This chapter analyses how China’s propaganda specialists have used popular entertainment to frame China’s historiography. By examining two recent propaganda products, the TV documentary Road to Revival and the multi-media opera of the same name, we explore how the Party and state deploy a range of visual and verbal tropes to re-write revolutionary history and adapt it to modern 21st-century China. Through a critical decoding of the multi-modal discourse within the two Road to Revival media products, we show how revolutionary periods in modern Chinese history are re-worked in order to justify the CCP as China’s ruling Party, and how this effort creates a restrictive albeit legitimizing discursive framework within which future Chinese leaders will have to negotiate political action. Keywords: TV documentary; Road to Revival; representing history
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