{"id":2066,"date":"2013-05-06T09:00:50","date_gmt":"2013-05-06T07:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicseastasia.com\/staging\/3558\/?p=2066"},"modified":"2016-10-10T12:19:23","modified_gmt":"2016-10-10T10:19:23","slug":"performance-meaning-and-ideology-in-the-making-of-legitimacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicseastasia.com\/staging\/3558\/research\/mass-media-events\/prc-anniversary\/performance-meaning-and-ideology-in-the-making-of-legitimacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Performance, Meaning, and Ideology in the Making of Legitimacy"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>The Celebrations of the People\u2019s Republic of China\u2019s Sixty-Year Anniversary<\/h2>\n<p>This article, co-authored with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lucthehague.nl\/about\/organisation-staff\/luc-faculty\/hwang.html\" target=\"_blank\">Jay Hwang<\/a>, analyzes how the Chinese Communist Party used the <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/6853452\" target=\"_blank\">60-year anniversary of the People\u2019s Republic of China<\/a> 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt1438461\/?ref_=nv_sr_1\" target=\"_blank\">The Founding of the Republic<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s 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 &#8216;Mao, Marx, and the Military&#8217;, 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\u00a0harmonious society concept.<\/p>\n<p>Even though this attempt was highly pervasive, we nevertheless find that China\u2019s 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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>This article was made possible through the support of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hum.leiden.edu\/lias\/\" target=\"_blank\">Leiden University Institute for Area Studies<\/a> (LIAS) and the Modern East Asia Research Centre (MEARC) at Leiden University, The Netherlands.<\/p>\n<h3>How to reference this article<\/h3>\n<p>Hwang, Yih-Jye &amp; Schneider, Florian (2011), &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.politicseastasia.com\/staging\/3558\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/CR_Manuscript_Hwang__Schneider-final-version.pdf\" rel=\"\">Performance, Meaning, and Ideology in the Making of Legitimacy: The Celebrations of the People&#8217;s Republic of China&#8217;s Sixty-Year Anniversary<\/a>&#8216;. <em>The China Review<\/em>, 11(1), 27-56.<\/p>\n<p>[button text=&#8221;More via The China Review&#8221; link=&#8221;https:\/\/www.chineseupress.com\/index.php?route=product\/product&amp;product_id=66&#8243;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This article analyzes how the Chinese Communist Party shifted its legitimacy discourse during the 60-year anniversary of the People\u2019s Republic of China.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2072,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[55,56],"tags":[43,64,172,175,81,177,170,57],"class_list":["post-2066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prc-anniversary","category-publications","tag-china","tag-discourse","tag-legitimacy","tag-mass-events","tag-military","tag-parade","tag-prc-anniversary","tag-visuality","post_format-post-format-image"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - 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