From “them” to “us”?

This study provides an account of how the representation of China has changed diachronically in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the leading liberal English-language broadsheet in Hong Kong, since the sovereignty transfer in 1997. Adopting a corpus-based approach to critical discourse studies, we analyse two corpora of news reports about China in the newspaper, one for 1997–2000 and the other one for 2015–2018. It is found that the representation of China has changed from very negative representations focusing on human right problems in the first period to largely positive representations centring upon China’s global and economic power in the second period. The changes may suggest that the SCMP has to a certain extent shifted its positioning of China from “them” to “us”, though an ambivalent stance is observed. The ambivalence is discussed in relation to the economic convergence and political divergence between Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland.