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Knowing and Feeling the ‘China Dream’: Logic and Rhetoric in the Political Language of Xi’s China

Kerry Brown

Officials in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) no longer speak in the cautious, restrained way they once did. In the era of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy from 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, prominent figures in the government have been accused by some commentators of using language that indicates anger, scorn or indignation. This is particularly targeted at those in the outside world who are seen as criticising the legitimacy of its governance system. Phrases used by government representatives like Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Zhao Lijian are a good example. His Twitter account since around 2018 has deployed increasingly colourful and strident language attacking those framed as enemies of the state he serves. Both the ways in which this communication is undertaken (on non-Chinese social media platforms) and the content (invective-laden, aggressive and confrontational) mark a change that has merited close attention by analysts and commentators.

Is this a generic issue, showing that China is undergoing the same changes in public language and communication that other places have also experienced (such as the US or in Europe) because of the widening use of social media? Some analysts have argued that it is more than this, and that the language and style of delivery from an official figure like Zhao is indicative of something more strategic and worthy of attention. In particular, it is seen as revealing an increasingly nationalistic, autocratic mindset, and one determined not just to tell its own citizens how to think, but also how they should feel. This language has been characterised as deliberately emotional and unreasonable (Brandy and Schafer 2020; Martin 2021).¹ It is, in essence, evidence of a China that not only feels powerful but also wishes to act powerfully and manifest that through its language.

The argument in this chapter focuses on the strategic use of emotion and how this relates to what language means in contemporary China. Far from being spontaneous, intemperate and uncontrolled, the ‘wolf warrior’ language and its ilk is the precise opposite – the result of a highly deliberative process that recognises that a key component of meaning is not just intellectual or rational understanding but also feeling and evaluation. In this new situation, the carriers and generators of emotion, such as narratives and the key phrases and terms conveying them, are linked to an underlying acceptance that, in Xi’s China, it is no longer enough to simply know that the country is doing as well as the government says. It is also necessary to feel this too. Both must be understood as part of an epistemological process that involves thinking, albeit in different ways.

There is wide acknowledgement that feelings have been on the rise in recent decades in China. The country has grown increasingly nationalistic. A more emotionally loaded discourse is something that has grown clearer in Chinese-language material. The patriotic education campaigns of the 1990s have inculcated in Chinese school children a narrative of modern history that builds on feelings of resentment and anger about the treatment of their country by outside powers in their modern history. This process has been well studied (Callahan 2008; Wang 2012). Vocabulary about ‘heroic’ (yingxiong 英雄) and ‘great’ (weidai 伟大) ‘struggle’ (douzheng 斗争, a term in use since the Maoist era), along with more negative notions, such as ‘national humiliation’ (guochi 国耻), ‘sacrifice’ (xisheng 牺牲) and ‘pain’ (tongku 痛苦), are key terms in this pedagogical discourse. These terms (and others) provide a palette on which dramatic word pictures can be produced of the country’s ‘life and death struggle’ (shengsidouzheng 生死斗诤), which then arouses appropriate emotional responses in the audience. Emotions are not alien to Chinese political communication. However, as this chapter argues, rather than two discreet strands of communication, one factual and empirical and the other emotive and concerned with feeling, the two are part of one complex discursive strategy. To think is to feel, and to feel is to think in the discourse of the PRC under Xi. And, while that may have been implicitly recognised in the past, now it is explicitly accepted.

The narratives of nationalism under Xi Jinping, leader since 2012, as the country progresses towards what he calls its great ‘rejuvenation’ (fuxing 复兴) and ‘renaissance’ (wenyi fuxing 文艺复兴) exemplify how this works in practice. With a host of economic (China becoming the world’s largest economy in gross terms perhaps by 2030), military (China having the world’s largest navy in vessel terms) and social (the country eradicating what it defines as absolute poverty in 2020) data, the Chinese audience (and those listening in from the outside world) are both informed about empirical issues and made to believe that only certain feelings are appropriate in response. As will be argued a little later, in this context, emotions are seen not as something outside of rationality and beyond language or intellectual evaluation, but as an integral and crucial part of human thinking. In Xi’s China, therefore, presenting the facts and how to feel about the facts is a coherent and legitimate communicative practice.

The ‘China Dream’ (zhongguo meng 中国梦) and ‘dreaming’ are important examples of this. They have played a core role in official language since their first appearance in late 2012. What is striking is that these specific terms have not appeared in this way before. They did not figure in the language of the Mao era, or in that of Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao, the four ‘core leaders’ before Xi. These particular phrases about dreaming indicate something new. They show that politicians are now using a form of language that clearly is not just about instructing, or ordering, but also about appealing to more complex motivations.

This is not to say that the leadership of the PRC in previous eras has not tried to speak to the emotions of the Chinese people and sought to find forms of power and persuasion in emotion. From 1949 to 1976, in the Maoist era, the use of hyperbole, stirring vocabulary and narratives of victory by good over evil was common in leaders’ speeches – from Mao himself to Jiang Qing, Lin Biao and Kang Sheng, all radical leaders in the Cultural Revolution. As one phrase from the time went, words were meant to ‘touch people’s souls’, rousing attitudes from anger and indignation to joy, which assisted people in prosecuting revolution. In classic speech act fashion, to say in a certain, intense, powerful way in Mao’s era was to do (Searle 1969). For the politics of this time, acts of speech were as important as physical acts. Uttering while feeling the right way about what one was uttering was a core component of revolutionary behaviour, and a sign of fidelity and conviction to the Party cause.

The difference between then and now is one of context. The China of the Xi era, economically, socially and geopolitically, differs dramatically from that of the Mao era. And while Chinese nationalism still prevails, along with ideas of mission, struggle, rejuvenation and greatness, the stage for these today when the country is so much stronger economically and geopolitically is vaster in scale. It therefore arouses far bolder thoughts and emotions. The nationalism of the PRC in the twenty-first century has matured, grown and transformed as the country has materially prospered. So, while the principal idea of all Chinese people being part of a joint historic mission through the guidance and leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to achieve renaissance and rejuvenation has remained dominant and unchanged, the reality is that, today, this is a far more exciting prospect than it was under Mao simply because so much more of it has been achieved. In the 1960s, many Chinese did not dare to dream. Today, not only is the government inviting them to do so, but also it is telling them they have to. That is the difference between these two eras.

Dialectic and Rhetoric: The Language of Thinking and the Language of Feelings

The distinction between these uses of language – appealing to rational argument versus arousing emotional attitudes – was recognised by Aristotle. He argued in Rhetoric 2,500 years ago that, for persuasion, one looked first at the character of the speaker, second at ‘putting the audience into a certain frame of mind’ and third at ‘the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself’. On the second point, Aristotle stated that ‘persuasion may come through the hearers, when the speech stirs their emotions’. This can be done through the use of stirring symbols, or powerful kinds of language forms. Unlike logical persuasion, in which the effect of influencing a listener is achieved through proving ‘a truth or an apparent truth by means of the persuasive arguments suitable to the case in question’, rhetoric aimed at producing or impacting feelings follows a more complex pattern (Aristotle 350 BCE).

What is different today compared to Aristotle’s time is the deeper understanding of emotions and the ways in which they are entwined with all forms of thinking and persuasion, even the most seemingly logical ones. Logical and empirical thoughts are not neatly separated from emotional feelings. Rather, they are different intellectual processes of trying to evaluate and understand issues. The key difference is the ways in which they are prompted by different kinds of facts and situations.

In a recent study of the physiology and sociology of emotions, Leonard Mlodinow presents a framework in which the fact that there are emotional responses that are seen as right or wrong shows that emotions have a logic (Mlodinow 2022). The American philosopher of emotions Richard Solomon, in a similar vein, argued that emotions are rational evaluations, albeit about issues different from the kinds of assessments one might make when describing a physical fact like whether a cup of coffee is hot or cold, for instance. Emotional language and thinking involves a deeper and more complex interplay between the speaker and what is being spoken about. In this interplay between subject and object, the act of evaluation comes to the fore. In essence, to say ‘I am angry’ is to infer ‘I am an agent, and I am experiencing a situation or a set of facts that create in me the disposition whereby I need to be annoyed, dissatisfied and frustrated and to consider doing something about that’.

Emotional responses on this model can be judged right or wrong. It would be strange for someone to experience a negative act, like being hit or insulted by someone else, and to evaluate the situation as one in which they should respond happily or positively. To be angry in these circumstances would be regarded as rational and correct. Solomon argued strongly against what he called the idea of ‘raw emotion’, something akin to a pressure cooker simmering uncontrollably under the surface and then exploding unguided when prompted. He showed that even the most powerful emotions could be articulated and defined in rational, intellectual categories. In essence, to feel anything one has to verbalise, and that involves an immediate need to categorise and perform other rational actions. It is not that strong emotions, like hate or love, have non-linguistic, non-rational raw material that gets clothed in language afterwards. These arise from a process of rational evaluation, or misevaluation, of situations in which the words are present from the start and constitute, to some degree, the feeling (Solomon 1977, 139). The core insight here is that the structure of emotions, like the structure of thinking, is a highly intellectual process.

We can gain further insight into this division between kinds of discourse from the thinking of the philosopher Jérôme Bruner. His work focused on differences between what he called argument and storytelling in narratives. Both, he stressed, were ways of thinking. But they showed thought undertaken in different ways. In ‘Actual Minds, Possible Worlds’, Bruner (1986, 11) wrote:

There are two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality. The two (though complementary) are irreducible to one another. Efforts to reduce one mode to the other or to ignore one at the expense of the other inevitably fail to capture the rich diversity of thought. Each of the ways of knowing, moreover, has operating principles of its own and its own criteria of well-formedness. They differ radically in their procedures for verification. A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as means for convincing another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude.

Bruner’s distinction between ‘argument’ and ‘storytelling’ aligns well with the two Aristotelian categories of ‘dialectic’ and ‘rhetoric’. They also show the kinds of mental processes in which the role of emotions and feelings is more pronounced in one than the other. And yet, through their mutual need for persuasion and well formedness, both clearly are ways of thinking and both involve thought. To feel is to think, though in a different way and with different dynamics to that focused on what could be categorised as factual or rational argument.

The PRC, since 1949, is a place where this division between what Aristotle called the ‘dialectic’ rational register and the ‘rhetorical’, and what Bruner calls ‘argument’ and ‘storytelling’, is strongly in evidence. For the former, we can see the language of technocratic instruction and report, found in documents like the various five-year economic plans from 1953 and government work reports and statements. Against this sits the language of angry attack or patriotic pride that figure as part of the ‘rhetoric’ and ‘storytelling’ function used by leaders like Mao and Xi referred to above. These two sorts of discourse, as we will see later, can sound very different. They are clearly aimed at having a different kind of impact on the audience. Nor is this something that is unique to public political language in China. The existence of these two prime registers in discourse, and the way they relate to each other, is universal. This is something made powerfully clear by the sociologist Manuel Castells who argues, in the post-modern era, how complex social, cultural and economic global changes have brought about a situation in which:

the relentless rationalist efforts of the last two centuries to proclaim the death of God and the disenchantment of the world mean we are in again – if we ever left – an enchanted world, where the way we feel determines what we believe and how we act. (Castells 2010, xviii)

The division between the discourse of argument and the discourse of feeling, and how they relate to each other, matters everywhere. It is just that in China, as ever, this has occurred with Chinese characteristics!

The use of ‘dream’ as a key term since 2012 by Xi is significant because it sits between the dialectical and the rhetorical, the argumentative and the storytelling. It is constructed partly on a set of recognised facts – the country’s material and social transformation in the last half a century, its current status economically and geopolitically in the world, and a host of separate economic data, all of which attest to China being a certain kind of success. ‘Dream’ also, as will be argued later, acknowledges the profound process of individualisation that has been ongoing in Chinese society over this period. At the same time it permits a specific set of feelings – pride, confidence, hope and expectation verging on excitement – that are clearly aimed for by the Xi leadership and regarded as critically useful for its overall nationalist political mission. Therefore, to argue for the ‘Chinese Dream’ is to recognise both a set of empirical facts and the story they are embedded in, wherein it is not just permissible but also almost mandatory to feel the emotions listed above. In this way, Xi’s China has created a language in which thinking and feeling can be melded together – and Castells’s ‘feeling determining acting’ can occur – in ways that the party-state mandates, authorises and (most importantly of all) controls.

Political Language in China Post-1949

That political language in China has a performative and propagandistic function has been conceptualised by a number of scholars since the 1960s. But the ways in which feelings relate to thinking has been less attended to. Much of the existing work has focused on the specific political vocabulary used in China after the Communist victory in 1949 when an official state creed came into existence. The interest here was the ways in which this demonstrated ideological and intellectual control. Franz Schurmann wrote of the ways in which the adoption of Marxism–Leninism as the official ideology meant the importation of a series of new terms into the Chinese language to convey the key ideas of this new belief system (Schurmann 1966, 61–2). This, he claimed, was to create a new way of thinking that accorded with the goals of the new leadership. Michael Schoenhals, over two decades later, looked at how official editorials in the People’s Daily were crafted and refined by key propagandists like Hu Qiaomu to continue to promote core Maoist ideological beliefs and political programs (Schoenhals 1994). The core aim here was to control the ways language conveyed ideological messages.

Emerging from the use of critical discourse theory from the 1980s, the relationship between language and power structures in China has received wide attention (e.g. Tsung and Wang 2015). The excellent China Media Project and, in particular, the work of Qian Gang, while not overtly theoretical, has concentrated on keywords and their links to specific strategies to exercise political influence – again through informing, conveying ideas and communicating facts rather than looking at strategies to generate a parallel emotional narrative.² The rise and fall of terms like ‘harmonious society’, for instance, can be directly linked to the replacement of one leader (in this case Hu Jintao) by another (Xi Jinping). Kerry Brown and Una Bērziņa-Čerenkova (2018) analysed the key words of the Xi era that are designed to convey core socialist values and the impact these are meant to have on people’s conduct.

However, very little has been explicitly written about language and emotion as they relate to each other when used in political, power related discourse, particular emanating from elite leaders. The extant studies either concentrate on language and politics or on emotions – never on both as part of the same reality. Works like Elizabeth Perry’s (2002) ‘Mobilizing the Masses’, which addresses the function of propaganda to rouse people’s feelings, exemplifies this. Mainly focused on the Mao era, it describes very well how core messages and ideas are promoted to a Chinese audience to get their compliance and acceptance by arousing and inciting them to feel anger and rage at enemies and class struggle targets. But it does not look more deeply at the ways in which feeling and thinking might be intimately and dynamically linked in this process, nor does it range more widely than highly inflammatory mass campaigns (Perry 2002, 111–28). Perry Link comes a little closer to attending not just to how Chinese political language tries to instruct but also how it generates emotions and feelings as a matter of course. But his focus is on the role of metaphor and symbolism and the links between China’s current political discourse and its relationship to other Chinese literary traditions (Link 2013). Neither of these works look very deeply at how rationalising and feeling might be understood in the same discourse. In essence, what they lack is any sense of an epistemology in which feelings are acknowledged as a fundamental part of all knowledge rather than an occasional phenomenon.

Sticking to the Facts: Technocratic Discourse from Deng to Hu

As argued above, in the Mao era, class struggle and dramatic mass mobilisation campaigns like the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s were accompanied by language that, in tone, content and delivery, was clearly highly charged and, in many cases, was meant to incite and arouse people rather than just to inform them. However, from the late 1970s and the onset of the Deng era, things changed. For Deng, Jiang and Hu, a technocratic discourse was dominant, one driven more by ordering specific economic and social changes to carry through reform and opening, and reporting on the success of this through specific empirical facts like economic growth or tangible evidence of China’s material development. This started with the Deng Xiaoping–led project from the late 1970s that saw the whole operation of governance change, as the work of Teiwes and Sun (2007, 2016) shows. This intermediary period can be called the consolidation era. Administrative performance became important, delivering specific targets like GDP growth, rising import and export figures, and the implementation of policies that were meant to have a demonstrable impact on people’s material living standards. Practice, as the popular slogan then put it, became the sole criterion of truth. The aggressive, Utopian and often provocative language of the Mao era in this new discourse and governance was not just jettisoned – in some respects it was held up as a model of failure.

We can seek an explanation for this once more in context. The Mao and Xi eras at either side of these periods can be categorised as ones in which the situation was and is amenable to high emotional charge and where the ‘storytelling’ function was and is more of a priority: for the first, because it witnessed the struggle to found and stabilise the new country, with all the effort that involved, and emotions of pride, expectation and, initially at least, hope this gave rise to; for the second because it has framed itself as the ‘new era’ in which national rejuvenation is at a particularly important moment and great nation status is imminent. For the Xi period, it is an era of fruition and realisation. The meaning of a phrase like ‘historic mission’ for national renaissance, which has been used since the 1990s, is now far clearer, because the aim being aspired to is far more obviously within reach; consequently, the excitement and hope arising from this is more intense and rational. It would have been hard to feel intense hope of China becoming the world’s top economy in the Mao era. But under Xi, that aim is no longer fanciful. It is, in fact, a very rational thing to expect (whether in fact it happens or not).

Greater acceptance of the link between thinking and emotions can be attributed to the work of the chief ideologue Wang Huning. Indeed, Wang Huning has been key to this process. Under Jiang in the mid-1990s, he constructed a series of slogans and memes in which the core idea of Chinese people needing to be proud of their identity, culture and unique intellectual and cultural assets were placed at the centre of the overall political communication strategy. The Chinese people were invited to not just know they were Chinese and to define this in a certain way (e.g. 5,000 years of history, Confucian heritage, etc.) but also to feel confident and proud about being Chinese. ‘China Dream’ is the key term that has come from this development in the Xi era. To refer back to Castells’s point, in Xi’s China, it is clear that feeling is as important as thinking or believing, to such an extent that they must almost be simultaneous – two aspects of one complex response. To intellectually recognise the country’s great material progress is not enough. One must also have the appropriate emotional attitude: pride, happiness and even joy. Far from being simply about economic success, conveyed in technocratic, statistical language, politicians like Xi have stressed the importance of having clear messages and answers on the thorny issue of what Chinese identity means and how feelings (particularly pride and happiness) play a role in this identity. And while Chinese identity involves emotions of pride, confidence or happiness, it is also about more than this. It means having a sense of authenticity and conviction, whereby people know that these are not just positive feelings but the right feelings – that is, the correct emotional responses (just like one has the correct rational response to ‘one plus one’ when one replies that it equals two) to the situation the country says it is in. Identity is not just about facts (what makes you who you are in terms of your material and physical circumstances) but involves a far more complex evaluation of what the facts of daily existence and circumstance mean in terms of the larger context and the (right) feelings a citizen should have about them. Wang Huning’s contribution has been both to accept the need for this imperative to go beyond facts and to assert that there is a correct emotional response to these – one that the party-state under Xi must speak to and shape.

Preparing for the Dream: Elite Leaders Speak at Party Anniversaries

‘China Dream’ is where the language of fact and feeling come together. This can be illustrated by many different kinds of events and examples from the Xi era (post 2012). One of the most striking was the celebration by the CCP of its one-hundredth anniversary on 1 July 2021. On that day, Xi spoke with confidence and assertiveness of the CCP leading a country that had delivered modernity on its own terms. The CCP was now able to face the world as at least an equal, and perhaps even a superior. Clearly, this achievement needed not just intellectual acknowledgement but also an appropriate emotional response.³ On this anniversary, Xi was addressing a national Chinese audience, most of whom may not have cared much about the formal ideology of the Party and its specific doctrines and technical ideas, but they were nevertheless invited to respond to the increasing evidence that nationalistic feelings were a valid emotional response to the situation that China, the entity the CCP represented, was in. The ‘rejuvenated nation’ spoken of that day, rather than the CCP itself, could arouse people’s pride and affection because it was a worthy object of admiration and love due to the size of its economy, its geopolitical impact, the size of its military and the physical transformation of its modernised landscape, along with its lauded cultural attributes. Inevitably, these were what Xi spoke of that day.

Xi’s performance showed where his era and earlier times differed. Past elite leaders did not have the vast array of assets that Xi could deploy to trigger happy, proud, nationalistic feelings in order to ‘sell’ the CCP’s core message. For Mao, speaking at the very genesis of the PRC over seven decades earlier, the sources of happiness and the cultivation of love towards the new country were spoken of more in terms of hope than current reality:

We are proclaiming the founding of the People’s Republic of China. From now on our nation will belong to the community of the peace-loving and freedom-loving nations of the world and work courageously and industriously to foster its own civilization and well-being and at the same time to promote world peace and freedom. Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up. Our revolution has won the sympathy and acclaim of the people of all countries. We have friends all over the world.⁴

The language here is about the future, of what ‘will’ happen, and of how China ‘will no longer’ be a certain thing. China may have ‘stood up’ and won sympathy, but the onus is on how things will happen going forward, and how the ‘insult and humiliation’ of the recent past will now be consigned to history.

In 2001, in a far more institutionalised context, Mao’s successor and core leader Jiang Zemin could speak in stirring ways as Party secretary and president. His confidence came from the fact that the 80-year-old party, having enjoyed half a century in power, had tangible evidence of its successes and contributions to draw on. While Jiang Zemin used the occasion to promote the main ideology associated with his era – the Three Represents (in which private business entrepreneurs were eventually allowed to become CCP members) – he did so in language that was also aspirational and future oriented, like Mao’s:

In the new century, the great historical tasks for our Party are to continue the modernization drive, accomplish the great cause of the reunification of our motherland, safeguard world peace and promote common development. Facing the profound changes in the domestic and international situations, our Party should follow closely the progressive trends of the world and unite and lead people of all ethnic groups throughout the country in seizing the opportunities and taking up challenges to accomplish the three major historical tasks successfully. To this end, we must unswervingly fulfil the requirements of the ‘Three Represents’.⁵

This is the language of a great project, a work in progress. It is pragmatic, realistic and almost humble in tone. Ten years later, Hu Jintao, marking his own ideological innovation, ‘Scientific Development’, in a speech celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of the CCP, tied everything to the hope and desire for national rebirth:

In contemporary China, only development counts, and this calls for pursuing scientific development. We should take scientific development as the goal and give priority to accelerating the shift of model of economic development … We will promote fairness and justice; long-term, steady and rapid economic development; and social harmony and stability. We will continue to make new and greater achievements in pursuing civilized development that leads to increased production, better lives for the people, and a sound ecosystem, and thus lay a more solid foundation for building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.⁶

In all of these, the sense of aspiration – of bringing something about in terms of China’s recreation – is clear, whether they be conveyed through Mao and the sense of victimisation and of China standing up; or by Jiang’s notion of historic tasks, reunification and modernisation; or by Hu and the construction of a rejuvenated, better society. Each of the elite leaders spoke as much about their hopes for the future as they did about the present reality the country was in. Each was implicitly saying that good things, which their listeners would like and feel happy about, were going to happen because of changes in the current situation. Hope and desire are fundamental emotions. They contain evaluations of one of the most complex and unknowable things – the future. Yet none of these leaders deployed the word ‘dream’ – surely one of the most frequent terms used when thinking, and feeling, about the future.

Dreaming Together – Or Dreaming Alone

One of the reasons for this can be found in the ways that ‘dreaming’ links to the notion of an individual and a person. One can imagine that, even for an idealist and utopian such as Mao, using a word like ‘dream’ would have raised uncomfortable echoes of the ultimate capitalist ideal – the ‘American Dream’. Dreaming was something private, self-centred and indulgent. The collectivist ethos underpinning Mao’s, Jiang’s and Hu’s statements is powerfully present. For instance, in each of the statements above, there was recognition that they were speaking in a moment when all Chinese people had worked together, committed to a common enterprise, either of national foundation, national reconstruction or national economic reopening. Although emotions are clearly stirred in this language, and through the ambitions alluded to, they are more on the social rather than the individual level.

Despite the underlying similarities in terms of the encouragement of key positive public emotions built on a shared concentration on China the great nation, as well as a shared narrative and understanding about its modern history, the context in which each of these statements was delivered was changing and evolving. This created a quandary for Xi when he became the core of the ‘fifth generation of leaders’ from 2012. The Maoist society dominated by collectivist social organisation, mass campaigns and strict enforcement of CCP norms and economic behaviour had dramatically changed after 1978. Economic liberalisation alone had resulted in a transformed society, where, as Kleinman et al. (2011) recognised, by the end of the Hu era, there was often rampant individualism, some of it verging on almost pathological hedonism.

The rise of this new form of individualism can be seen in the radical changes to the country’s material circumstances. From 1980 onwards, the new economic policies started to have an impact. Specific results could be witnessed, measured, spoken about and offered as evidence of success. These had tangibility. This is not to say that in the Mao era there were no material improvements in people’s lives. But these occurred in a complex situation in which they stood beside crises from the famines of the early 1960s and widespread social instability from 1966 onwards. Under Deng, a commitment was made to simplify the CCP. Its elite leaders’ key message, and the CCP’s main mission, was to make China materially wealthy while preserving the one-party system. Dense deployment of economic data became a key means of getting this message across, embodying the changes happening in people’s lives and conveying success. The dialectic/argument function dominated. People needed to be persuaded to engage in this practical process of national material enrichment, rather than aroused to feel a certain way about larger, longer-term abstract national goals. The audience for elite leaders was one that did not have to principally feel happy, angry, indignant or bitter – but to simply produce. Language such as that conveyed by Hu Jintao in 2003 epitomises this, showing that statistics had taken control:

I know you are all interested in China’s current economic situation and future trends of development … From 1978 to 2002, China registered an average annual GDP growth rate of 9.4%. In 2002, when [the] world economy experienced a growth slowdown, [the] Chinese economy grew by 8%. In the first half of this year, China’s GDP went up by 8.2% despite the interruption by SARS. At present, China’s economy remains in good shape with a strong momentum for expansion. The 7% increase target set for this year is well within reach.⁷

This is the message of the prudent accountant, not the leader of a party historically committed to revolutionary change. But it does display a communication strategy in which the audience is offered empirical evidence that can speak for itself about how the country is progressing and growing. This is indeed the discourse of ‘seeking truth from facts’ in which there is an unproblematic relationship between what is described and what conclusions can be drawn.

What linked Hu’s language to that of Jiang and Mao was the sharing of an historic narrative of positive progressive development, and the commitment to stimulating excitement about the future. The latter was where the strongest emotional energy was generated through a sense of expectation and direction. In the ‘Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism’, Daniel Bell (1976) wrote about how capitalist societies were frequently infected by a fetishisation of the future. The future would always be better, things would be faster, easier more luxurious. This offers a common point with socialism with Chinese characteristics – a hunger for tomorrow not only being better but also being seen to be better – showing this, for example, in GDP figures that always went up, never into recession. During the early Mao years, that there was a tomorrow at all (given the horrific levels of death and destruction that had occurred during the civil war and the Sino-Japanese War) was, in itself, a positive and unifying message. The promise of a new China would, as Mao said in 1949:

lead the people of the whole country in surmounting all difficulties and undertaking large-scale construction in the economic and cultural spheres to eliminate the poverty and ignorance inherited from the old China.⁸

As the PRC proceeded, expectations changed. The message was no longer about simply surviving, though that remained important through many of the hardest Mao years, but, eventually, after 1978, became about prospering. Indeed, by the time of Hu it started to be about even more than that – about thriving and somehow dealing with the excesses of wealth and material goods that had been created.

Xi Jinping: Dreaming about Feeling Together

Clearly, between the Hu and Xi eras there was a rethink of how the Party was managing its public messaging. The dense and impersonal Hu-era style was no longer adequate. There needed to be recognition that, while promoting strong collective narratives and accepted facts and interpretation of the Party’s achievements was important, this was happening in a context in which individualism in China was an unchangeable new reality. The Party, therefore, had to create at least some kind of register where, despite this profound change, it could still mobilise and motivate people and create a language that did not just instruct but also inspired and engaged both on a public, collective level, and down to the individual. The era of the rhetoric/storytelling function had returned.

From 2012, Xi deployed a different kind of language, often using his own life story, something Hu, Jiang and Deng had never done, and conveying the China story in a more concrete, less technocratic language. Speaking in Seattle during a visit to the US in 2015, Xi stated:

Towards the end of the 1960s when I was in my teens, I was sent from Beijing to work as a farmer in a small village of Liangjiahe near Yan’an of Shaanxi Province, where I spent seven years. At that time, the villagers and I lived in ‘earth caves’ and slept on ‘earth beds’. Life was very hard. There was no meat in our diet for months. I knew what the villagers wanted the most. Later I became the village’s party secretary and began to lead the villagers in production. I understood their needs. One thing I wished most at the time was to make it possible for the villagers to have meat and have it often. But it was very difficult for such a wish to come true in those years. At the Spring Festival early this year, I returned to the village. I saw blacktop roads. Now living in houses with bricks and tiles, the villagers had Internet access. Elderly folks had basic old-age care and all villagers had medical care coverage. Children were in school. Of course, meat was readily available. This made me keenly aware that the Chinese dream is after all a dream of the people. We can fulfil the Chinese dream only when we link it with our people’s yearning for a better life.⁹

The statistics of the Hu era largely disappeared. In its place was storytelling. But not just any storytelling: a specific form in which Xi figured as an individual – albeit one with a strongly representative and symbolic function – came to the fore. Alongside this, more complex issues have been recognised, such as the need for cleaner governance within the Party, the desire to address inequality through common prosperity and the notion that China is seeking greater autonomy through its ‘dual circulation’ policy. Nationalistic pride has also grown stronger, because, through economic growth and geopolitical developments, the country has more to feel proud about. The political challenge for Xi and his colleagues was how to find the best language to encourage, and exploit, this pride, and to allow Chinese people to feel, rather than just know about, their country’s achievements.

This question of audience is a key one for any communication practice and strategy. It is striking that, for all the changes in people’s daily lives, and the rise of individualism and social differentiation, both Mao and Xi talked of their serving, and speaking directly to, their core audience – a very generic notion of ‘the People’. This term has remained remarkably static, despite all the changes going on around it. On 15 November 2012, when Xi emerged on the stage of the Great Hall of the People as the key leader, he stated: ‘It is the people who create history.’ The Party, he explained, ‘[maintain] close ties with the people’.¹⁰ That was its task. This echoed Mao’s celebrated speech of September 1944, ‘Serve the People’, when he had talked of ‘the common revolutionary objective’ – to lift the suffering of the Chinese people.¹¹

That they both said they were talking to this group is one thing. But what did they signify by this term? Surely conceptualisation of it had not remained unchanged over the decades: or had it? In fact, of all the terms in modern Chinese political discourse, few can be more contentious than that of the ‘people’ (renmin 人民). The contemporary Chinese writer Yu Hua noted that ‘renmin’ was ‘remote, but … so familiar too’ (Yu 2012, 3). His work provides insight into how and why Xi’s use of the term was so different to Mao’s. Once upon a time, Yu explained, ‘during the Cultural Revolution, the definition of “the people” could not have been simpler’, namely ‘workers, peasants, soldiers, scholars, merchants’. But, after that:

new vocabulary started sprouting up everywhere – netizens, stock traders, fund holders, celebrity fans, laid-off workers, migrant labourers and so on – slicing into smaller pieces the already faded concept that was ‘the people’. (Yu 2012, 6)

The ‘people’ had become atomised, complex and diverse.

For Mao, there were clear and elemental moral distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people, and that was all. You were an enemy or a friend. For Xi, the ‘people’ – the audience he spoke to – might have been figured as though they were still one great collective. But his tone of almost deprecation and respect to this great mass, and the fact that Chinese people were clearly socially, culturally and economically more diverse than ever before, marked a massive difference. As Xi stated:

During the long process of history, by relying on our own diligence, courage and wisdom, Chinese people have opened up a good and beautiful home where all ethnic groups live in harmony and foster an excellent culture that never fades.¹²

The use of ‘we’ is rhetorically crucial here. Xi was speaking as one of those he was addressing. He was on the podium, for sure. But he was also asserting he was in the crowd listening too.

Moving the people while recognising the vast complexity contained within them; trying, despite this, to speak directly to them, as one of them; recruiting them into a narrative carrying clear evaluations that will lead to emotional responses – these have been major objectives of the Xi era. But, as the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Communist Party made clear, when Xi spoke once more to his audience he used a crucial new term. The Party, at 100 years of age, was not just in the business of thinking, or planning, or doing, but also ‘dreaming’ – and it was doing so with confidence, Xi stated:

To realize national rejuvenation, the party has united and led the Chinese people in pursuing a great struggle, a great project, a great cause, and a great dream through a spirit of self-confidence, self-reliance, and innovation, achieving great success for socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era. We Chinese are a people who uphold justice and are not intimidated by threats of force. As a nation, we have a strong sense of pride and confidence. We have never bullied, oppressed, or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will. By the same token, we will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us. Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.¹³

‘Dream’ is a profoundly significant term here. This issue of Chinese people being invited by their leaders to dream is a new development. It says something important about the evolution of the role of aspiration in contemporary China, and the space now being granted to it by political leaders – something that has grown from the language of previous elite leaders but which is now located in a very different context and with a different kind of content and usage. It also marks a deeper acceptance of the individualism of the people being spoken to, and of there needing to be acknowledgement of their having the agency to take this offer to ‘dream’ and shape it to their own unique circumstances.

The act of dreaming as it occurs in Chinese literary and historical traditions is a well attested one, and something that the contemporary discourse of a national and personal dream calls on. In his excellent book on the Chinese Dreamscape during the era 300 BCE – 800 CE, Robert Ford Campany writes of the importance given to dreams through divination and a complex set of interpretative tools by Chinese writers and thinkers. But, looking at this history today, one thing is certain: dreams have always been regarded as carrying meaning. Indeed, as Campany (2020, 67) observes: ‘Questions about dreaming were inextricable bound up with questions about how best to live.’

Despite this, Mao seldom if ever mentioned dreams to address this issue of capturing aspirations, hopes and desires about the future. None of his significant statements or slogans referred to dreams. For much of the post-reform era, most elite Party leaders refrained from speaking in an emotional register, instead keeping to the business of informing, ordering and quantifying. Using the language of dreams, therefore, bespeaks an important shift – an acknowledgement that the Party needs to get back into the business of arousing and inspiring emotions and using these as part of its political strategy.

Deploying the language of dreams opens up interesting new spaces for political discourse in contemporary China. It goes some way towards solving the conundrum of how to accept the rise of individualism in society and addresses the need to have language that can arouse people’s feelings in a way that is controllable by the party-state and hitched to its own agenda. Appealing to dreams – a very open and vague term – allows plenty of space for different sorts of evaluations of different kinds of reality. As used by Xi, the one thing that is certain is that the qualities of being individual, varied and almost worldly are regarded as positives. Unlike in the Mao era, the Party knows that it cannot command so easily but needs to carry at least some elements of persuasion. Inviting the people to dream is an uncontentious thing to do, especially as the invitation does not specify what the dream should be about beyond better living standards and a great, powerful and strong country. The main thing is to ensure that the dream itself can be shared. This is how Xi spoke when he first deployed the term in 2013: ‘Everyone has an ideal, ambition and dream.’ But then, in an act of Party appropriation, he went on to say: ‘In my opinion, achieving the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has been the greatest dream of the Chinese people since the advent of modern times.’ This was not just a thing shared by people at a particular time:

This dream embodies the long-cherished hope of several generations of the Chinese people, gives expression to the overall interests of the Chinese nation and the Chinese people, and represents the shared aspirations of all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation. (Xi 2014, 38)

This reminder of the aspirations and emotions of past elite leaders, and the context of a China that, after four decades of economic and material enrichment could now allow itself the luxury to dream and to stand a chance of seeing those dreams come to reality, creates the peculiar sub-discourse within Xi-speak for this term. In May 2013, Xi declared that ‘the Chinese dream pertains to the past and the present, but also the future’. This idea of dreaming about the past belongs more to the traditional use of the term – much as people often dream in their sleep about what has happened to them. But the second definition of dreaming, which is closer to the sense of hoping, aspiring and wishing, is also important here – as a nod to the future. So is the sense of tangibility:

The Chinese dream is the dream of the country and the nation but also of every ordinary Chinese. One can only do well when one’s country and nation do well … The great renewal of the Chinese nation will eventually become a reality in the course of the successive efforts of youth. (Xi 2014, 53)

For Xi, the situation of China today is best seen as a dream fulfilled. We often hear that people of the Maoist era who survived into the current one feel that they would never have dreamed of China being in the position it is today, with the levels of development it has. But for a politician sitting at the top of the CCP, this is a complex story to gather into one phrase that can then generate positive emotions to go beyond simple intellectual acknowledgement. To compound the challenge, the status of the party, the diversity of the audience and the complexity coming from different technological platforms all mean that it is very difficult to say one thing that will reach and speak to everyone and make them feel the way the Party wants them to. The idea of dreaming – a state of emotional receptivity, but without any overt emotions necessarily linked with it – achieves this goal. One can dream and be happy, fulfilled, ecstatic, pleasantly confused, satiated, thrilled – the choice is yours. The main thing is just to dream. The feelings start to flow after that.

Conclusion

The use of language to communicate instructions, interpretations and facts and also to promote a set of emotional responses has been and continues to be an essential part of political life in contemporary China – as it is in any community. The CCP’s five core elite leaders since 1949 have all used a mixture of language in their main communications to instruct, command and inform; such language also aims to inspire, to mobilise and to create emotions in people ranging from love to hate, fear to pride. This does not mean that these kinds of language uses are utterly distinct from each other. As Solomon argues, emotions are evaluations of situations and circumstances, albeit complex ones, and they have a logic of their own.

The CCP’s leadership, through the language used at core public occasions such as celebrations of Party anniversaries, illustrates the evolution of the relationship between language to inform and language to inspire and talk to people’s emotions over the last 80 years. While Mao deployed terms laden with reference to victimisation, standing up and the need for pride and hope, for Deng, Jiang and Hu, the commitment to a more prosaic politics of building better material lifestyles meant that, while a sense of nationalism was present in their language, their principal aim was to direct, report (tangible economic success) and show (evidence that China was indeed modernising and growing stronger).

These political and social changes have resulted in a society in which there are far higher levels of individualism and self-expression than in the Maoist era. Even so, under Xi Jinping, the CCP elite leadership has used ‘dream’ as a term that can at least address the strong feelings of satisfaction and love of the strong Chinese nation that has resulted from the economic and material changes in the country since the 1980s. That ‘dreaming’ is a key part of the Xi-era discourse reveals not only how important actions, information and the presentation of facts are in terms of what the Party wants the people to accept, but also how important feelings are, arising from the evaluation of those facts. Just as there are clear right and wrong ways to regard policy and political options in contemporary China, so there are also right and wrong ways to feel about these things. This shows the ambition of the Xi era – that it is willing not just to assert its own reality, but also to assert its own account of whether the people should feel happy or sad about that reality.

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