpus in relation to the Circumstances premises as the editorials often build the arguments on issues related to the current events.

A detailed analysis of one editorial

To provide a detailed account of the argument deconstruction process as well as to illustrate the interconnectedness of the constituent elements of the argument, an in-depth analysis has been included here. The above editorial presents several suggestions regarding an appropriate course of action for the Hong Kong Government in response to the growing violence and numerous repercussions of the extradition protests.

The effectiveness of the main argument presented in ‘The Hong Kong government must do whatever it can to placate extradition row’ hinges upon the contextual support provided by several sets of Circumstances set forth in the text. Firstly, the author introduces several concurrent Circumstances which represent both negative impacts of the protests and signs that the situation is likely to deteriorate in the immediate future (lines 1–3). The increasing opposition to the extradition bill is framed here as a dynamic Circumstance with negative ‘political and economic’ outcomes looming.

This series of Circumstances is followed by a brief summary of the wide gamut of opinions among politicians regarding the next ideal course of action, including the views that the bill should be delayed indefinitely, others arguing that ‘all options should be considered’, and yet another that it should be passed immediately (lines 6–12). This discord of voices primes the readers with additional antecedent support for the assessment-based Claim that there is a general lack of consensus and solidarity within the government.

The worsening relationship between the police and general public is then framed as yet another adverse Circumstance (lines 17–22). The author takes great care here to create ambiguity to avoid explicitly assigning responsibility for the violence during protests to the protesters (‘The Occupy-style protest was marred by violence’). In lines 18–21, the Value of social stability is implicitly conveyed through the framing of protest violence as an undesirable outcome, a message which resonates with the headline of the article.

The series of deteriorating Circumstances contributes to the depiction of an overall increasingly volatile situation as well as the premise that more conflict would be devastating, which serves to bolster the Claim that social stability and restoring confidence in Hong Kong should be a priority. The author thus argues that the government should take action to ameliorate rather than aggravate the situation as a means to achieve this Goal. Indeed, the article ends by reiterating the Value of social and economic stability and advocating defusing the crisis as the Means to return Hong Kong to its previous level of social harmony and economic prosperity (lines 26–28).

At a more general level, a clear distinction in the text is observed between two different types of claims. The former is often presented in the form of descriptive claims regarding events which have already taken place or are currently unfolding (‘Wednesday’s clashes have not just affected the image of the police, but also the trust between the force and the public’), whereas the latter represents a more prescriptive claim (‘All sides must exercise restraint tomorrow to avoid more clashes’). It is worth noting that Claims made through practical reasoning appear to encourage reader alignment with the authorial stance as well as lend legitimacy to their theoretical counterparts.

When evaluating this particular article within the context of the entire dataset, it can be seen that many elements of a given set of premises presented in one article can often be found in other articles. As significant protest-related events continued to happen in the real world, certain premises were repeatedly presented by the authors, creating a sense of contiguity which resonated across the editorials and mirrored the interconnectedness of the events themselves. In fact, this editorial was preceded 2 days prior by an editorial asserting a strikingly similar claim that ‘the government’s top priority now must be to defuse the crisis’ (‘Hong Kong’s crisis needs to be defused as chaos and economic woe loom’, June 13, 2019).

The figures below present a visualization of the subordinate premises of the article’s main claim (Figure 2) and the multiplicity and stratification of claims identified (Figure 3):

Applicability of Fairclough and Fairclough’s model

Informed by the findings of the present study, we can now answer the first research question by assessing the extent to which Fairclough and Fairclough (2011)’s model may be applied to analyze and offer an adequate descriptive account of the arguments pertaining to the extradition bill crisis. It is clear that a seemingly finite set of Claims can be found across the editorials in our corpus given the argumentative nature of this newspaper genre that is distinct from the newspaper articles that are more often studied in critical discourse research (Richardson, 2007). While we followed Fairclough and Fairclough (2011)’s practice of focusing on the most prominent claim in each editorial analyzed, we also demonstrated, through a more detailed analysis of one editorial, that multiple claims can be embedded in the arguments presented in the editorials. Ideally, one should analyze the editorials in detail to identify all the multiple claims. Alternatively, a more cost-effective approach may be to acquire a bird’s-eye view of the prominent claims in a collection of arguments, as we did in the present study, and gain more insight into the ongoing discourse in relation to the political crisis.

One important phenomenon to note in regard to the claims expressed in the texts is an apparent distinction between what appear to be descriptive claims and prescriptive claims identified within the data. The former focuses on providing a relatively more objective account of a current state or situation, whereas the latter represents a normative assessment of a desirable outcome which can be realized through action. Although Fairclough’s study and our own corpus are primarily concerned with arguments calling for action, the arguments with descriptive claims should also be accounted for in order to analyze the arguments more comprehensively. These descriptive claims seem to appear more frequently and serve an auxiliary role in providing support for the more general and central action-based claims. The pseudo-factual nature of these claims bears a strong resemblance to the features of the Circumstance, yet with the important distinction that they are in fact claims in the very literal sense: they are subjective in nature.

We also adjust the analytical approach under the Fairclough model by not focusing on the Means-Goal component in our analysis as this component is recognized implicitly. We did so not because the premises are not important; rather, we found that given that most of the claims in the editorials refer to calls for action or proposed solutions to the societal problems addressed, in a sense, the Means have been embedded in the claims. As a result, the Means-Goal premises can be inferred through combining the Claim and Goal, seemingly eliminating the need for a separate premise category in the model.

The main themes identified in the corpus in relation to the social context

To complement the analysis of the argumentation components, a close examination of the main themes identified in the corpus applying Fairclough’s model can offer unique insight into the discourse regarding the event at hand, namely the debate on the political crisis in Hong Kong over the proposed extradition bill amendments. While a range of recurrent themes have been identified for each premise in the model, quite a number of the themes overlap with one another. In Table 5, overlapping themes are presented in the same rows which can help us better understand the societal context and problems surrounding the extradition bill crisis. In the next two subsections, the two main issues – the violence in the crisis and its roots and consequences as well as the lack of government leadership to resolve the crisis- are discussed with reference to the historical and societal backgrounds to provide the findings with a context to enrich our understanding of the problems of Hong Kong.

Table 5.

Argumentation components of overlapping themes found in the arguments.

	Claims	Circumstances	Goals	Values
Violence	Stay calm and rational	Increasing violence	Restore peace and social order	Peaceful expression of opinions
	Ensure the effective and fair law enforcement (no claim is identified)		Restore peace and social order	Fair law enforcement
			Ensure freedom of expression	Freedom of expression
	Prioritize social efforts or explore alternative/additional solutions	Deteriorating situation	Restore peace and social order	Prioritizing urgent matters first
	Compromise is needed	Key stakeholders raised concerns	Gain political support	Political compromise
	The government should show leadership	Positive development or improvement	Restore confidence on government	Communication among different actors
Government leadership	Political actors should communicate	Lack of communication among stakeholders	Enhance communication	Communication among different actors
	The government should show leadership	Positive development or improvement	Restore confidence on government	Leadership
	Compromise is needed	Deteriorating situation	Ensure economic prosperity	Importance of local economy
	Pay attention to the need of a specific group	Deteriorating situation	Protect future generations	Well-being of a specific group

The violence in the crisis, its roots, and consequences

The first prominent issue that many of the editorials address is the violence involved in exchanges between the protesters and the Hong Kong police. Among the five Circumstances identified, four of them are related to violence. The authors sounded the alarm when increasing violence was reported and observed the positive development or improvement when the level of violence abated. In several articles, the discussion is indirect as the authors simply refer to a deteriorating situation or the concerns of key stakeholders. Yet, violence was indeed the main characteristic of the extradition bill crisis during which far more violent behavior on the part of both protesters and law enforcement was witnessed than the Occupy Hong Kong movement in 2014. In fact, as reflected in the slogan of the Occupy movement was to Occupy Central with Love and Peace, the organizer deliberately called for protesters to avoid violence as much as possible (SCMP, 2014). In light of such violence, the editorials repeatedly made claims asking people to be calm and rational, calling for effective and fair law enforcement in order to reduce violence and restore peace and social order. Even when referring to more general strategies of resolving the crisis such as prioritizing efforts, exploring other solutions and compromising among stakeholders, the implementation of any action to rectify the situation is hindered by the problem of violence. Antithetical to violence is the theme of freedom of expression, a theme found in both Goals and Values. Ironically, violence also represents a form of expression, yet it is one that the society needs to avoid by fostering the freedom of peaceful expression.

The issue of violence is also tied to the conflict between the protesters and the government not just in the physical form of confrontations between the protesters and the police, but in the figurative sense of the political struggle. Among the five demands made by the protesters, two of them appear to hold some merit. The first is retraction of the characterization of the 12 June 2019 protests as ‘riots’, as the protesters refused the label of rioters, which implied the violent nature of some of their actions. The second is establishment of an independent commission of inquiry into police behavior widely regarded by many as police brutality. Our findings on the issue of violence, therefore, resonate with the larger social context of the extradition bill crisis and shed light on the nature of the conflict between the protesters and the government on multiple fronts.

At a more fundamental level, the tension between violent protests and peaceful expression of opinions points to the groundswell of support for democracy in Hong Kong. As the Occupy movement calling for true universal suffrage ended with no progress for the city towards a democratic election of the chief executive, many people in Hong Kong came to believe that they could not rely on peaceful expression of opinions to engender significant social change. Unlike western democratic societies in which people can freely express their viewpoints on the government and vote out leaders who prove to be incompetent, the chief executive of Hong Kong is elected by a committee dominated by those loyal to Beijing. Primarily accountable to the Beijing government, the chief executive thus has little incentive to listen to the voice of people, and it is no wonder that ordinary people in the city become increasingly frustrated with the policies made by the government. It is noteworthy, therefore, that among the editorials in our corpus, the issue of universal suffrage and the development of democracy in Hong Kong was barely discussed although the resignation of the current chief executive and the universal suffrage for the Legislative Council and the chief executive elections was one of the five demands of the protesters. This may imply that the media and protesters are operating under different premises regarding what constitutes realistic outcomes for the future of Hong Kong. Nevertheless, the Hong Kong people did find a democratic and peaceful way to express their views through the district council election held on 24 November 2019. Not surprisingly, in this election, the two pro-democracy parties, Democratic and Civic, won 54 and 20 more seats compared to the previous election, whereas the pro-establishment counterpart lost 96 seats.

From the perspective of Beijing, however, granting full democracy for the people of Hong Kong may not be politically feasible. It is well known that the idea of ‘one country, two systems’ was formulated by the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping who rose to power in late 1970s after the death of Chairman Mao. Determined to rejuvenate the Chinese economy through the open door policy attracting foreign investment from the Western world, Deng took a pragmatic approach to solving the problem of Hong Kong by ostensibly retaining the capitalist institutions and culture for 50 years after the handover of the city to China. The underlying premise of such an arrangement was that Hong Kong was to remain an economic engine for the Chinese economy and serve as a bridge between the Western world and mainland China. While Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, introduced more democracy to Hong Kong a few years before the handover in spite of opposition from the Chinese government, the pragmatism of Beijing regarding the matters of Hong Kong gave little reason to expect the Chinese government to grant full democracy to Hong Kong. Although the question of whether Beijing has broken its promises made under its Joint Declaration with the UK on Hong Kong is debatable, it is important to keep in mind that at the core of Beijing’s policies on the city is the economic interests of Hong Kong and the Mainland in terms of how they impact the whole of China. The violent behaviors of the protesters essentially broke the bottom line as the Hong Kong economy was threatened by the protests, with the confidence of foreign and Chinese investors shattered.

The lack of government leadership to resolve the crisis

Leadership represents yet another theme which resonates throughout the editorials. Many articles bemoan the lack of government leadership during the crisis, pointing to a paucity of leadership in multiple areas, most notably in terms of crisis management and decision making. This tendency likely relates to several complex historical and societal factors which contribute to the perceived general lack of leadership from the Hong Kong Government. This situation is compounded by a wide range of ‘deep-seated problems’ (China Daily, 2019) which the government appears either disinclined or unable to resolve. In fact, whether it be regarding the property market, immigration, or education, the government is widely perceived as having done little since 1997 that has been regarded as beneficial to Hong Kong.

Unfortunately, however, leadership appears to be a quality which is neither endogenous nor exogenously accessible to the Government. Historically, it must first be noted that with the notable exceptions in areas such as foreign affairs and military, given the unique nature of the task of governing Hong Kong, the Chinese government initially adopted an approach characterized by the Chinese saying ‘the river water avoids the well water’ in designing the post-handover government, preserving many aspects of the original colonial system of governance (Fong, 2014). One noteworthy aspect which was retained was the Government’s lack of strong legislative or policy-forming power (Koehn, 2001). Despite this apparent deficiency, fueled by talk of universal suffrage in recent years, the premise of increasing autonomy has been looming on the minds of many, but such hopes may have been arguably overly optimistic given the Chinese government’s political agenda and the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Hong Kong government (Langer, 2007).

It seems that the increasing awareness of its own impotence may have solidified the government’s position as a bad faith actor, which in turn manifested during the extradition protests as a perceived lack of commitment to engaging with the people of Hong Kong in constructive dialogue or taking concrete action to ameliorate the crisis, two recurring manifestations of this dearth of leadership. The lack of communication initiated on the part of the government is a focus of much of the criticism in relation to the lack of government leadership. The government’s perceived lack of willingness to proactively engage with protesters, other than through token gestures, may be an indication that it has indeed fully embraced its role as a mere extension of the Chinese Central Government. Similarly, the inaction of the government may also imply it has resigned itself to being relegated to a role of supervisory beaurocrat. One the one hand, the government simply lacks perspicacity regarding current policies and vision about Hong Kong’s future; but on the other, it may indeed be the case that the government must receive approval from the central government unbeknownst to the general public in relation to decisions with larger ramifications.

The identification of these themes along with the wider discussion of the social context surrounding the protests are inspired by the findings of the corpus. This shows how collectively analyzing the editorials reveals a broader perspective in which the more localized protest-related events can be contextualized.

Conclusion and future studies

The present study endeavors to analyze the argumentation patterns and themes presented within a set of editorials regarding the Extradition Protests in Hong Kong. Specifically, the study attempts to apply Fairclough and Fairclough’s (2011) framework for analysis of argumentation structure to a particular sub-genre within political discourse. It is further argued that, although Fairclough’s model may not capture the arguments in individual editorials comprehensively, the model can be usefully applied to analyze a collection of interrelated editorials as we did in this study to reveal more insights about an ongoing political crisis.

Despite the encouraging results, some limitations with our particular application of the framework were identified. First, the analysis involves the identification of one major argument per editorial; yet articles were analyzed in which main arguments were set forth involving subordinate claims and arguments: the design of future studies should allow for this potential multiplicity within the analytic framework. Another limitation was observed in terms of the corpus selection. By solely analyzing editorial articles, we were unable to comparatively analyze the argumentation patterns of closely related sub-genres of news discourse such as op-eds and letters to the editor, an approach which may ultimately yield findings not attainable through separate analyses of these genres. Future applications of this framework may endeavor to comparatively examine these similar genres.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

John Della Pietra is an Assistant Lecturer in English at the Language Centre, Hong Kong Baptist University. He is planning to undertake his PhD studies in stance-taking on online forums.

Dr Simon Wang is a lecturer in English at the Language Centre, Hong Kong Baptist University. His research interests include discourse analysis and computer-assisted language learning.

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