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A Natural Language Processing Analysis of Newspapers Coverage of Hong Kong Protests Between 1998 and 2020

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Abstract

This article investigates how the SCMP, the China Daily-and western-based newspapers cover protests in Hong Kong in an effort to identify changes in journalistic practices between 1998 and 2020. It combines natural language processing (NLP) with a qualitative investigation of a novel corpus of newspaper articles spanning 22 years. It  enlists topic modeling to contrast the treatment of protests in Hong Kong diachronically and across news sources. Through comparison of lexical frequency and lexical usage it  showcases preferences and discrepancies in the use of protest-relevant keywords in the newspapers’ articles. Embedding neighborhood comparisons strengthens our understanding of how words are used differently between the SCMP, the China Daily and western-based newspapers, and also how the context of protest-related keywords may differ across news sources over time. Finally, computational sentiment analysis measures the tone and connotations of articles. The article fills a gap in the literature on Hong Kong media and  its methodology broadens the application of NLP techniques to the social sciences.   

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Notes

  1. The National Security (Legislative Provisions) Bill 2003 was a proposed bill which aimed to “amend the Crimes Ordinance, the Official Secrets Ordinance and the Societies Ordinance pursuant to the obligation imposed by Article 23 of the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to provide for related, incidental and consequential amendments.” (Hong Kong Government, press release, 24 February 2003).

  2. https://socialmovements.trinity.duke.edu/groups/scholarism

  3. http://english.www.gov.cn/archive/white_paper/2014/08/23/content_281474982986578.htm

  4. https://carnegieendowment.org/2016/10/17/implications-of-sixth-hong-kong-legislative-election-for-relations-with-bei**g-pub-64872

  5. https://www.legco.gov.hk/yr18-19/english/bills/b201903291.pdf

  6. “The idea of one country, two systems originated in 1979, when China offered to allow Taiwan to keep its economic and social systems, government, and even military in return for acknowledging that it was part of the People’s Republic. Taiwan rejected that proposal. [Then-Premier] Deng ** next used the idea to resolve an emergent crisis over Hong Kong. The biggest section of Hong Kong, the New Territories, was scheduled to revert to mainland rule in 1997, and real-estate investors feared they would lose everything in the reversion. Those concerns led to a historic confrontation between Deng and [British Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher in December 1984 and the 1985 Sino-British Joint Declaration which promised to preserve the judicial system, legislative and executive autonomy, and all the key freedoms to which Hong Kong people had become accustomed for 50 years.” In Overholt, W. (2019). Hong Kong: The Rise and Fall of “One Country, Two Systems, Boston: Harvard Kennedy School, p.1.

  7. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cd/introduction.html, accessed on 03/25/2023.

  8. Following the recommendation of Wendlandt et al. (2018) and Gonen et al. (2020), we use 1000 nearest neighbors.

  9. Research on news values implies answering a fundamental question: “What is news?” and journalism and communication-related disciplines have put significant effort in trying to answer this question. See Galtung and Ruge, 1965; Eilders, 2006; Welbers et al. 2016.

  10. https://www.britannica.com/event/Tiananmen-Square-incident

  11. carnegie-mec.org/2016/10/17/implications-of-sixth-hong-kong-legislative-election-for-relations-with-bei**g-pub-64872

  12. TADA 2021, 11th Annual Conference in New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data. Panel on Longitudinal Studies of Language, with Philip Resnik as discussant. https://tada2021.org

  13. See page 2–4.

  14. The China Daily, August 16, 2019.

  15. The South China Morning Post, June 7, 2019.

  16. The China Daily, September 23, 2019.

  17. The South China Morning Post, November 28, 2019.

  18. https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202001/08/P2020010800638p.htm

  19. For the purpose of this research, the term keyword is used in the information retrieval rather than the corpus linguistic sense, meaning a term that is statistically characteristic in a text. See also Douglas Biber and Randi Reppen (Eds.). (2015). The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 90–105.

  20. https://www.npr.org/2019/07/01/737761290/looking-back-22-years-to-the-handover-of-hong-kong-from-britain-to-china

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  1. Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N Charles Street, Baltimore, MD, 21218, USA

    Giovanna Maria Dora Dore

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  1. Giovanna Maria Dora Dore
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Dore, G.M.D. A Natural Language Processing Analysis of Newspapers Coverage of Hong Kong Protests Between 1998 and 2020. Soc Indic Res 169, 143–166 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-023-03147-0

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