Description
Analyzing image can help us access international politics from a cultural lens. Image can capture and communicate political meanings and generate public emotions across time and space. This paper aims to analyze how China’s popular culture, themed on peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention, has constructed China’s identity as a humane great power, by a combination of narratives, visual images, and sound. I will build on Bleiker (2018, 1-29)’s theoretical framework of visualizing global politics to interpret how China’s state-aligned cultural productions have constructed China’s national identity through selective representation and aesthetic choices of China’s humanitarian role in the overseas conflicts. I draw visual data from Chinese films and TV series produced by China’s state-aligned producers since 2013 when Xi Jinping assumed presidency. This contributes to the existing debate of China’s role in “saving strangers” in overseas humanitarian crises, by moving beyond official diplomatic discourse and delving into public cultural discourse. It also contributes to comparing the (mis-)alignment between official practices and cultural representation.
