Rebuilding national unity through discourse in China: strategic narrative and concordance

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine the discursive practices used by the Chinese political leadership in its attempts to rebuild national unity and avoid potential conflict in fostering concordance between three key actors, which are the Party, the military and the people. The article adopts an interdisciplinary approach, by blending arguments and concepts coming from the discipline of political communication, mainly for the analysis of “strategic narrative”, but also from the field of civil–military relations for the notion of concordance. Here “concordance” is understood, in a constructivist perspective, as an outcome of a discursive process through which shared elements that can bind together the three actors are constructed; it is then seen as a modality to alleviate potential risks of conflict between them. The concordance implies the existence of shared values and goals, as well as a shared agenda, which integrates the needs and roles of the military in a wider framework of national goals. The paper argues that the promotion of the strategic narrative of national rejuvenation was used by the Chinese political leaders following the Tiananmen incident and the end of the Cold War to rebuild national unity around the Chinese Communist Party by fostering concordance between the Party, the military and the people.

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