ABSTRACT
How, and to what degree, does elite politics in contemporary China reflect organizational emperorship? This question matters significantly. Since the early 1990s, China has experienced waves of TV serial dramas on the traditional emperorship, especially those set during the Qing dynasty. The popularity and rating of these dramas are unusually high; no other dramas on historical figures can match them. For thousands of years, China did not develop a system of free speech and expression as seen in Western democracies. China, however, has developed a very sophisticated system of historical insinuation (yinshe shixue, literally, ‘to use history to reflect the present’) and of using the past to disparage the present (jiegu fengjin). The Chinese audience enjoys these dramas on emperors – through them people can understand what is taking place inside the zhongnanhai (the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the government) today. Although the audience can sense similarities between the present and the past, it is difficult to tell what those similarities are. It is a task for the scholarly community to explore how the spirit of emperorship continues to live in China today.
