Like “Spring Breeze and Rain”: An Analysis of the CCTV Documentary Jiaoyu qiangguo 教育强国

The political leadership of the PRC has traditionally attributed great importance to education and educational policies, which have been repeatedly adapted to serve not only changing social and economic needs, but also political ones. This is no less true for contemporary China, where Xi Jinping defined the project to build a “powerful country of education” (jiaoyu qiangguo 教育强国) as essential in pursuing the objective of the Great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation (Xi 2017). The present paper analyses the 2019 four-episode documentary produced by the CCTV and the Ministry of Education of the PRC, titled “教育强国” (Powerful country of education), available on the CCTV website (CCTV/Jiaoyubu 2019). The paper starts from the assumption that this documentary constitutes a manifestation of China’s official political discourse on education. As such, it contributes to building the dominant narrative on the topic. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis and on Social Actors Representation Theory (Reisigl/Wodak 2009; Van Leeuwen 1995; KhosraviNik 2010), the objective of the paper is to examine how this product contributes to the narrative about the transformation of China into a “powerful country of education” and, specifically, about the State’s and Party’s efforts and achievements in this project. The analysis mainly focuses on the verbal mode (e.g., the narrating voices) of the documentary. However, given the characteristics of the genre, a multimodal perspective (Machin/Van Leeuwen 2016) is also adopted, examining how the different modes (verbal, visual, audio) interact to construe this dominant narrative.