Hong Kong’s new normal: Remaking authorized discourses of “special administration,” 2017–2022

Abstract

The paper presents a critical discourse analysis of the five annual policy addresses of Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-Ngor, whose term of office (2017–2022) spanned the most tumultuous episode in the modern history of the territory, one bisected by an extended season of street protests and the subsequent imposition of a national security law. Read as an authorized, real-time transcript of governmental rationalizations and responses, delivered in the first-person voice of Hong Kong’s most senior politician, the annual policy addresses narrate a crisis-mediated shift from a postcolonial redoubt of liberal capitalism to an outpost of China’s national-security state. Although the “one country, two systems” formula enshrined in Hong Kong’s Basic Law retains its official status, a distinct transformation is evident, from the evocation of “two systems” as a wedge against one-country assimilation, to an apparently new normal based on the principles of securitized, “one-country” integration. In the process, the chief executive increasingly embraced the received discourses and sanctioned priorities of the Chinese Communist Party in her depictions of a “New Paradigm” for the governance of Hong Kong, founded on the “steer of the Central Government” with the “cooperation” of the government of the Special Administrative Region.