3. Key issues
How ruling/political groups construct national
identities:
◦ Beijing Olympic Games 2008
◦ Taiwan’s Presidential Election 2008
How?
◦ advertisements, posters, slogans, cartoons,
animations, stories, speeches given by political
leaders, etc.
Try to analyze the content and expression of
such materials to explore how national
identities are defined, (re-)constructed, and
understood
JCM229|T5|Dr. Wong 3
4. Interaction identity
People need to interact under the specific
environment so as to construct their “identity”
◦ Being born into a family or clan: full-month banquet
that a baby is introduced formally to be a family
member
◦ Working together to achieve the same end-goal:
team spirit and goal
◦ Worshipping the same god: same dream or
fulfillment
Identity: a set of meanings emerging from how
one constructs one’s relationships
(associations) with others
JCM229|T5|Dr. Wong 4
5. Building political identity [1]
Collective identity:
Build hegemonic dominance: a process in
which individuals construct their own
identity, but they do so in interaction with
“others”, drawing upon and helping to
construct identities that are collectively
shared
Sense of belonging to a political community:
a sense of groupness, and getting people to
identify with this group
How: Stories, memories, mythologies ,
memoirs, myths and beliefs
JCM229|T5|Dr. Wong 5
6. Building political identity [2]
The growth of a political hype (publicity)
industry is related to perceptions and
perception management
◦ Building political collectivities through the
sharing of discourses (e.g., story, myth, belief,
dream) politicians need the mass media to
help circulate appropriate political discourse,
preferably as entertaining myths/stories
designed for mass consumption journalists
are implicated in constructing mass identities
JCM229|T5|Dr. Wong 6
7. Building hegemony [1]
Dominant (leading, like ruling/elite class) and
dominated groups
The former one is able to set the over- arching
intellectual agenda in society and steer discourses
Establishing and maintaining the ruling/elite group
through (1) political alliance with the powerful,
such as capitalists, the military, (2) reach
legitimacy/ consensus with the public, and (3)
coercive capacity (e.g., police, courts, prisons,
military forces)
The ruling groups are required to learn, mobilize
and organize 3 key skills: (1) the arts of coercion, (2)
negotiation (to ‘politic’ alliance), and (3) mass
communication (to build ‘mass’ consent)
JCM229|T5|Dr. Wong 7
8. Building hegemony [2]
Institutionalize/hype the art of mass political
communication: form a set of complex symbiotic
relationships between politicians, spin-doctors and
journalists
Spin industry of PC consultants, PRs and impression
managers link the political machine to the mass media
machine (e.g., through news reporting, features)
Gramsci (1971) suggested the ways in which
hegemonic groups can be dominant:
1. Discourses holding the ruling alliance together (e.g., we
are patriotic front)
2. Maintain a leading position in society: they have leading
group dominance (e.g., pro-Beijing/patriotic elites)
3. Generate consensus by ensuring that discourses,
practices and authority of the ruling group are seen as
legitimate (and ideally as “neutral”) by the ruled (e.g.,
social harmony, love the motherland, love Hong Kong)
JCM229|T5|Dr. Wong 8
9. Building hegemony [3]
• For hegemonic groups, the more
“naturalized” and “obfuscated” the
discourses and practices become, the
better, because naturalized hegemonic
discourses/practices effectively people
into “hidden” power relationships
discursive control
JCM229|T5|Dr. Wong 9
10. Building national identity
Forms:
1. Political phenomena
2. Relationships between political system, the mass
media and legitimacy building
3. The evolution of political process: right to political
participation, defined national territory (country)m
and shared language and cultural characteristics of the
people living in that ‘nation’
Growth of national identity and (print) mediai-zied
communication
◦ Earliest national culture were constructed by print
media circulating texts in local languages, forming the
powerful relationship existing between communities
and print languages
JCM229|T5|Dr. Wong 10
11. How NI is formed….. *1+
Case Study [心繫家國]:
Official ver.:
http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=fzoDYC
xANCs (HKG)
http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=P0kl2Y
kkl3Q (CHN)
“Revised” version:
http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=B65uW
mSd-CM
JCM229|T5|Dr. Wong 11
12. How NI is formed….. *2+
1. Literate elites construct the controlled,
cultivated ‘garden cultures’ through
standardized mass education. Intellectuals,
journalists and teachers generate and circulate
the discourses and practices necessary to create
‘publics’ (who share the representations and
identities manufactured by the elite)
2. Elite build cultural infrastructures – media and
schools – to disseminate identity-building
representations through the construction of 3
interlocking phenomena: [a] a codified
vernacular (‘national’ print language), *b+ mass
literacy, and [c] a media industry (books,
newspapers and magazines)
JCM229|T5|Dr. Wong 12
13. How NI is formed….. *3+
3. Creating identity:
*a+ manufacture ‘publics’ ,
*b+ create ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’, a constructed
boundary separating ‘us’ from ‘them’
*c+ build ‘bounded’ imagined ‘spaces’ with ‘special’
shared ‘meanings’ for the in-group: emotionally
laden landscapes, time-scapes and cultural artifacts
as ‘memories’ which position people inside shared
symbolic communities
Narratives and constructed memories (books, TV programs,
music, etcetera)
Symbolic constructions (Great Wall, the Olympic
constructions in Beijing)
Symbolic landscapes (Huang He, Chang Jiang, Gobi dissert)
Symbolic rituals (rallies)
JCM229|T5|Dr. Wong 13
14. How NI is formed….. *4+
Apart from deliberate nationalistic
constructions by ruling elites, journalists
and teachers ‘unconsciously’ circulating
representations which have become
naturalized and taken for granted
Media representations and stereotypes:
become the raw material people use to
create their sense of ‘self’ and to
construct their ‘imaginings’ of their
relationships to ‘others’
JCM229|T5|Dr. Wong 14
16. Journalism & PI [1]
Provide the vehicles for:
1. Facilitating the hegemonically dominant
communicating with the enfranchised masses
2. Creating identities for the masses through
disseminating stories, myths and symbols
3. Marking and maintaining the boundaries of group
identities: mass and/or niche [有利可圖] politics
4. Politicians promote themselves and their policies
with mass electorates
5. Leading ‘public opinion’ by highlighting some issues
and ignoring other (agenda-setting), demonizing
some individuals, groups, and ideas (folk-
devils/moral panics) while praising other individuals,
groups and ideas
JCM229|T5|Dr. Wong 16
17. Journalism & PI [2]
6. Legitimating the specific ideology, the state and its
political, legal and bureaucratic framework
7. Promote practice valuable to the specific ideology
8. Naturalizing those discourses and practices which
underpin smooth functioning of the states
Creation and packaging process increasingly
professionalized within a political myth-making
and impression-management system involving
the various players (see the table)
JCM229|T5|Dr. Wong 17
18. Journalism & PI [3]
Intellectuals Politicians Spin-doctors Journalists Teachers
• create
myths
• systematize
myths and
ideologies
• select
already-
created
myths and
ideologies
and sell
them
• package
myths
• struggle
with other
politicians
over which
myths
become
dominate
• circulate
myths
• help
politicians
package
and sell
myths
• report on
politicians
circulating
myths
• Package
myths for
media
audiences
• Circulate
myths (in
society)
• packaging
dominant
myths for
students
• circulate
myths (in
schools)
JCM229|T5|Dr. Wong 18
