The relationship between external crises and national narrative shifts cases of the Great Patriotic War and the Sino-Japanese War

Abstract

The thesis aims to analyze the variations of national narratives in Russia and China through the changes from 2015 to 2020. It focused particularly on the narratives of the Great Patriotic War and the Sino-Japanese War to see how authority shifted narrative approaches in the face of external crises. To assess the variations in the framing patterns during the targeted time frame, the thesis collected elite speeches of 2015 and 2020 on the commemorative events of the Great Patriotic War and the Sino-Japanese War from Russia and China, respectively. The thesis encoded the collected elite speeches to assess the shifts in theme to understand the national narrative framing variations of Russian and Chinese elite speeches. To create the communications between the two datasets and conduct a comparison between Russia and China, the thesis designed a codebook to bridge the analysis and engage the narratives from both countries. The speech analysis was undertaken with Nvivo 12. There are eight main coding themes in the codebook, with subthemes as complements, and they are defined by the primary theme from both datasets to have the analysis parallel. The thesis contributed to the existing literature by confirming three hypotheses regarding the relationship between external crises and national narratives in authoritarian regimes. Authoritarian governments tend to have a more inward-facing narrative in the face of external crises, including drawing a line between the image of self and others. Apart from that, within authoritarian regimes, different institutional designs also contributed to the narrative formats.