In Discursive change in Hong Kong, Jennifer Eagleton provides a first-hand, comprehensive examination of the changes in political discourse that have occurred in Hong Kong over the past few decades. The author considers metaphor as the main approach and critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the major method for her book. Overall, she treats three aspects as crucial for her analysis: Hong Kong's status as a political hybrid, the Chinese state's promise of universal suffrage, and Hong Kong's path-dependent nature as a British colony and Chinese society. The author also examines how Hong Kong ‘sees itself’ through metaphors.
Chapters 2 to 9 are the book's main contents. Chapters 2 to 5 focus on the first decade after the reunion in 1997. The author notes that the main discursive frame in this period is the Basic Law, and two metaphorical bases for political discourse are road maps and timetables. She observes how early established local political parties, print media, and other official texts utilised these basic and other derivative narrative frames and metaphors and examines how they were repeated, took new shapes, and formed new textures of coherence during this period. In chapter 5, the author provides a detailed case study of how multiple camps of political actors in Hong Kong understood and used the narrative thread of the Cultural Revolution as discursive strategies from 1997 to 2007.
Chapters 6 to 8 focus on the second decade, with the main focus on the discourse on ‘the rule of law’ in the Umbrella Movements in 2014 and discursive changes of interpreting the One-Country and Two-Systems policy increasingly towards the state side, in particular after 2015. In chapter 8, the author further examines how protestors’ strategy of ‘being water’ in the 2019 protests is reflected in discourse. Chapter 9 further looks toward the future, examining the impact of the national security law, the demand for performative loyalty from civil officials, and metaphors of Hong Kong's ‘second return’ to China.
Eagleton became a Hong Kong resident shortly after the reunion in 1997, and is a long-time observer and participant of Hong Kong's social and political changes. Clearly having benefited from these backgrounds and experiences, the author provides rich materials and valuable examination of discursive change in Hong Kong. The book, nonetheless, could be strengthened by incorporating the rich existing literature particularly in contemporary scholarship of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology to the analysis. In addition, in many places, the author does not provide clear or sufficient descriptions of how methods and materials are linked. In particular, though CDA is stated as the main method, in case studies CDA is only explicitly mentioned in chapter 8.
Overall, this book provides rich materials and an ambitious examination of the discourse change in Hong Kong in the post-reunion era. Valuable as it is, the work can benefit from more systematically incorporating contemporary literature on metaphor, identity, and discourse in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, as well as addressing possible missing links between methods and cases.
