Speaker: Zimeng Pan, 2024-25 Visiting Scholar; Professor in the Department of International Studies and Director of the Research Center for Discourse and Society, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics

China’s current patriotic education is deeply embedded in President Xi’s ideology of Cultural Confidence with an aim of strengthening national identity and unity through traditional cultural values and nationalist legacies. This presentation will first provide a brief overview of China’s patriotic education policies from 1978 to 2024, followed by a rich account of how its current ideology of patriotism has been interpreted and reproduced by practitioners and the public, particularly in the fields of education and media. Findings of two ethnographic research and corpus-assisted discourse research projects will be introduced. Detailed topics that are to be discussed include national textbook designs, classroom practices, AI-assisted education, and female image constructed in media. This presentation will show how ‘patriotism’ and ‘culture’ are conceptualized and reconceptualized in the current Chinese context and how grassroots practices have been accordingly influenced.