A corpus analysis of discursive constructions of the Sunflower Student Movement in the English-language Taiwanese press

The Sunflower Student Movement was a protest movement in Taiwan against a trade agreement with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) by students and civic groups, in which the national legislature was occupied by protesters between 18 March and 10 April 2014. This study examines the discursive constructions of this movement in the two major English-language newspapers in Taiwan, The China Post and the Taipei Times, in corpora of articles published in the six-month period after the protests began. The data were collected from the online editions of the newspapers and analysed utilising a corpus-driven approach. First, frequency lists of the corpora were studied and an in-depth analysis of collocates and concordances of certain frequent words was undertaken. This was followed by a study of keywords when each corpus was compared against the other. The findings demonstrate that one newspaper depicted the protests as a struggle for democracy, associating the protests with democracy movements from the past and emphasising the inclusivity of the movement, while the other media source constructed the protests more negatively, focusing on destabilising elements of the protests such as the economic consequences of the occupation, highlighting instances of violence and disruption to the status quo, as well as constructing the protesters as being unrepresentative of the general population of the island. The article concludes by critically discussing how the differing discursive constructions of the protest movement are representative of the divisions within the Taiwanese society in relation to questions of nationhood and its stance towards the increasing economic and political influence of the PRC.