Yearning for a homogeneous Chinese nation: digital propaganda campaigns after the 2020 protest in Inner Mongolia

ABSTRACT This study examines the digital propaganda campaigns carried out by the Chinese Communist Party in Inner Mongolia following Mongols’ protest against the bilingual education reform in 2020. It analyses texts and images posted on WeChat official accounts of the Inner Mongolia Daily and Inner Mongolia Education Department. Through a detailed discourse and semiotic analyses of propaganda texts we reveal that the national unity and development discourses are replete with Han-centric assimilationist ideology. In our analysis, by drawing on a Bakhtinian chronotope, we foreground how the past, present and future are turned into a unified folkloric-cum-colonial space–time. This study also elucidates how the drastic policy shift and the re-articulation of national form in China is reflected in publicly circulated words and images in Inner Mongolia.