Narrative of governing emigration: a case study in Hong Kong

Understanding media narratives helps us better understand how diverse actors in society attempt to shape public opinion. The reports of government officials’ announcements and discussions, as well as articles published by political figures and opinion influencers in major newspapers, provide an important complement to policy narratives about an event. Our study examines the media narrative surrounding the recent emigration wave in Hong Kong following the large-scale social unrest in 2019. We utilised the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a generative statistical model, which provides an efficient and effective method for the analysis of large-scale textual data. Analysing reports and articles from five major Chinese newspapers in Hong Kong, published between January 2020 and December 2022, we identified five major themes. These themes shed light on the strategies used to interpret the emigration phenomenon.