Heritage-making and value creation in China: CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala as mirror and contributor

This article takes China Central Television’s (CCTV) 41 years of Spring Festival Gala (hereafter Gala) as a space of, and for, the contemporary Chinese official discourse in shaping national heritage, and it examines the Gala’s evolving role in recent years. Using thematic analysis and longitudinal approaches, the article explores how the Gala contributes to the (re)construction and dissemination of values amidst the heritage boom in China. The article argues that the Gala has become institutionalized as part of the national tradition, serving as both a reflection and a contributor to heritage-making. In the process of this ‘becoming’, the Gala has served and continues to serve as a quintessential space of heritage and heritage (re)construction for the production and dissemination of concepts, knowledge, norms, and values via the visualization of narratives as China goes through a transformation from socialism to cultural nationalism, the process of which has been called ‘value appropriation’. The main contribution of this article lies in its contextualization of the development of the Gala as part of heritage-making in China, thus advancing the literature on how sites and practices in China are strategically selected to direct and manage the creation of a national heritage.