Agenda Between the Lines: Comparing KMT Newspaper Coverage of the 1925-26 Canton-Hong Kong Strike and CCP Newspaper Coverage of the May Thirtieth Movement in 1925
Zixin Zhou
13/10/2026
The 1925-1926 Canton-Hong Kong Strike and the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, two large mass mobilisations in modern Chinese history, have been studied with continued interest since the past century. A particularly intriguing aspect of these movements is the partisan involvement, or more specifically, the motives of political parties—in this case, the KMT (Kuomintang) and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). Most existing research focuses on organisational records and institutional archives, leaving partisan news use unexamined. This study analyses two newspapers The Republican Daily News (Canton edition) and Hot Blood Daily using frame analysis (Benford and Snow 2000), investigating the agendas and objectives of the KMT and the CCP during the strikes. I illustrate the comparisons through a mixed-methods approach, including word frequencies aggregation and fine-tuned BERTopic modelling over 2,072,209 tokens of newspaper texts and qualitative analysis of 36 representative documents from the BERTopic model output. The results demonstrate a shared goal of cultivating anti-imperialistic ideological consensus rather than finding concrete solutions for immediate problems and mobilising the public into action, as well as different agendas in terms of coalition scope, media role, and timeline expectation. Overall, this study contributes to the extant scholarship by performing a framing analysis and providing interpretations derived from media framing.