Silent Control: The Ideological Construction in Xi’s Era and the Political Expression from Grassroots

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study is situated within more than two decades of the author’s lived experience and long-term, in-depth observation in contemporary China. It begins with a top-down analysis of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a Leninist vanguard that pragmatically reconfigures Marxism to facilitate its institutional imperatives. Under the Xi Jinping administration, the elevation of “ideological work” as a core pillar of governance has precipitated a reuse of Mao-era street banners and slogans. These artifacts are strategically embedded into the fabric of daily life with the ubiquity of commercial advertisements, forming an omnipresent semiotic web that envelops the daily life of the people. By broadcasting narratives of institutional superiority, these ideological signifiers serve to manufacture and consolidate the party’s political legitimacy. The second half of this thesis investigates the vernacular responses to this top-down propaganda. It argues that grassroots actors have constructed a parallel “micro-structure of resistance” that operates outside the state’s authoritative discursive framework. Rather than seeking the overt overthrow of the regime, these individuals engage in micro-level tactics to construct a subjective system of meaning within the interstices of existing power structures. This form of resistance is particularly significant within China’s environment of heightened ideological saturation. By reappropriating the very slogans and banners intended for social control-adopting their precise form and content while infusing them with divergent and opposite meanings. The ordinary people enact a form of mimetic subversion with this method. Analyzing these subaltern voices provides a vital metric for assessing the actual efficacy of the state’s ideological project. Ultimately, this research reveals that the CCP’s discursive hegemony is far more porous and less monolithic than official projected.