The birth moment of the ideological foundation of the post-socialist China: a critical discourse analysis of the propaganda of domestic and foreign policies, 1977-1979

This study aims to uncover the ideological foundation of the foreign and domestic policies of post-socialist China. I claim that current literature disproportionately focuses on the disruption of the policies in the Xi Jinping era from the post-Deng reform. Most importantly, the lack of understanding of the ideological continuity between the two eras can make the understanding of the discontinuity out of context. I argue the overarching ideology of the whole post-socialist China is not only their insistence on the one-party authoritarian rule but also the belief in a classical modernisation discourse, i.e., the gradual-linear development of society. This modernist discourse takes for granted that every society cannot escape the necessary staged development, such as, from the labour-intensive to the technology-intensive production, from simple to complex division of labour, and from shallow to deep globalisation. As I argue, the new domestic and foreign policy initiatives in the Xi era are also only thinkable under this general ideology. Through the lens of critical discourse analysis, this paper examines the propaganda of domestic and foreign policies in People’s Daily from 1977 to 1979, showing how the Maoist developmental strategies were swiftly reversed in the birth moment of post-socialist China. Moreover, we will show how this ideology of modernisation still plays an active role in the current Chinese policy discourse.