Umbrella Movement Campaigns: Power and Discourse

Through the lens of critical discourse analysis, this article seeks to contribute to the understanding of the Hong Kong’s power relations by examining the register of six media campaigns of The Hong Kong Federation of Students, a co-organizer of the Umbrella Movement in 2014. A content analysis of the campaigns was designed and studied with respect to the broader sociopolitical contexts within which the campaigns were initiated. As this study has found, two textual elements have captured the political thread that runs through the anti-government discourse in the campaigns: 1. The first-person we-family and 2. The repetition of the theme resistance. Both textual elements interweave each other in a way that, when considered both in relation to the city’s colonial past and legacy, as well as the political turmoil that embroiled Hong Kong in 2014, suggests that youth activism had erred on the side of radical idealism.