Infusing patriotism in popular culture: the multimodal construction of patriotic values in a Chinese main melody film

ABSTRACT

The porous boundary between popular culture and politics has often led to the political appropriation of popular cultural venues for promoting official ideologies and fostering patriotic consciousness. To understand how patriotic values are infused into popular culture, this study analyzes a 2019 Chinese “main melody” film, My People, My Country, from a social semiotic perspective. To examine the interplay between power, narrative, and patriotism, a framework is developed to analyze the patriotic values and how they are constructed through linguistic and visual resources. Analysis shows that patriotism represented in the film incorporates four types of values, namely, national shame and pride, self-sacrifice, kindness, and diligence. These values are realized through the multimodal design of characters’ actions and historical events. The findings shed new light on evolving Chinese patriotism and the unique cultural governance in China shaped by the entangled forces of neoliberalism and Chinese culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• patriotism
• main melody film
• multimodal analysis
• popular culture
• pop-propaganda

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Editor Dr. Rachel Alicia Griffin for her meticulous review and insightful comments, which greatly enhanced the clarity and coherence of our work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Shaanxi Soft Science Research Program: [Grant Number 2024ZC-YB-XM-121].

Notes on contributors

Yilei Wang

Yilei Wang is Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong University. Her research interests include media and communications research and multimodal discourse analysis. Her publications appear in journals such as Social Semiotics, Discourse, Context & Media, and Environmental Communication.

Dezheng (William) Feng

Dezheng (William) Feng, PhD, is Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Research Centre for Professional Communication in English at the Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research focuses on the analysis of various media and communication practices from the perspectives of pragmatics, discourse analysis, and multimodality. His recent publications appear in journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics and Society, Discourse and Communication, and Visual Communication.