China’s Road to Revival: ‘Writing’ the PRC’s Struggles for Modernization

In: Discourse, Politics and Media in Contemporary China

One of the main components of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda strategy is the analogy of China’s ‘road to revival’ (fuxing zhi lu) – a phrase that became popular under Hu Jintao and that the current president Xi Jinping most recently evoked in his patriotic call for citizens to share in the ‘Chinese Dream’ by fighting for ‘the great renaissance of the Chinese nation’. The idea of revival has meanwhile become a recurring trope in propaganda materials and cultural products; these products foster and perpetuate a sense of national pride as they trace modern Chinese history from the Opium wars of the 19th century to the founding of the New China and its arrival on the world stage in the 21st century.

This book chapter, co-authored with Jay Hwang, analyses how China’s propaganda specialists have used popular entertainment to frame China’s historiography by invoking discourses of renewal and modernization. How are various signs tied together in multi-modal media products to form an official interpretation of modern history in China? What communication strategies inform such cultural products? By examining two recent propaganda products, the TV documentary Road to Revival and the multi-media opera by the same name, we explore how the state makes use of ‘soft’ regulatory techniques in order to re-write its revolutionary history and adapt it to modern 21st-century China.

Through a critical decoding of the multi-modal discourses that are at play within the two Road to Revival media products, we demonstrate how revolutionary periods in modern Chinese history are re-worked in order to legitimize the CCP as China’s ruling Party. The importance of this discourse should not be underestimated. As our analysis shows, CCP propaganda has opted to base its guiding narrative on a view of modernity that promotes relentless industrialization and strong us-vs-them stereotypes. It is this narrative that now provides the emotive meaning-making framework for future administrations, creating a restrictive albeit legitimizing discursive framework within which future Chinese leaders will have to negotiate their political actions.

How to reference this article

Schneider, Florian & Hwang, Yih-Jye (2014), ‘China’s Road to Revival: ‘Writing’ the PRC’s Struggles for Modernization’. In Cao, Qing, Tian, Hailong & Chilton, Paul (Eds.), Discourse, Politics and Media in Contemporary China. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 145-170.