"Making China Great Again" One Web-Novel At A Time

In this conversation, Wang Bin Han maps how China's sprawling "Make China Great Again" internet literature really works. It's not just escapist entertainment. It's a decentralized engine of ideological production, and the state has learned to co-opt it rather than control it. The surprising takeaway? China's ruling party didn't invent the "Chinese Dream." Citizens built it themselves, one novel at a time, and the party simply rode the wave. This bottom-up consent machine explains regime resilience better than any surveillance state argument. For anyone analyzing China's political trajectory or soft power ambitions, here's the key insight: the state's willingness to allow negotiation over national identity, within limits, creates a self-reinforcing legitimacy loop that top-down propaganda never could. The hidden consequence is that China's global influence may depend less on exporting ideology and more on domestic cultural dynamics playing out in million-character web serials.

The Hidden Engine of the "Chinese Dream": Why the State Lets Citizens Write Its Ideology

Conventional wisdom frames authoritarian propaganda as a one-way street: the party dictates, the people absorb. Wang's research flips that model. The "Make China Great Again" web novels, hundreds of them, each averaging 2.8 million characters, predate Xi