The Influence of Thematic Variation on the Interpretation of “Dream” Concept: Chinese Experience

The article is devoted to the study of the “dream” concept as a significant element of the political discourse in the modern China, which plays an essential role in providing legitimacy to the current political regime. The link of a dream with collective memory and appealing to the image of a desired and achievable future help the country’s ruling elite to carry out symbolic positioning, ensuring the ideological and semantic dominance of its course. Methodologically, the research is based on the combination of culturalsociological and political-anthropological attitudes, which makes it possible to actualize and operationalize the problem of temporality as a significant qualitative characteristic of social reality. The “dream” concept is considered in the theoretical and methodological framework of traditionalizing as a process of building a stable connection between the present, past and future. By using thematic analysis, the article reveals the peculiarity of the coordination of traditional and innovative elements within the “dream” concept. It also examines options for the representation of temporality and traces the temporal uniqueness of the “Chinese dream”, which uses the features of the idealized past to construct an image of the desired future (“the great rebirth of the Chinese nation”). It shows, that the loss of balance between traditional and innovative leads to the fragmentation of the concept. The author documents the hybrid nature of the dream, which became the result of a temporal rethinking of Marxist ideology, Confucian traditionalism and economic liberalism. The author underscores the connection of the dream with “basic socialist values”, revealing an attempt of the ruling elites to shift the emphasis from economic to socio-cultural and emotional components in the image of the future. While expanding and deepening the existing ideas about the specifics of symbolic positioning used by the ruling elites to legitimize their power and build stable communication links, the research also reveals that the current theoretical and methodological apparatus is limited, and it does not allow to fully operationalize the “temporal optics” yet and needs greater sophistication.