One Event, Three Stories

Abstract

This article analyzes how the media from the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong constructed their respective narratives about the handover of Hong Kong - based on their institutional configurations, the relevance of the story to their home constituencies, their conventions of news-making and the cultural repertoire on which they drew to make the event intelligible. Domesticating a global media event reflects and reproduces each society as a discursive community; in a defining moment like this, the media bind each society through their shared ways of interpretations and expression.