Hong Kong's new normal: Remaking authorized discourses of "special administration," 2017-2022

The paper presents a critical discourse analysis of the five annual policy addresses of Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-Ngor, whose term of office (2017-2022) spanned the most tumultuous episode in the modern history of the territory, one bisected by an extended season of street protests and the subsequent imposition of a national security law. Read as an authorized, real-time transcript of governmental rationalizations and responses, delivered in the first-person voice of Hong Kong's most senior politician, the annual policy addresses narrate a crisis-mediated shift from a postcolonial redoubt of liberal capitalism to an outpost of China's national-security state. Although the "one country, two systems" formula enshrined in Hong Kong's Basic Law retains its official status, a distinct transformation is evident, from the evocation of "two systems" as a wedge against one-country assimilation, to an apparently new normal based on the principles of securitized, "one-country" integration. In the process, the chief executive increasingly embraced the received discourses and sanctioned priorities of the Chinese Communist Party in her depictions of a "New Paradigm" for the governance of Hong Kong, founded on the "steer of the Central Government" with the "cooperation" of the government of the Special Administrative Region.