Chinese media—television shows, movies, and online videos—has long been a tool for Beijing’s ruling party, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to shape public opinion. City regulators scan scripts and storylines closely and, if needed, rewrite them to make sure they glorify the CCP, promote patriotism, and protect the party’s image.
The latest example appears on the anniversary of China’s World War II victory, the so‑called War of Resistance against Japan. On September 3, 2025, the capital staged a huge military parade in Tiananmen Square to mark the 80th anniversary of the war’s end. While the parade was a grand official show, a new wave of ultra‑short war dramas has turned wartime memory into an online entertainment trend. The videos mix rapid, cinematic scenes with patriotic messaging, making history feel like a trendy social‑media hit.
This trend reflects how the CCP keeps war stories in the public mind. After the 1989 protests, the party launched a nationwide patriotic‑education campaign. Textbooks were rewritten, compulsory “patriotic education” centers opened in schools and the narrative of Japanese brutality was sharpened to unify the nation around the party’s legitimate role. The 2025 commemorations—exhibitions at memorial museums, a military parade, and other events—continue that strategy. Yet the sheer amount of war content on platforms like Douyin (China’s TikTok) has produced a market for patriotic entertainment that feels more like pop culture than outright propaganda.
Regulators are watching this space closely. As teenagers flock to short‑form war dramas, the party faces a dilemma: can it keep a monopoly on historic memory when viral video clips blur the line between state propaganda and commercial hype? The 80th anniversary showed that control over how the young remember the war is not just a question of narrative authority but of how the CCP negotiates the boundaries of collective memory in a digital age.
Source: ianslive
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