Branding the Chinese Dream: Reception of China’s Public Diplomacy in Britain’s “Cultural China”

Over four decades, China’s transformed propaganda system has embraced public diplomacy to dispel its perceived “threat.” The most recent strategy has been the branding of the Chinese Dream narrative. Although there has been some academic focus on China’s nation branding, little has been written about its reception by overseas audiences. Accordingly, this article draws on focus-group data and employs Tu Wei-ming’s “cultural China” framework in exploring how the Chinese Dream is received and interpreted in the United Kingdom. This article contributes to understandings of nation branding by recognising how Chinese diaspora communities and British intellectual and professional elites engage with and promote brand values. It argues that the socio-cultural aspect of branding is important for China’s identity and that using the Chinese Dream as a branding narrative is successful when it focuses on cultural and economic messaging but divides opinion when political ideology is used. Image © Yan Wu

Guarding the Space In-between

Based on eight in-depth interviews, this article analyses the quandary faced by liberal mainland Chinese student migrants in Hong Kong. On the one hand, the liberal pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong are deeply intertwined with the rise of localism, which is based on a dichotomy between Hong Kong and mainland China. On the other hand, a rising, development-centric nationalism in mainland China reduces Hong Kong protesters to unemancipated British colonial subjects. However, in the context of this “double marginalisation,” liberal Mainland students guard a form of liberalism that transcends both Hong Kong localism and Chinese nationalism. They debunk the stereotype of mainland Chinese students being apolitical and therefore provide an alternative definition of being Chinese. They challenge the view that mainland Chinese can only be emancipated outside mainland China to destabilise a Fukuyamian linear interpretation of history. They use four tactics to cope with double marginalisation: understanding localists, befriending expatriates, assuming professionalism, and becoming apolitical. Image © Ling Tang

Red Collections in Contemporary China

“Red Collecting” is a widespread phenomenon in contemporary China. It refers to the collecting of objects from the Chinese Communist Party’s history. Red Collecting has received only minimal treatment in English-language scholarly literature, much of which focuses on individual object categories (primarily propaganda posters and Chairman Mao badges) and overemphasises the importance of Cultural Revolution objects within the field. Because of this limited focus, the collectors’ motivations have been similarly circumscribed, described primarily in terms of either neo-Maoist nostalgia or the pursuit of profit. This article will seek to enhance this existing literature and, in doing so, offer a series of new directions for research. It makes two main arguments. First, that the breadth of objects incorporated within the field of Red Collecting is far broader than current literature has acknowledged. In particular, the importance of revolutionary-era (pre-1949) collections, as well as regional and rural collections is highlighted. Second, it argues that collectors are driven by a much broader range of motivations, including a variety of both individual and social motivations. Significantly, it is argued that collectors’ intentions and their understandings of the past do not always align; rather, very different understandings of China’s recent past find expression through Red Collecting. As such, it is suggested that Red Collecting constitutes an important part of contemporary China’s “red legacies,” one which highlights the diversity of memories and narratives of both the Mao era and the revolutionary period. Image © Hou Feng

An Issue on Identities and Art

This issue falls into two thematic sections, one on the politics of Chinese identities, the other on art and collections. The first part deals with possibly the most pertinent topic in Chinese studies at present, and that is the question of Chinese identity, how it relates to China in the narrow sense of the PRC on the one hand and to alternative identity categories on the other. The question is of particular pertinence in the context of the surge of racism against Chinese and other East and Southeast Asian communities since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK and across the world. We alert you to our call for papers on Chinese Identity in an Age of Anti-Asian Racism and #StopAsianHate with a deadline of 15 August. The four articles engaging with the question of identity in this issue address the problematic in different timeframes and with different conceptualisations. The second half of this issue features three articles which each deal with differing aspects of art, aesthetics, and media in the contemporary PRC; it includes the prize-winning essay of the 2020 Early Career Researcher Prize by Angela Becher. We conclude with an elegy on a Hui Muslim mosque. Image @ Zhang Xiaotao

The Digital Illusion

This paper examines how Chinese new media artists negotiate the symbolic nature of urban space via 3D-modelled simulations, augmented and mixed reality. Via semiotic and media analysis, the paper scrutinises the ontology of these media in their deployment of spatial parameters such as proportion, perspective, stasis and motion to create an ideologically informed spatial narrative. The paper contrasts the imaginary of architecture and space in the independent 3D animation film Mist by Zhang Xiaotao and Cao Fei’s Second Life project RMB City against the implementation of video art in Zhu Xiaowen’s mixed reality performance Wearable Urban Routine and the augmented reality app Statue of Democracy & Tank Man by artist collective 4 Gentlemen. It be will argued that in all the discussed works, the use of the digital medium serves to create a temporary illusion whereby the ephemeral experience of a virtual world can help to better understand the role of the human in actual, physical space, which adopts particular importance in the context of a radically transforming country. This study contributes to the growing scholarship on the interlinkages between Chinese art, architecture and the city and on the increasing importance of technology within Chinese cultural studies. Image with permission from © Zhu Xiaowen

Elegy to the Nanguan Mosque (1981-2020)

This article charts the fortunes of Nanguan Mosque in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region over the past forty years.

Colour me Revolutionary

Colour in China has a long history of artistic, symbolic, religious, and mythological use. This paper takes the idea of colour as a meaningful element within Chinese society and introduces the use of visual colour grammar as a new way to identify and breakdown the use of colour within political art and propaganda posters. The use of colour has been adapted by visual linguists into its own unique visual grammar component, relaying much more information than just a symbolic transfer from sign to signifier. Meaning within political posters can be derived from regularities in use, presentation, and conventional meanings. Colour as a visual grammar component is expressed through the three metafunctions: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. This paper explores how the Chinese views on colour interconnects with the metafunctions of colour to look at the political posters of the PRC. I will discuss both the approach to art as a text that can be ‘read’ through visual grammar and present colour in the Chinese context as more than a symbol making device but as a meaning component in and of itself.

Open Access Articles and Position Papers

In addition to an overview of the issue, this article is a reminder that we are fully open access, free of charge, double-blind peer reviewed, and offer well-above-average editorial support, especially for early-career researchers. All of the editorial team work in a voluntary capacity. We are committed to finding alternative models of publishing, to reclaim the project of Open Access and key it to a different register of shared creativity and responsibility and work towards a more accessible, ethical, transparent, and creative form of scholarly communication.

Chinese Studies in a Pandemic: A Historian's View

For someone who studies Western perceptions of China, the Covid-19 crisis certainly captures the attention. Writing from the position of a historian, much of the media discourse during the pandemic sounds strangely familiar to the author. Plus ça change, he says, although logic would suggest that the successes of South Korea and Taiwan in dealing with the crisis may begin to erode the image of a backward Asia.

Taipei and Wuhan

This article examines the neighbourhood governance response to the coronavirus pandemic in Taipei and Wuhan, arguing that in both cities this has been remarkably effective and that it relies on co-operation with the community. It argues that cities around the world have much to learn from the role of neighbourhood governance in public health, regardless of regime type and the efficacy of the national response. Image: urban neighbourhood, Shanghai ©Gerda Wielander