Logos and Ethos: Heroism and Social Bildung in China

This article explores how heroism is constructed in China’s sociocultural context of values. It identifies a sociocultural novel, film, and heroic TV program as a mechanism for producing heroism for Chinese society. Furthermore, it explores the heroic principles that are generated by these media and how they inform expected actions in China. The article thus argues that the construction of Chinese heroism embodies specific representations of the expectations of humankind, a kind of “governing by worth” in heroism science. The function of these representations, forming heroic idols, could therefore help individuals become heroes with logos and ethos in pathos, subsuming particular heroic qualities within the highest national pursuits of values. Moreover, the analysis engages social Bildung in a collective conversation with art, philosophy, political and cultural studies by drawing on an example of typical Chinese heroic fiction and its transformation into a TV series. In doing so, the analysis demonstrates a reconfiguration of heroic traditions and how this is instantiated in the administering of lives