The Dream of the Dragon: A content analysis of Xi Jinping’s “China Dream”

<p>China under Xi Jinping has a story to tell. In recent years, China has devoted more time and energy extending its discursive influence overseas. Aspirational propaganda slogans such as Xi’s “Chinese dream” indicate a potential change from Deng Xiaoping’s “bide your time, hide your strength” towards an outwardly focussed foreign policy of Striving for Achievement as China’s confidence grows. This project conducts a content analysis following the method set out by Klaus Krippendorff of 1907 Xinhua articles from 2013 – 2017 and finds that while this assertion was true shortly after articulation; coverage reverted to an inward focus in subsequent years. Furthermore, the findings show that there is an individualistic aspect to how the dream is portrayed whether it is intended by top government figures or not. Understanding how tifa develop, interrelate – or depart from each other – is vital in understanding contemporary political discourse in China. Lastly, the Chinese dream contains within it the beginnings of a prototype vision of Chinese exceptionalism.</p>

The Dream of the Dragon: A content analysis of Xi Jinping’s “China Dream”

<p>China under Xi Jinping has a story to tell. In recent years, China has devoted more time and energy extending its discursive influence overseas. Aspirational propaganda slogans such as Xi’s “Chinese dream” indicate a potential change from Deng Xiaoping’s “bide your time, hide your strength” towards an outwardly focussed foreign policy of Striving for Achievement as China’s confidence grows. This project conducts a content analysis following the method set out by Klaus Krippendorff of 1907 Xinhua articles from 2013 – 2017 and finds that while this assertion was true shortly after articulation; coverage reverted to an inward focus in subsequent years. Furthermore, the findings show that there is an individualistic aspect to how the dream is portrayed whether it is intended by top government figures or not. Understanding how tifa develop, interrelate – or depart from each other – is vital in understanding contemporary political discourse in China. Lastly, the Chinese dream contains within it the beginnings of a prototype vision of Chinese exceptionalism.</p>

Closure in dystopia: Projecting memories of the end of crises in speculative fiction

In this piece, I approach the relationship between the paradigm of imbricated crises pertaining to the second decade of the twenty-first century and its contemporaneous dystopian literature. I focus particularly on how dystopian literature forges a sense of closure that attempts to give meaning through the construction of imaginary memories of how crises came and went, or came and stayed. Dystopian tales provide the troubled reader of its time with a sense of narrative continuation and a substitute for closure. For my analysis, I draw on a corpus of literary works from around the world, which includes The Queue, by Basma Abdel Aziz; Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel; The Emissary, by Tawada Yōko; Severance: A Novel, by Ling Ma; China Dream, by Ma Jian; Ansibles, Profilers and Other Machines of Wonder, by Andrea Chapela; and The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Pericoronial writing from China and the diaspora

This article analyses what Margaret Atwood calls the literature of ‘ustopia’. The portmanteau term brings together the utopia and dystopia categories because Atwood argues that one contains the germ of the other. Ustopian writing is a body of work that is helpful when it comes to understanding current destruction to lives and livelihoods, and imagining our post-coronavirus future. The present article thus explores four works of ustopian writing from China and the diaspora, three of them having been written before the current COVID-19 crisis but all shedding light on it. Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary (2020) represents the first real work of postcoronial literature in what seems likely to be an outpouring over the coming years. It is anticipated very ably by the precoronial texts also analysed here – Mo Yan’s Frog ([2009] 2014), Ma Jian’s China Dream (2018) and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018) – which presage the post-COVID dispensation. Taken together, they form a body of work that the article terms pericoronial writing.

Wang Bing’s Cinematic Journey: A Counter-Narrative of the China Dream

This chapter helps locate the geographical trajectory of Wang’s cinematic activities. It also introduces the broad concept of ‘space’ and its centrality in the discussion. By looking at the shooting locations over a map of China, the investigation of Wang Bing’s cinematic travelogue is set against the ongoing state narrative of the China Dream. This is a slogan that frames China’s rise. The author argues that Wang’s films can be understood as a counter-narrative that shows the less shiny side of China’s growth. They can also be loosely grouped according to different definitions of space: spaces of labour, spaces of history and memory, collective spaces, exhibition spaces, and spaces of human practice. Moreover, without losing their Chinese distinctiveness, the issues at stake in Wang’s films speak to a much larger global experience of marginal spaces and uneven development.