THE PROPAGANDA TRAP OF CHINA’S VIRAL PATRIOTISM

On July 21^st, China’s State media regulatory body, the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA), issued a regulation notice calling for stricter oversight of wartime-themed ultra-short dramas. Citing growing concerns about their impact on ‘young people’s values’, the notice criticized these ultra‑short war dramas for their ‘anti-intellectual’, ‘shocking’ and ‘outrageous’ depictions of the Second Sino‑Japanese War. Viral clips of these dramas on Douyin in recent months have shown soldiers leaping away from bullets, wielding drones in 1944 and carrying out slapstick revenge plots against villainous Japanese soldiers; an exaggerated storytelling form largely crafted to ride the patriotic wave ahead of September’s ‘80th Anniversary of China’s Victory in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression’. Yet, almost a month prior, the Communist Party of China (CPC) announced a grand months‑long commemorative campaign encompassing exhibitions, patriotic events and museum tours, all meant to reaffirm the country’s collective memory against Japanese aggression.

These contrasting dynamics, of grand official commemorations on one hand and viral, exaggerated war entertainment on the other, highlights a fundamental tension in the CPC’s larger narrative strategy. By simultaneously treating history as both a sacred source of legitimacy and a consumable spectacle, the Party risks undermining the credibility of its own patriotic storytelling. In many ways, the recent public criticism of the ultra‑short war‑drama industry signals not so much a moral stand as it is a strategic course correction, signifying how deeply vigilant the Party remains about maintaining control over the broader historical narrative.

The Propagandisation of Memory Politics

The War of Resistance against Japan has long served as the focal point of the Communist Party’s internal legitimacy and long-term war memory. In the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the Party intensified its narrative strategy by launching a nationwide ‘Patriotic Education Campaign’ that redesigned textbooks and established mandated patriotic education bases, highlighting Japanese atrocities to reinforce national humiliation as political capital. In the following decades, ideological and political education in schools was overhauled in alignment with this campaign, placing the Party at the centre of wartime resistance and thereby laying the foundation of legitimacy based on the narrative of victimhood now turned into triumph.

The 2025 commemorative campaign, unfolding from July through September, represents an important marker of this long‑standing strategy. It draws a direct connection from the trauma and sacrifice of the 1940s to the Party’s legitimacy today. In between these months, the Party has launched a series of coordinated events including themed exhibitions at memorial museums,  international academic conferences, medal ceremonies honouring surviving veterans and a grand ceremony with a military parade on September 3rd at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, led by Xi Jinping himself.

Taken together, these commemorative activities function as a form of soft-power theatre targeted at domestic audiences. Their cumulative effect is to embed the Party firmly at the core of China’s collective memory, ensuring that history is interpreted and mediated through the Party’s lens rather than independent understanding.

Yet this saturation of war memory has also produced a cultural side effect. In parallel to state-led commemorations, a market for patriotic entertainment has flourished online, especially among the youth in China. Ultra-short war dramas, often short and under five-minutes optimized for social media virality, have exploded in popularity and has also utilised patriotic content for greater dissemination. But with these drama’s blurring the line between state propaganda and commercial spectacle, it has also drawn heightened scrutiny from Chinese authorities.

Ultra‑Short Dramas and the Market Logic of Propaganda

Chinese media, especially TV shows and films, have long been essential tools for reinforcing official narratives. Regulatory bodies in China have known to strictly vet and shape programming to ensure alignment with Party ideology; with scripts and plotlines designed to celebrate the CPC’s role in history, promote patriotism and depict events and values that uphold the regime’s image. This careful curation has allowed the Party to maintain a relatively tight grip over the ways in which wartime memory is constructed and disseminated to the public.

The rise of ultra-short war dramas in China, however, represents both an innovation in storytelling and a subtle dilemma for the Party’s propaganda apparatus. On the surface, these micro-dramas deliver spectacle in minutes if not seconds; rapid revenge arcs, hyper-patriotic heroics and easily shareable moments. This would at first glance appear to serve the state’s objectives by energizing patriotic sentiment and embedding collective memory in a format consumable to younger audiences. Yet, their very dependence on marketized virality has also exposed a structural paradox within the Party’s propagandic framework. 

In order to thrive on competitive digital platforms, the content must cater to the logics of attention and entertainment, encompassing speed and dramatized emotions, not the careful, pedagogical tone of official campaigns. This contradiction has thus created a shimmering tension for the Party’s war memory strategy; the more the Party leans on commercially driven storytelling to amplify its message, the more it risks ceding narrative control to market impulses that can trivialize or even subvert its intended patriotic messaging.

The commemorative campaign thus embodies a self-reinforcing paradox; to sustain political legitimacy, the Party must keep wartime memory emotionally alive and resonant. Yet, this very imperative incentivizes the cultural industry to produce ever-simpler, more spectacular content, risking the gravity and coherence of the official historical narratives.

It would however also be inaccurate to suggest that the Party’s propaganda apparatus is unaware of this risk. Its evident anxiety, particularly in response to the multiplying effect of ultra-short dramas, exemplifies a persistent wariness about losing control over the historical narrative it has so carefully constructed.

This is also reflected in the sweeping regulatory changes that have already affected the micro-drama industry. Between late 2022 and early 2023, China’s Radio and Television Administration reportedly removed approximately 25,000 programs on grounds of vulgar content, signalling a tightening grip on this novel form of mass entertainment. Over the years, the industry has shifted from being one of the freest forms of creative expression in China to among the most heavily regulated ones, indicating the constant worry it continues to cause within the Party due to its growing economic weight and global digital influence.

In that way, the 80th anniversary campaign and the crackdown on war-themed ultra-short dramas together encapsulates the Party’s efforts to sustain patriotic fervour among the youth without losing control of its own narrative. Ultimately, this evolving dual dynamics lays bare the complex nature of the CPC’s narrative engineering. The crackdown on ultra-short war dramas is thus more than a critique of poor artistic quality and importantly signals an acute awareness of the fragile grip the Party holds over historical memory. Whether the Party can sustain that control over the long term, especially in the wake of a rapidly evolving digital landscape that specifically caters to the youth, remains an open question.