Legitimation or Hegemony? The Chinese Government’s Changing Discursive Approach to Hong Kong

State discourse in China is often less about generating belief than it is about reproducing the political leadership’s symbolic hegemony over normative truth claims. This study analyzes hegemony-making discourse as a system of intertextual conventions characterized by the public’s lack of belief in the discursive contents, discursive securitization, and sycophantic citations that produce a language game between leaders and their subordinates. This paper investigates the changing approach of China’s central government to state discourses in Hong Kong from the 1980s to the present. These changes have been accelerated by legal and political changes in Hong Kong and its relationship with the central government since 2019. Offering explanations for these shifts at the structural, interpretive, coalitional, and strategic levels, this study evaluates the benefits and vulnerabilities of the Chinese government’s new discursive approach to Hong Kong in the years since the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement (Anti-ELAB movement).