Description
China’s People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) faces the challenge of communicating its resolve to both foreign adversaries and domestic elites and publics. In response, the PLARF uses repeated portrayals of ritualised coordination. While self-narrating its own deterrence practices, PLARF photographers and videographers focus on groups of soldiers, drilled to perfection in undertaking coordinated and highly technical activities. Men in uniform are repeatedly shown to have mastery of their machinery, reinforcing deterrence themes of resolve, control and cohesion. Additionally, these sources include portrayals of ceremonies where soldiers pledge fealty to the Communist Party, often promising to die in its name. In all of these cases, the coordination of movement is taken to its zenith, elevating them beyond a strictly instrumentalist military training-logic to a choreographed performance. By doing so, the PLARF attempts to communicate that they will always obey their Party leaders, that they are fully in control of their weapons, and that they will sacrifice themselves to achieve their mission. In ritualising deterrence, the PLARF draws on the power of ritual to make the otherwise highly abstract (and perhaps incredible) ideas of controlling the Bomb, or retaliating despite grievous casualties, feel “real” in an emotional-political sense.
