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Drawing upon the approach of strategic framing, this study investigated how China's state-run media mobilize foreign propaganda machine and use specific patterns to describe the 2019 Hong Kong protests on Twitter. It also shed light on the heterogeneity of both production and reception of the strategic frames used by state media. Structural topic modeling was employed to analyze a large amount of Twitter content (i.e., 14,412 tweets) posted by 13 verified organizational accounts, and six strategic frames were identified as conflicts and violence, calling for stability and order, marginalizing protests, criticizing the West as accomplices, delegitimizing protests, and social and economic disruption. These frames highlighted insider–outsider and causes and consequences as two overarching communication strategies. The results also revealed that the bureaucratic rank of state media and the engagement rate of each tweet were closely associated with the content prevalence of various strategic frames. In addition to enhancing our understanding of the construction of "protest paradigm" against the social media context, these empirical findings uncover the often overlooked mobility and flexibility of China's state media discourse as well as the communication ecology shaped and consolidated by the increasing importance state media communicators attach to online engagement metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the authoritarian conditioning of political expression on social media in three Chinese societiesby analyzing three parallel surveys comprising 6942 respondents from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Results demonstrate that the use of social media to gather political information triggers politically expressive use of social media and indirectly predicts offline non-institutionalized political participation. Individuals' authoritarian orientation, however, moderates such indirect effects. Only people who demonstrate low or moderate adherence to authoritarian value systems exemplify this mediation model. Those with high levels of authoritarian orientation are not exemplary. Furthermore, the extent to which social media use interacts with authoritarian orientation to build a relationship with political participation presents two different patterns across three Chinese societies. The moderated mediating effect described here exists in Hong Kong and Taiwan but not in mainland China. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses why and how, in October 2013, the struggle for a free-to-air TV license by HKTV could turn into a social movement. It traces the historical makeup of neo-liberalization and monopolization in TV production: TV licensing as a (colonial) governmental measure on the media under the guise of a “laissez-faire” media policy, which has been reinvented as a grip on cultural rights to TV in post-handover Hong Kong. HKTV's “David vs Goliath” struggle against the decision demonstrated how political fear (of Beijing control over the Hong Kong government) among the people has fed into an anxiety over media monopoly. What might have caught the powers-to-be by surprise was the vociferous protest from the general public. My analysis situates the incident in the context of an array of travesties against media freedoms in recent years, which have enabled the audience (as citizens) to rise up and demand their cultural rights to creative and quality TV. I conclude by examining the agency of creativity, which, in this case, has been articulated to an agency of (decolonized) identity in the struggle for democracy in the present political cultural conjuncture of Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]