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
2006Imagined Communities. 3rd rev. ed. London & New York: Verso.
Barabantseva, Elena
2009 “Change vs. Order: Shijie
Meets
Tianxia in China’s Interactions with the World.” Alternatives 34/2: 129–155.
Barmé, Geremie
2009 “China’s Flat Earth: History and 8 August 2008.” The China Quarterly 197: 64–86.
BBC
2013 “Chinese President Xi Jinping Calls for Renaissance.” BBC Asia Online, 17 March 2013: [URL] [21.0313].
Brady, Anne-Marie
2008Marketing Dictatorship – Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield.
Brady, Anne-Marie
2009a “Mass Persuasion as a Means of Legitimation and China’s Popular Authoritarianism.” American Behavioral Scientist 53: 434–457.
Brady, Anne-Marie
2009b “The Beijing Olympics as a Campaign of Mass Distraction.” The China Quarterly 197: 1–24.
Breslin, Shaun and Simon Shen
2010 “Online Chinese Nationalism.” Chatham House Asia Programme Paper ASP PP 2010/03: [URL] [27.1210].
Callahan, William A
2010China – The Pessoptimist Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
CCTV
2007Fuxing zhi lu (The Road to Revival). CCTV.com: [URL] [21.0313].
Chilton, Paul
2004Analysing Political Discourse – Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge.
Cull, Nicholas J
2008 “The Public Diplomacy of the Modern Olympic Games and China’s Soft Power Strategy.” In Owning the Olympics – Narratives of the New China, ed. by E. Monroe Price and Daniel Dayan, 117–144. Ann Arbor: DigitalCultureBooks.
Müller, Marion and Arvid Kappas
2011 “Visual Emotions – Emotional Visuals. Emotions, Pathos Formulae, and their Relevance for Communication Research.” In The Routledge Handbook of Emotions and the Mass Media, ed. by Katrin Doveling, Christian von Scheve, and Elly A. Konijn, 310–331. Oxon and New York: Routledge.
Fairbank, John K. and Merle Goldman
2007China – A New History. 2nd ed. Cambridge MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Fairclough, Norman
1995Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
Fewsmith, Joseph
2008China since Tiananmen, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foucault, Michel
1975/1995Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.
Gries, Peter Hays
2004China’s New Nationalism – Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy. Berkeley et al.: University of California Press.
Holbig, Heike
2006 “Ideological Reform and Political Legitimacy in China: Challenges in the Post-Jiang Era.” In GIGA Working Paper Series 18 (March), 1–35. Hamburg: GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
Iedema, Rick
2001 “Analysing Film and Television: a Social Semiotic Account of Hospital: an Unhealthy Business.” In Handbook of Visual Analysis, ed. by Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt, 183–204. London et al.: Sage.
Jäger, Siegfried
(2004): Kritische Diskursanalyse. Eine Einführung. (Discourse Analysis. An Introduction). 4th unabr. ed. Münster: UNRAST-Verlag.
Kinder, Donald R
2003 “Communication and Politics in the Age of Information.” In The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, ed. by David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis, 357–393. Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press.
Kress, Gunther and van Theo Leeuwen
2001Multimodal Discourse - The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.
Kurlantzick, Joshua
2007Charm Offensive – How China’s Soft Power is Transforming the World. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe
2001Hegemony and Socialist Strategy – Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. 2nd ed. London & New York: Verso.
Latour, Bruno
2005Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
MacFarquhar, Roderick and Michael Schoenhals
2006Mao’s Last Revolution. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Mittag, Achim
2008 “Historiography.” In Brill’s Encyclopedia of China, ed. by Daniel Leese. Leiden: Brill Academic Pub.
Mitter, Rana
2004A Bitter Revolution – China’s Struggle with the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
NCPA
2009Daxing yinyue wudao shishi fuxing zhi lu (The Large-Scale Musical Epic Road to Revival). The National Center for the Performing Arts Online: [URL] [01.0610].
Nyíri, Pál, Zhang Juan, and Merriden Varrall
2010 “China’s Cosmopolitan Nationalists – ‘Heroes’ and ‘Traitors’ of the 2008 Olympics.” The China Journal 63: 25–55.
Nye, Joseph S
2004Power in the Global Information Age: From Realism to Globalization. London and New York: Routledge Chapman & Hall.
Shirk, Susan L
2007China – Fragile Superpower. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shue, Vivienne
2004 “Legitimacy Crisis in China?” In State and Society in 21st-Century China: Crisis, Contention, and Legitimation, ed. by Peter Hays Gries and Stanley Rosen, 24–49. New York and London: RoutledgeCurzon.
Sperber, Dan
1996Explaining Culture – A Naturalistic Approach, Oxford and Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Van Dijk, Teun A
1993 “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis.” Discourse & Society 4/2: 249–283.
Wang, Zheng
2012Never Forget National Humiliation – Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl and Karin Liebgart
2009The Discursive Construction of National Identity. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Zarrow, Peter
2005China in War and Revolution 1895-1949. London and New York: Routledge.
Zhang, Xiaoling
2009 “From ‘Foreign Propaganda’ to ‘International Communication’: China’s Promotion of Soft Power in the Age of Information and Communication Technologies.” In China’s Information and Communications Technology Revolution: Political Impacts and State Responses, ed. by Zhang Xiaoling and Zheng Yongnian. Oxon & New York: Routledge. 103–120.
Zhao, Suisheng
2004A Nation-State by Construction – Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Zhao, Yuezhi
1998Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Cited by
Cited by 5 other publications
Boc, Anny
2015. The Power of Language: Globalizing “The Chinese Dream”. Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 8:4 ► pp. 533 ff.
Musolff, Andreas
2017. Analiza scenariuszy metaforycznych w ramach lingwistyki kulturowej. In Lingwistyka kulturowa i międzykulturowa. Antologia,
Musolff, Andreas
2017. Metaphor and Cultural Cognition. In Advances in Cultural Linguistics [Cultural Linguistics, ], ► pp. 325 ff.
Musolff, Andreas
2022. Universality and/or Cultural Specificity of Metaphors and Analogies? NATIONS as BODIES/PERSONS. In Metaphors and Analogies in Sciences and Humanities [Synthese Library, 453], ► pp. 401 ff.
Zhang, Yunhan & Jan Orbie
2021. Strategic narratives in China’s climate policy: analysing three phases in China’s discourse coalition. The Pacific Review 34:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.