Understanding China’s national identity and identifications through mediated popular culture

Abstract

This research sets out to examine China's national identity led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from a mediated popular cultural perspective. Building on the revised model of the "circuit of culture", it attempts to understand how does the CCP (re)produce and (re)distribute China's national identity through mediated popular culture. This thesis defines the central problematics of China's national identity as: domestically, the dynamic between the individual and the collective, and internationally, the tension between China as an ideological minority versus the dominant political culture that is based on liberal humanism. With this understanding in mind, this thesis adds four elements to the "circuit of culture", and examining China's national identity circulated in the mediated popular culture as political/ethical; subjective/personal; social sedimentation, social imagination and extended social space; last but not least, China's national identity as a temporal construction that evolves in accordance to contingent conditions in China mainland. After clarifying the key concepts and theories deployed in this thesis, it firstly explores the historical dynamic between the state, the Chinese people and the media, which provides an insight into the modern constructions of China's national identity led by the CCP. Secondly, this thesis analyses China's current official national identity propagated by the state in 2012 and reveals that the construction of the Chinese Dream is a complex process of reworking the old and new political discourses concerning China's newfound position as the world's second largest economy. Thirdly, as China's state media institutions learnt to adapt to the new media and communication technologies first developed in the west, the political communication of China's national identity has also seen a gradual change in terms of styles, content and method. The last two chapters focus on how China's national identities are produced, consumed, regulated, and represented in popular cultural industries. The previous case study looks at Chinese blockbusters and examines that if the state-owned media conglomeration manages to encourage Chinese consumers' identification with the nation-state. The latter case study analyses the celebrity-fan network online and its complex entanglement with cyber nationalism initiated by Chinese netizens. This thesis concludes by suggesting that while mediated popular culture seems to be a required field in generating Chinese people's identification with the Party-state, the real acceptance of one's national identity also depends significantly on what the government deliver to its people, rather than ideology