Farewell to the Crown Colony: a Content Analysis of the British Press Coverage of the 1997 Sovereignty Reversion in Hong Kong

Substantial researches have accounted for how Hong Kong experienced the 1997 handover from Britain to China and Hong Kong's complex post-colonial development. Little has however been done to account for how the British society experienced the historical event and perceived the development of British-Hong Kong-Chinese relations. This monograph attempts to fill this knowledge gap. Deploying the content analysis methodology for systematically studying the British press coverage of the 1997 sovereignty reversion, it examines British-Hong Kong- Chinese cultural relations through the theoretical lens of Edward Said's Orientalism. By treating news as a form of cultural representation, it discusses how the British press re-constructed the sovereignty reversion in Hong Kong into a discourse of Orientalism. Moreover, through critically discussing the limitations of the present study, it calls for the need to carry out more comprehensive and comparative studies on the British, Hong Kong and Chinese press coverage of the post-colonial Hong Kong, which may further shed lights for understanding the post-millennial British-Hong Kong- Chinese relations.