Narratives, Politics, and the Public Sphere: Struggles over Political Reform in the Final Transitional Years in Hong Kong (1992-1994) (Social & Political Studies from Hong Kong)

The theoretical aim of this book is to extend the discussion on identity politics to accommodate a wider understanding of the public sphere and the formation of public opinion. Starting with the position that citizenship underlies a terrain of symbolic struggles over the discursive representation of the community, the author proposes that the notions of "public" and "narrative" are central to understanding the cultural and political dynamics of the public sphere in modern society. Public credibility concerns the actors ability to speak in the name of the "public", whose sources of imagery are in the symbolic representations of the culture of a community and of the opinions of the public at specific times. Diverse and conflicting cultural meanings are interwoven into a web of publicly coded discourses which make public contestation both possible and necessary. The author incorporates the theory of the public into a theory of narrative progression in order to explain the interaction between narrative construction and political conflicts in the politics of public credibility, the progressive or narrative formation of the force of the "public" out of the struggle, and its power over the positioning and repositioning of the actors. The framework is applied to Chris Patten's reforms in Hong Kong and the struggles for democracy taking into account social conflict over legislation and changes in public opinion towards the government.