Like “Spring Breeze and Rain”: Exploring Legitimation in a Chinese Official Documentary on Education

The present chapter explores processes of meaning generation in the media in the contemporary People’s Republic of China (PRC). It focuses on a 4-episode official documentary entitled 教育强国 [Strengthening the Country through Education], first broadcast by China Central Television in November 2019. The documentary is devoted to the representation of the history of education in the PRC, its development since 1949 and, especially, the strengths and challenges that characterise this crucial domain today.

The analysis conducted in this chapter relies on the framework of legitimation in discourse and the symbolic functioning of ideology and adopts an integrated approach which also accounts for the multimodal nature of this audio-visual product. The objective is to identify and highlight the main discursive strategies through which this audio-visual product contributes to the construction of a dominant discourse regarding the transformation of China into an “education powerhouse” and, particularly, on the role played by different social actors—especially the Party-state—in this process.