Performance, Meaning, and Ideology in the Making of Legitimacy

The Celebrations of the People’s Republic of China’s Sixty-Year Anniversary

This article, co-authored with Jay Hwang, analyzes how the Chinese Communist Party used the 60-year anniversary of the People’s Republic of China to construct its legitimacy. We analyze the elaborate celebrations, which involved not only a large-scale military parade, but also a civilian pageant and various cultural products, for instance the 2009 propaganda blockbuster The Founding of the Republic.

By adopting a discourse analytical approach, our analysis shows how the celebrations were devised explicitly with a domestic audience in mind, and how they represented an attempt to bridge the various ruptures between contemporary Chinese modernity and the nation’s revolutionary past. This entailed an often subtle re-balancing and re-writing of existing historiography and discourses. Contrary to popular beliefs in the foreign press at the time, the event was not a return to ‘Mao, Marx, and the Military’, but rather an attempt to emphasize the leadership of Hu Jintao and to shift the focus of Chinese political discourse to issues related to the harmonious society concept.

Even though this attempt was highly pervasive, we nevertheless find that China’s propaganda experts could not achieve their goal in full. A media event like the 2009 anniversary celebration and its accompanying cultural products does not exist solely in a domestic context, and the incongruities with China’s soft-power strategy and with recent cosmopolitan narratives presented at events like the Beijing Olympics ultimately jarred with the nostalgic imagery designed for the pageant.

This article was made possible through the support of the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) and the Modern East Asia Research Centre (MEARC) at Leiden University, The Netherlands.

How to reference this article

Hwang, Yih-Jye & Schneider, Florian (2011), ‘Performance, Meaning, and Ideology in the Making of Legitimacy: The Celebrations of the People’s Republic of China’s Sixty-Year Anniversary‘. The China Review, 11(1), 27-56.