EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Politics & International Relations 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 176 Zlotea Mugur (University of Bucharest) “The Essence of the Nation”— Political Discourse on China’s Traditional Culture Key words: traditional culture, Confucianism, political discourse, ideology, nationalism Starting from the point of view expressed by many scholars that China is going through a period of ideological crisis and taking into account the changes in the political discourse after 2012, the following paper looks at how the Chinese tradition, and especially Confucianism, is approached nowadays, in the elite Party discourse. The paper focuses upon the concept of “traditional culture” and the way it is used today by the Chinese leaders, analyzing how this concept fits into the new type of discourse, the context into which it appears, how it is defined, which is the “quintessence” which should be absorbed and which part of it should be discarded. The goal of the research is to find possible answers to the following questions: 1) is the emphasis on the importance of the traditional culture, in fact, a silent attempt by the Chinese leaders to use tradition as the new ideological “glue” to bind the people together and reunite them around the Party; 2) how does the emphasis on tradition fit into the bigger discourse of state nationalism.