Sedition Poem Analysis
Bertoldo Beyer
An at-a-glance resource to enable a discussion of the poem 'Sedition' by Cecil Rajendra. This is a four-page compact analysis for handout or slide sharing. It includes notes on background and biography while examining themes, imagery, style, punctuation, diction, form and other relevant aspects of the poem. It is a very useful product to facilitate a wider interpretation of the subject matter and further debate. Please ensure that the students have a legitimate copy of the poem for their own use as this version is represented here only as a vehicle for the notes.
After more than a quarter of its population stormed the streets, including a rally attended by two million people, the extradition bill was withdrawn. However, the protests persisted as people were angry about the use of force by the police and demanded amnesty for arrestees. An even more expansive law was then imposed on Hong Kong, bypassing its legislature altogether. The National Security Law (NSL), enacted in June 2020, has successfully quashed the protests and dramatically increased the risks of dissent [7].
More than 10,000 people have been arrested in the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement (hereafter anti-ELAB). Many are now being put on trial, on charges ranging from illegal assembly and rioting, to language crimes such as incitement and sedition. All these cases, including the one reported in this paper, have been tried without a jury. One of the most contentious slogans used in the protests is 光復香港 時代革命 [gwong1 fuk6 hoeng1 gong2 si4 doi6 gaak3 ming6] (Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times).
In another case that was tried at about the same time, HKSAR v Tam Tak Chi [20], the meaning of the same slogan was also contested. Even though this case involves the same slogan, the charges are based on colonial-era sedition law instead of NSL. The historian who testified in Tong Ying Kit submitted his opinion for the prosecution, while I was called by the defence as an expert witness, along with the professor of politics and public administration who also served in the case above. To my knowledge, this is the first time in a Hong Kong courtroom where a linguist (other than handwriting experts) served as an expert witness. Using linguistic methods, my analysis leads to the same conclusion as the defence experts in Tong Ying Kit: that the slogan has divergent and indeterminate meanings.
While the plot does not tell us anything about the meaning of the slogan, it provides some guidance on locating speech events that matter. The plot triangulates journalist reports that the slogan first appeared in February 2016, when Edward Leung adopted it in his election campaign in the Legislative Council by-election. He chanted the slogan on stage and printed it on his campaign flyers. Leung was a member of Hong Kong Indigenous, a localist political party.
Just as the literal meaning is not necessarily the most frequently occurring meaning, the most frequently occurring meaning may not be the intended meaning adopted by a particular speaker at a particular time. The meaning of the slogan in each occurrence can only be determined contextually, paying attention to contextual cues such as tone of voice, facial expressions and gestures, speaker identity, audience characteristics and reaction, time, location, and shared knowledge.
In sum, the slogan in question has been used in two prominent types of speech events in Hong Kong: election and social movement. We may ask whether the same slogan diverges in meaning in these different speech events. While there is clearly an intertextual relationship among its instances of use, only closer examination could reveal whether the slogan has been recontextualised and has transformed in meaning.
Shuy defines schemas as how participants think about what is being talked about [44]. This may sometimes be gauged through analysing the verbal and non-verbal context of an utterance. I was also able to draw from ethnographic and journalistic interviews that directly probed into the thoughts of speakers, evidence that may not be available had the relevant speech events not drawn wide attention.
Although the slogan was embraced more by younger protesters than older protesters, and more by localists than moderate democrats, the fact that most protesters identified with it means that its meaning is vague enough to appeal to people with a wide spectrum of political views.
The great majority of speakers in these adjacency pairs were not involved in formulating the slogans. It is exactly because the slogans have become formulaic that such a ritualised turn-taking pattern is possible. Although the interlocutors in all these examples may be considered animators, the initiator (A) in the table has some freedom to decide which first pair parts they will conjure up; their options are however limited by the repertoire of slogans the crowd (B) has. The collective animation forms a powerful spectacle as large crowds appear to be speaking with one voice. Iterative completions of adjacency pairs help to construct and reinforce group identity.
Shuy, following Austin, understands speech acts as how participants convey their contributions [1, 44]. Speech acts are ways of getting things done with language, such as admitting, offering, and reporting. One key aspect of the speech act theory is the conceptual differentiation between the illocution and the perlocution: the illocution reflects speaker intention, and the perlocution is the addressee uptake. The speaker is not in full control of the perlocution.
Conversational strategies are about how participants try to influence each other using various communication techniques. Hyperbole, as mentioned above, is a well-known technique in political speech. Another strategy, commonly seen in election campaigns and political slogans, involves the strategic use of linguistic indeterminacy.
The Chinese slogan consists of four compound words: 光復 (liberate), 香港 (Hong Kong), 時代 (era), 革命 (revolution). The terms 光復 (liberate) and 革命(revolution) are the most controversial. A three-prong approach was used to study each keyword. First, I conducted a quantitative survey on Google Ngram and Google Trends, which sketch the frequency of usage of these terms in a time series, allowing for a glimpse of the connection between these terms and socio-political events at the time. Secondly, dictionary definitions are researched and compared. Finally, I performed a qualitative analysis of the recent use of these terms to gauge their semantic range from authentic usage.
Google Ngram is based on roughly 5 million, or 4%, of all books ever published. The Chinese subcorpus on Ngram Viewer contains 13 billion Chinese words. There are obvious limitations with the Ngram data, considering that it consists of only books (and therefore may not contain the most recent usage), and that its Chinese subcorpus cannot differentiate geographical differences in usage (such as that between Hong Kong and other Chinese speaking regions). On the other hand, Google Trends has data, between 2004 and present, of frequency of the keywords used as a search term. Because of the restriction of its operation, Google has relatively limited data from mainland China; however, the system does have data of search frequency specifically for Hong Kong.
Google Ngram as captured in Fig. 2 above shows that after a huge spike in usage in the 1940s (corresponding with the Japanese invasion and the Chinese civil war), the term has enjoyed limited but consistent usage since.
Despite the limitations of these datasets, these quantitative data show that the usage and interest of these keywords are not stable and unchanging over time but correspond with sociopolitical events of the time. The timing of sudden increases in usage or interest helps to corroborate the qualitative analysis on how the keywords go through recontextualization. The Google Trends graph also helps ensure that my qualitative analysis does not miss out important contexts of usage.
Next I examined the range of meanings 光復 (liberate) can carry by examining its recent usage in Hong Kong. My survey of usage used the Internet as a database (through the mediation of Google and Yahoo as search engines), using the keywords as search terms. The purpose of the qualitative analysis is not to establish the relative frequency of meanings ascribed to these terms, but to investigate the range of meanings that are commonly carried by these terms in their contemporary usage in Hong Kong.
One limitation of using the Internet as a database of authentic language usage is that the searchable content consists almost exclusively of written language, and that while it covers a wide range of genres such as newspaper reports, government press release, discussion forums and personal blogs, it does not cover genres that are used offline (such as conversations that happen in elevators, gossiping in coffee shops, or exchanges between vendors and clients). However, since my investigation here focuses on semantic range, this limitation means that the actual range can only be larger than what could be sampled from the Internet and therefore does not invalidate the findings.
With the term 革命 (revolution), I will again begin with a quick survey of its usage pattern. Google Ngram data, as captured in Fig. 4, show that the term 革命 (revolution) is more frequently used than 光復 (liberate), which is not surprising. Its frequency of usage peaked in between 1940 and 1980s, with smaller peaks in the 1920s and around 1910.
Dictionary definitions of the term 革命 (revolution) are again rather consistent. It denotes major change. Such change may be societal, political, economic, or cultural. It can also be used metaphorically to describe a kind of revolutionary consciousness or aptitude.
The usage analysis suggests that the slogan as a whole refers to a need to rectify a problem and to return to the original, a more desirable state of affairs for Hong Kong, without specifying what problem there is and what the desirable state of affairs looks like. This interpretation is consistent with denotations listed in dictionaries and is broader than that of the prosecution expert. I warn against interpreting the political slogan too literally, and I argue that conveying a desire for change is not only a permissible but an ordinary meaning that the slogan carries in Hong Kong today.
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