Cultural policy, ideology and national development in China : the historical crisis of the Communist Party's management of culture

The principal purpose of this thesis is to examine how the strategic political frameworks of the People's Republic of China have historically informed national cultural policy, and today maintain cultural policy as an important official mechanism for both national economic development and the dissemination and inculcation of political ideology. The primary rationale for this study is to extend the scholarly orbit of contemporary cultural policy research. The investigation that forms this thesis explores how, historically in China, cultural policy became a medium of ideology, strategically utilised by the central government for both national economic development and the manifestation of political legitimacy. It then analyses, again historically, the party's ideological project. In doing this, the thesis seeks to explain why the 'mass line' of culture – a fundamental principle of the party's ideological project – is a determining fulcrum for policies that serve the symbiotic maintenance of China's economic growth and the CPC’s (The Communist Party of China, henceforth the CPC) perpetual ideological formation and re-formation. Following the historical examination in its early chapters, the thesis investigation proceeds to a second historical examination of the Government-controlled institutional reform of China's cultural system. By way of examining the cultural changes provoked by the institutional reforms, the thesis proffers China's television sector as a primary field of cultural production in which changes can be identified and subject to critical reflection. Through critical reflection, the investigation reveals how cultural policy remains a central medium not only of CPC ideology, but of governmental authority and legitimacy, and where ideology, authority and legitimacy converge and are manifest as a perpetual crisis of political contradiction. The thesis’ argument concerns this perpetual crisis in the context of China’s governmental international commitments to sustainable development, notable for its sponsorship of various UNESCO cultural projects. This thesis thus aspires to demonstrate a current dilemma for China as a growing global power, and whose self-identification with Chinese ‘culture’ is essential to its ideological evolution and continuity as much as its continued economic viability. Such dilemma, I argue, lies in the structural contradictions animating the Government's management of culture, and the increasing division between the culture of everyday life (‘ordinary people’ and their ways of life), and State directed national economic development