EVENTS

January 2024 onward, China’s Patriotic Education Law has made the cultivation of patriotic sentiment a matter of legal duty. Unlike earlier initiatives, this statute extends into schools, families, workplaces, digital platforms, and religious venues, requiring all to contribute to the project. Drawing on discourse-analytic approaches, this seminar explores how the Patriotic Education Law, alongside preceding drafts, guidelines, opinions, and policy outlines, weaves a comprehensive framework of patriotism that permeates both everyday life and institutional practices. Patriotism is reconfigured as inseparable from loyalty to the Party and socialism, manifesting through festivals, memorials, family education, curricula, corporate culture, and platform governance. Notably, the law positions patriotic education as open to “the outstanding achievements of human civilisation,” it simultaneously restricts unapproved historical interpretations. The analysis illustrates how these overlapping directives collectively shape an expansive ideological terrain that governs identity, security, and cultural pride across Chinese society in the “New Era”.

Speaker

Nishant Dilip Sharma is a doctoral scholar at O.P. Jindal Global University, and is currently based at the Harvard-Yenching Institute as an Institute of Chinese Studies–Harvard-Yenching Institute Doctoral Fellow. As a part of this fellowship, he has conducted research at Fudan University and pursued Chinese language studies at Central China Normal University (CCNU), Wuhan. His research centers on memory studies, discourse analysis of cultural and educational policies, and the politicisation of public policy in contemporary India and China. He holds a Master’s degree in International Studies from Christ University, Bangalore.

Chair

T.G. Suresh is Associate Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His academic work focuses on comparative political economy, labour processes and globalisation, and urban development in Asian cities. He has conducted research in collaboration with institutions such as the International Labour Organisation, and his works have been published by Harvard University Asia Centre, Routledge and the Oxford University Press. He has contributed to the policy debates on labour reforms, global supply chains, and China’s developmental model. He is also a Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Scholar affiliated with the Mario Einaudi Centre for International Studies at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York and a visiting professor at the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs, Higher School of Economics (HSE), Moscow.

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