A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Western and H ong K ong–based Reporting on the 2019–2020 Protests (2021)

Abstract: We apply statistical techniques from natural language processing to Western and Hong Kong–based English language newspaper articles that discuss the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests of the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement. Topic modeling detects central themes of the reporting and shows the differing agendas toward one country, two systems . Embedding-based usage shift (at the word level) and sentiment analysis (at the document level) both support that Hong Kong–based reporting is more negative and more emotionally charged. A two-way test shows that while July 1, 2019 is a turning point for media portrayal, the differences between western- and Hong Kong–based reporting did not magnify when the protests began; rather, they already existed. Taken together, these findings clarify how the portrayal of activism in Hong Kong evolved throughout the Movement.

## introduction on february 12, 2019, the hong kong government revealed its plan to amend the fugitive offenders ordinance and the mutual legal assistance in criminal matters ordinance @xcite . hong kong chief executive lam stated that the bill had been inspired by poon hiu-wing's murder: a judicial loophole was preventing the hong kong courts from trying her killer for murder, and it needed to be closed @xcite . chief executive lam proposed changing the law so that hong kong could extradite fugitives, on a case-by-case basis, to jurisdictions it did not have an agreement with, including mainland china, macau, and taiwan. opponents of the bill argued that rather than fixing a loophole, chief executive lam's amendment would open the door to extraditions between hong kong and mainland china, something that beijing sought ever since the 1997 handover. to pass the amendment to the bill before poon's murderer hong @xcite western-based tensions us-china, tension, war, dispute, uncertainty, heightened, prolonged, worsening, fallout, turmoil culture, state-owned, protections, tourists, market, base, rise, travel, closer, argued from a theoretical perspective, this article can be positioned within what oliver et al. broadly call "the world of news and politics" @xcite and, especially, how "dissonance across media outlets could be socially and politically consequential" @xcite . the research behind the article is based on a mixed-methods approach that combines the application of a variety of nlp techniques with experts' insights on hong kong politics and society. nlp aids in marking inconsistencies in event characterizations as we analyze news articles related to episodes of civil unrest between january 2019 and june 2020, in both western-and hong kong-based english-language newspapers. experts' insights help put into perspective how the volatile context of hong kong politics, plus newspapers' tendency to report more dramatic events, may result in reporting bias that either emphasises or undermines the legitimacy of either the protests or the regime against which protests are directed @xcite @xcite . the powerful mixedmethods interplay guides the analyses and enables this work's rich and nuanced discussion of these three research questions about newspaper depiction of the protests: ## related work in answering our three questions, we benefit from the methods of content analysis @xcite by complementing subject matter expertise with the potential for massive scale. in this vein, lucy et al. (2020) use word embedding similarity, topic models, and dependency parsing to generate clues toward differing portrayals of race and gender in u.s. history textbooks. field et al. (2018) relate the content of russian state-run news articles to the nation's economic performance, finding an agenda of distraction. other content analysis and stylometry considers authorship @xcite , native language identification @xcite , and deceptive product reviews @xcite . considering civil unrest generally, @xcite apply topic models and named entity recognition to protest event analysis. @xcite show that not all protests are alike, computationally speaking: event extraction models for protests perform much worse on countries outside the training set. inverting this, we call into question different views on protest in the same location. within the specific focus of hong kong, the closest work to ours is the contemporaneous @xcite , who perform a longitudinal analysis of hong kong news media since hong kong's transfer of sovereignty. our work "zooms in" on the 2019-2020 protests-the largest in hong kong's history. ## data we rely on a corpus we have collected of 3398 news articles from six western-based english language newspapers: the new york times, the wall street journal, the washington post, the financial times, the guardian, and the times; and two hong kong-based english language newspapers: china daily and south china morning post, over a period of 18 months, from january 2019 to june 2020. although we took steps to include a diverse array of newspapers from within given regions, the newspapers used in this sample were purposefully selected because they were english-language newspapers. this still allows for important insights into differences across cultures and regions. future research ought to extend news coverage of protest beyond english-only news sources @xcite @xcite . the articles were collected through keywordbased searches in proquest newspapers for the western english language newspapers, and newsbank access world news research collection for the english language hong kong newspapers. we searched for the keywords "hong kong" + "protests", "hong kong" + "rallies", "hong kong" + "marches", and "hong kong" + "riots". we used the east coast editions for the new york times and the wall street journal; the uk editions for financial times, the guardian, and the times, and the overseas edition for china daily (which is run and printed in hong kong). to be eligible for collection, articles had to be at least 300 words long, and be about the protests. a one-by-one, manual screening process eliminated irrelevant items such as eventual duplicates within each publication, readers' letters, and articles that included any of the chosen keywords but whose content was not about the protest incidents. following the manual screening, we retained 3398 articles. the mean length was 783 tokens. the foremost question we answer is about the lay of the land: what is discussed? in this section, we first look at the frequency of articles about protests in hong kong: over time, how much are the protests jan 2019 jan 2020 apr jul oct apr 0 200 400 western non-western figure 1: hong kong-based sources published far more throughout the protests and tapered off later. ## conclusion the hong kong protests captured domestic and international media attention, and their news value increased as their objectives shifted from protesting against a proposed amendment to the existing extradition bill to protecting democracy. our research shows that techniques from natural language processing help strengthen our understanding of how the portrayal of activism in hong kong profoundly evolved over the 18-month timeline of our study. while hong kong-and western-based publishers cover similar topics in their articles on the 2019 protests, the framing of those topics is different, which in turn carries implications for the public's perception, understanding, and support of those events. we also show that, in general, the use of charged words is more prominent in hong kong-based sources than westernbased ones. this has implications for the extraction of protest-related events from corpora with politically opposed polarities such as ours. finally, july 1, 2019, emerges as a turning point both for hong kong-and western-based news sources: afterwards, lexical choice related to protest descriptions becomes more negative and hostile in articles from both sources. in exposing these findings, we combined expert domain knowledge and techniques from natural language processing. the interplay allows faster, more efficient analysis with larger sample sizes, which can be contextualized and interpreted to go beyond the descriptive and uncover the "so what?"