Striding through the storms: the politics of distance in HKUSU Public Statements during the Umbrella Revolution

Abstract

Public statements played a key part in the Umbrella Revolution (UR), the largest civil disobedience movement in Hong Kong’s history which was initiated by local students in 2014 to fight for “genuine” universal suffrage. The paper presents a text analysis of three public statements issued by The Hong Kong University Students’ Union (HKUSU) during the UR, and examines the recent changes of this public genre associated with the adoption of new media. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the authors first discuss the field, tenor and mode of the texts in focus, as well as how the predominant use of classical allusions in their original Literary Chinese (wenyan) form served as a distancing strategy to clearly differentiate the declarant’s (i.e., the longest-established tertiary students’ organization in the territory) voice from that of the addressee (i.e., the general public and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government). Code-mixed texts, in which the highly sophisticated embedded “language” (Literary Chinese) was heavily infused into the comparatively profane matrix “language” (Standard Modern Chinese), giving rise to an atypical rhetorical style for the genre. A context of production temporally proximate yet culturally distant from the context of reception was thus created, during which a significant socio-semiotic distance (Lam, 2010) between the declarant and the addressee was engendered as a salient gesture of elitist nonconformity in the form of a “public-space dialogue” (Boyd, 2014). The authors further argue that the implied, quasi-interpersonal nature of the declarant-addressee dynamic was made possible by the preferred use of social media and online newspapers as means of publishing. The resulting spontaneous access to the public statements, and online user interactions, reshaped the textually unidirectional genre into “technologically–mediated public spaces” (Wodak & Wright, 2006) through manipulation and orchestration of semiotic resources.