oa Chapter 6. China’s Road to Revival

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

• Affiliations: 1: Leiden University