By analyzing the incident of Hou Dejian’s return to China in 1983, this research explores how mainstream newspapers (the Central Daily News, United Daily News, Min Sheng Bao, and Independence Evening Post) involved the complex of national identity when reporting the event. This paper employs Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis to examine the different political tendencies of news outlets, ideological constructs, and social contexts. The findings suggest that newspapers initially tended to personalize the incident of Hou’s return but later uniformly criticized the Chinese Communist Party. This research compares the different discourses from Tangwai magazines and Hou’s autobiography and notes that mainstream newspapers avoided reporting political and ideological issues pertaining to the incident. Finally, Hou’s Chinese consciousness differs from the official nationalism and is indicative of the various national identities prevalent in the 1980s.