CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IN HISTORIOGRAPHY: THE CASE OF HONG KONG'S EVOLVING POLITICAL IDENTITY

摘要

1 July 1997 marked Hong Kong's (hereafter HK) transfer of sovereignty from Britain back to China. Negotiations between the two countries began in the early 1980s, with a Joint Declaration (JD) agreed in 1984 that HK would become a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China after 155 years of British rule. The JD went into considerable detail in specifying the terms of the handover and China published a mini-constitution known as the Basic Law for post-1997 HK, guaranteeing the capitalist economic system, common-law legal system, free press, freedom of worship, right of assembly, and two official languages (Chinese and English). If everything went according to plan, the transfer of HK's sovereignty, always a historic event, might not have been the major international diplomatic and political clash between two world cultures of the 20th century as it turned out to be.