Alignment and antagonism in flux: A diachronic sentiment analysis of attitudes towards the Chinese mainland in the Hong Kong press

Despite extensive discussions about Hong Kong’s sentiments towards the Chinese mainland since the sovereignty transfer in 1997, there has been a lack of large-scale empirical analysis of attitude change in the mainstream media, which both reflect and shape sentiments in society. To address this gap, the present study employs an optimised semantic-based automatic sentiment analysis method to examine a corpus of news about China from 1997 to 2020 in three leading Chinese-language newspapers in Hong Kong, namely Apple Daily, Ming Pao, and Oriental Daily News. The analysis reveals that although the Hong Kong press had a positive emotional tone towards China in general, the overall sentiment was becoming increasingly negative. Meanwhile, the alignment and antagonism towards China have both increased, providing empirical evidence for attitudinal polarisation in the Hong Kong press. Specifically, Apple Daily’s depictions of China became increasingly negative, though with some positive turns before 2008, whereas Oriental Daily News consistently expressed favourable sentiments. Ming Pao maintained an impartial stance towards China through an increased but balanced representation of positive and negative sentiments, with its subjectivity and sentiment intensity growing to an industry-standard level. By explicating the cross-newspaper and cross-period variations, the results provide new insights into the complexity of sentiments towards China in the Hong Kong press, and media attitudes in general in terms of the “us” and “them” positionings.