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Mega discourses, as discourses recognised and espoused at the broader societal level, enact the taken-for-granted premises governing an organisational sector. The dominant power can designate the value, norm and moral duty of an organisational sector through manipulating such mega discourses. Conceptualised within critical discourse studies and Chinese discourse studies, this article assesses the official discourse of China’s third sector circulating in the policy documents, political speeches, and news media, illustrating how China’s authoritarian state utilises discursive strategies to articulate a new order of discourse of the third sector. It argues that such an alternative discursive ordering is significantly different from its western counterpart. The authoritarian state has strategically appropriated historical and cultural resources to legitimise such a “de-SMOisation” process, intending to insulate nongovernmental organisations from social movements. This study concludes with a discussion on the significance and implications of this third sector discourse.

Studies on the “protest paradigm” have long explored how a society's mass media system frames the social movements occurring within that society. This study adopts a social movement diffusion perspective to sharpen the transborder dimension of the protest paradigm. Specifically, we introduce the concept of the “diffusion-proofing” protest paradigm, given that an understudied and undertheorized function of the protest paradigm is the prevention of the import of exogenous social movements. Taking the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement as an example, we investigate how mainland China's mass media acted to prevent movement diffusion. Four transborder components of the diffusion-proofing protest paradigm are proposed: reactions, attributions, consequences, and solutions. Through content analysis, we argue that by highlighting these transborder components, China's newspapers attributed the movement's rise to foreign intervention, emphasized the movement's negative effects on both Hong Kong and mainland China, and revealed the uncompromising nature of China's reaction and the urgency of cross-border cooperation for containing the movement and its diffusion. Further, we identify two modes of reporting: a mainly descriptive mode that relied on a local framework to depict the movement and its local context and an evaluative mode that emphasized the level of deviance and foreign intervention, thus amplifying the movement's transborder effects and the need to prevent its diffusion. Notably, the level of deviance acts as a mediating channel between the two modes, transforming the local framework into a transborder one. The diffusion-proofing protest paradigm is also found to vary across media types and periods.

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Since 2003, Hong Kong has gradually transformed into a 'social movement society'. With the help of new technologies, mediatised 'transborder conversation' about social movement across the border with mainland China, as a verbal practice, has become routine. Sojourn students from the mainland, who usually stay in Hong Kong for several years, actively participate in this verbal practice. Taking a 'discourse-centred online ethnography' approach, this study aims to unpack the verbal practice of transborder conversations driven by sojourn students during the Umbrella Movement from the theoretical perspective of speech codes. By conducting participant observation and in-depth interviews with 30 participants, two oppositional codes, cynicism and idealism, have been identified. Each code assumes different relations of the self and the state and different political efficacy, which manifests as different interactional practices. The presence of these oppositional codes has endangered the counter-hegemonic nature of transborder conversations.