Explore the vast range of titles available.

This book examines the role played by political communications, including media of all kinds - journalism, television, and film - in defining and shaping identity in Greater China; China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas Chinese. In the context of increasing cross-border interactions of people, investment and commercial products between the component parts of greater China, the book explores the idea that identity, rather than nation-states or political entities, may be the key factor in achieving further integration in Greater China. The book focuses on the ways in which identity is communicated, and shows how communication of identity within and between the component parts of greater China plays a central role in bringing about integration. Gary D. Rawnsley is Senior Lecturer in Politics and Director of the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, University of Nottingham, UK. He has published widely on international communications and the politics of Taiwan. Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley is Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, University of Nottingham, UK. Her research interests include media, democratisation and identity issues.

Since 2003, Hong Kong has witnessed a series of large-scale protests which have constituted the core of a reinvigorated pro-democracy movement. What drove tens of thousands of citizens to the street on a yearly basis to protest? What were the social and organizational bases of the protest movement? How did media and public discourses affect the protests’ formation and mobilization? How did the protesters understand their own actions and the political environment? This book tackles such questions by using a wide range of methods, including population and protest onsite surveys, media content analysis, and in-depth interviews with activists, politicians, and protest participants. It provides an account of the \"self-mobilization processes\" behind the historic July 1, 2003 protest, and how the protest kick-started new political dynamics and discursive contestations in the public arena which not only turned a single protest into a series of collective actions constituting a movement, but also continually shaped the movement’s characteristics and influence. The book is highly pertinent to readers interested in political development in Hong Kong, and as a case study on \"the power of critical events,\" the book also has broad implications on the study of both media politics and social movements in general. 1. Introduction: From a Critical Event to Ritualistic Protests 2. Public Opinion on the Eve of Explosion 3. Organization, Communication, and Mobilization 4. The Reshaping of Public Discourse 5. Constructing the Call for Democracy 6. Contextual Changes and Strategic Responses 7. Development of the Movement Organization 8. The Social Bases of Continual Protests 9. Making Sense of Participation 10. The June 4 Connection Francis L. F. Lee is Associate Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Joseph M. Chan is Professor of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He also served as the Changjiang Chair Professor of Journalism at Fudan University, Shanghai. The authors also co-edited Media and Politics in Post-handover Hong Kong (also published by Routledge, 2008).

Digital and social media are increasingly integrated into dynamics of protest movements. They strengthen the mobilization power of movements, extend movement networks, facilitate new modes of protest participation, and lead to the emergence of new protest formations. Meanwhile, conventional media remain an important arena where the contest for public support between protesters and their targets play out. This book examines the role of the media—understood as an integrated system composed of both conventional media institutions and digital media platforms—in the formation and dynamics of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014. It grounds the analysis into the broad background of the rise of protest politics in Hong Kong since the early 2000s. More important, this book connects the case of the Umbrella Movement to recent theorizations of new social movement formations. It treats the Umbrella Movement as a case where connective action intervenes into a collective action campaign, leading to an extended occupation mixing old and new protest logics. The analysis shows how the media had not only empowered the protest movements in certain ways, but also introduced forces not conducive to the sustainability and efficacy of the movement. Conventional and digital media could also be used by the state to undermine protests. Through a combination of protester surveys, population surveys, analyses of news contents, and social media activities, this book reconstructs a rich and nuanced account of the Umbrella Movement, which helps shed light on numerous issues about the media-movement nexus in the digital era.

Conventional wisdom assumes that increased censorship will strictly decrease access to information. We delineate circumstances when increases in censorship expand access to information for a substantial subset of the population. When governments suddenly impose censorship on previously uncensored information, citizens accustomed to acquiring this information will be incentivized to learn methods of censorship evasion. These evasion tools provide continued access to the newly blocked information—and also extend users’ ability to access information that has long been censored. We illustrate this phenomenon using millions of individual-level actions of social media users in China before and after the block of Instagram. We show that the block inspired millions of Chinese users to acquire virtual private networks, and that these users subsequently joined censored websites like Twitter and Facebook. Despite initially being apolitical, these new users began browsing blocked political pages on Wikipedia, following Chinese political activists on Twitter, and discussing highly politicized topics such as opposition protests in Hong Kong.

•Pro-government respondents were twice more likely to vaccinate than the opposition.•Results suggest that political attitudes determine vaccination program support.•Positive health expert opinions increased vaccine support among opposition respondents.•Political attentive respondents were more receptive to health expert communication. Despite evidence suggesting that vaccines offer protection against COVID-19, the uptake rates of COVID-19 vaccines have been low in some high-income regions. Support for vaccination program is important to fight the pandemic. This study aimed at exploring two research questions: first, to what extent political attitudes are associated with support for COVID-19 vaccination program; and second, whether health expert communication is effective in increasing the support. An online survey was undertaken by 1079 Hong Kong residents aged 18–77 years from May 26 to June 3, 2021. The survey found higher support in pro-government respondents, and lower support in political opposition. A strategy of positive communication by health experts could increase support in the opposition and politically attentive respondents. Other variables that were positively related to program support were quarantine experience, trust in government, preference for pandemic control over freedom, political attentiveness, and disagreement with China’s influence on Hong Kong’s COVID-19 policymaking. This study contributes to understanding the relationship between political attitudes and support for vaccination program and provides empirical evidence of the efficacy of health expert communication strategy in improving support for vaccination program for people with certain political attitudes.

This article critically examines the communicative and policy-framing response of Australia’s Victorian government to the state’s growing crisis of far-right extremism. Through a critical discourse analysis of the Victorian Andrews and Allan Labor governments’ political communication from 2021 to 2023, we explain how the government discursively responded to the rise of far-right extremism. We found the Andrews and Allan governments employed a range of communicative, discursive, and legitimisation strategies to both legitimise the government’s policy to ban Nazi symbols and gestures and to (re)establish Victoria’s reputation as an inclusive and multicultural liberal democracy. The findings of this article broaden our empirical understanding of the central role of political and crisis communication in responding to extremism and may provide a template for other governments to respond to the global crisis of far-right extremism.

This article examines the discriminatory discursive strategies adopted in the online interactions between different power groups from Mainland China and Hong Kong in their response to two YouTube videos about the Hong Kong Umbrella, or Occupy Central, Movement. A corpus of 4329 comments made by 2157 posters from Mainland China and Hong Kong was coded regarding commenters’ place of residence and their perceptions of the Umbrella Movement and then tagged based on Flowerdew et al.’s previous taxonomy of discriminatory discursive strategies. The results show that a wide range of discriminatory discursive strategies, used by two power groups from Hong Kong and one from the Mainland, were found in the majority of the comments, including four sub-strategies not identified by Flowerdew et al. While studies to date on the Umbrella Movement have mainly focused on Hong Kong data, our study contributes to the literature by adding the perspective from Mainland China. The findings of this study provide insights into the increasing social and political tensions between Hong Kong and its mother country as well as the current situation in the divided city.

Most observers argued that press freedom in Hong Kong has been declining continually over the past 15 years. This article examines the problem of press freedom from the perspective of the political economy of the media. According to conventional understanding, the Chinese government has exerted indirect influence over the Hong Kong media through co-opting media owners, most of whom were entrepreneurs with ample business interests in the mainland. At the same time, there were internal tensions within the political economic system. The latter opened up a space of resistance for media practitioners and thus helped the media system as a whole to maintain a degree of relative autonomy from the power centre. However, into the 2010s, the media landscape has undergone several significant changes, especially the worsening media business environment and the growth of digital media technologies. These changes have affected the cost-benefit calculations of media ownership and led to the entrance of Chinese capital into the Hong Kong media scene. The digital media arena is also facing the challenge of intrusion by the state.

In this timely and insightful book, Yiu-Wai Chu takes stock of Hong Kong's culture since its transition to a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China in 1997. Hong Kong had long functioned as the capitalist and democratic stepping stone to China for much of the world. Its highly original popular culture was well known in Chinese communities, and its renowned film industry enjoyed worldwide audiences and far-reaching artistic influence. Chu argues that Hong Kong's culture was \"lost in transition\" when it tried to affirm its international visibility and retain the status quo after 1997. In an era when China welcomed outsiders and became the world's most rapidly developing economy, Hong Kong's special position as a capitalist outpost was no longer a privilege. By drawing on various cultural discourses, such as film, popular music, and politics of everyday life, Chu provides an informative and critical analysis of the impact of China's ascendency on the notion of \"One Country, Two Cultures.\" Hong Kong can no longer function as a bridge between China and the world, writes Chu, and must now define itself from global, local, and national perspectives.

Using Hong Kong and Shenzhen in a comparative case study, this article addresses two important questions about digital governance: what its development sequence is, and the governance role of social media in the Chinese context. A content analysis is performed of social media communication by four sets of comparable agencies in the two cities, using the framework of e-government interconnectivity. Contrary to general expectations, our findings show that Shenzhen was more active than Hong Kong in the governmental use of social media. The results also suggest that, against the normative and sequential models, there is no strict sequence or particular order of development that must be followed in digital governance, thus rejecting the stage-by-stage ＂walk before you run＂ hypothesis. A government can ＂leapfrog＂ or ＂run before it walks＂ in its digital governance, bypassing earlier stages of development. Furthermore, the study shows that digital governance is an important tool of institutional adaptation and development to enhance a government's ability to respond to a dynamic environment of raising citizen expectations. State-led digitalization complements and compensates for the traditional and formal citizen-government interaction mechanisms, making offline and online institutions interchangeable and substitutable, and therefore also more interrelated and indistinguishable.