Media discourses in Hong Kong change in representation of human rights

This study examines the change in the representation of human rights issues in a corpus containing over 5 000 articles collected from a leading English newspaper in Hong Kong in two periods before and after the change of sovereignty in 1997 using Sinclair s (1996 2004) lexical item The analysis of instances of the phrase human rights in the corpus as a lexical item dhows that the newspaper in question has changed its representation of human rights issues particularly in China and Hong Kong, over the decade This reflects an ideological shift in the newspaper's stance in response to the current situations in both local and world politics, and that human rights concerns are not merely a nationalistic but also a culturally dynamic phenomenon