Red Genes: Communism Nostalgia and Authoritarian Legitimation in China

• In Event: Authoritarian Resilience and Legitimacy in China and Beyond

Abstract

Contrary to the popular belief that authoritarianism suffers from an inherent legitimacy deficit due to the absence of popular election to produce the government, many recent studies have shown that the Chinese Party-state still enjoys performance legitimacy and nationalist support. This burgeoning literature on authoritarian legitimacy and legitimation shares one implicit context: as China has undergone fundamental economic, political, and social transformations in the reform era, the Party-state has to explore new reasons to justify its rule because communism is no longer a viable source of legitimacy. Yet, recent developments suggest that the “spectre of communism” is still haunting China in many ways, affecting political struggle at the top and penetrating everyday lives at the bottom.

How does communism as an ideology fare in the post-reform and digital age China? What are the potential political implications, especially regarding the resilience and legitimacy of the authoritarian regime? This paper combines online ethnographic methods and various text analysis techniques to identify and analyze the phenomenon of communism nostalgia in the popular digital cultural consumerist experiences of online fictions. By investigating how these works (re)memorize, (re)present, and (re)interpret communism both as an ideation and as a practice, I probe into the intriguing relationship between communism and authoritarian legitimation. I find that such communism nostalgia in popular online fictions romanticizes China’s revolution past and passes down the “red genes” of the communist belief to public. By shaping citizens’ understanding of the history, the communist ideology, as well as their expectation toward the current regime, the popular trend creates a predicament for the Chinese Party-state: while it allows the regime to garner historical and ideological legitimacy, it also questions its very nature as a regime. Such a predicament creates constraints for political elites in China, explaining the left turn it takes under Xi and perhaps the more aggressive foreign policy.

Author

• Rongbin Han, University of Georgia