Emotional Governance under Familial Nationalism in China’s ‘New Era’

The power of emotion in mass mobilization was a key ingredient in the Chinese Communists’ revolutionary victory, and remains central to party-state propaganda in post-Mao China (Perry,2002). The wide-scale patriotic education campaign launched shortly after the Tiananmen Incident is one example (Wang 2012). Under Xi Jinping, patriotism/nationalism has become a priority for ensuring regime legitimacy, social integration, and ‘harmony’ (Guo 2019). One key strategy of Xi’s deployment of emotional rhetoric has been his adoption of a vocabulary of family and traditional family values to evoke support for and identification with the nation-state. He has repeatedly called on citizens to unify their love for family with love for the nation through his promotion of ‘family and nation sentiment’ (jiaguo qinghuai) and his call for the ‘Construction of Family Values (jiafeng jianshe)’. Meanwhile, however, empirical evidence reveals an increased tolerance of different lifestyles among China’s citizens and an ongoing transformation of family practices, evinced by pre-marital cohabitation, later marriage, extra-marital affairs, more divorce and reshaped norms of filial piety (Yan 2021). Bringing together insights on the political mobilization of emotion (Goodwin et al. 2001; Thompson and Hoggett2012) with theories of gender and nation (Yuval-Davis 1997, 2011), and critical perspectives on heterosexuality (Jackson 2006, 2019) and Asian familialism (Ochiai 2014), this paper establishes familial nationalism as a theoretical framework to analyse the multi-layered implications of the emotionalization of Xi’s propaganda work. We also assess the potential power and dangers of emotionally charged familial nationalism as a means of securing regime legitimacy.