Policy addresses are important governmental documents that convey the government's policies and publicize the government’s work plan set for the coming year, and at the same time, carry important information about social and economic developments. This paper studies the policy addresses of Macao SAR in the post-handover period from 2000 to 2017. It aims at investigating how the linguistic configurations reflect the ideologies constructed by the government in the post-handover period. With a corpus-assisted methodology, this paper applies discourse analysis to the investigation of the policy addresses given by the two chief executives of the four different terms of the Macao SAR government. The analysis shows that the diction in the policy addresses reflects the changes in the development of Macao and in the relationship between the government and the audience in the investigated period. It is argued that a corpus-assisted investigation can reveal how discourse is shaped by social practice and how discourse is used to help construct ideologies.

Macao, a special administrative region of China, has been able to maintain the records of zero deaths and keep confirmed cases under 50 since the outbreak of COVID-19 for more than half a year as of July 2020, despite being the world’s most densely populated city. The current paper utilizes the dialogic public relations theory to analyze the situation using both literature review on how the various government actions and strategies during the pandemic were corresponding to the theory, and a quantitative random digital dialing (RDD) telephone survey, with a sample of 502 Macao residents aged 18 or above, to study the public reactions towards the government pandemic prevention actions. Survey results show a high level of public satisfaction towards epidemic prevention performance, as well as some forms of collaborative information re-dissemination behavior in social media platforms. Literature review and analysis from dialogic theory found that spirit of mutual equality, collaboration with local community, immediacy of presence in crisis time, engagements with stakeholders through maximum media channels and networks, supportiveness to public with both useful information and practical social support like subsidy program, as well as commitment to transparent and genuine communication, are all the dialogic communications strategies that describe what the Macao government has done in the crisis of COVID-19. The dialogic strategies that could be learned from the Macao government may be used as a reference for similar urbanized and densely populated cities in other territories.