Branding Cultural Confidence: Guochao and the Re-Centering of Global Cultural Production

At the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2017, President Xi Jinping emphasized that national prosperity depends on “building stronger cultural confidence,” grounded in Chinese history and tradition (Xinhua, 2017). One prominent example is guochao, or the “Chinese cultural craze,” through which Chinese scholars and state-owned media celebrate the incorporation of traditional and religious narratives into consumer culture, showcasing cultural confidence locally and globally. This paper examines two guochao cases highlighted by state-owned media: Li-Ning’s 2018 “Wu Dao (A principle of Daoism)” sportswear line and the 2024 video game Black Myth: Wukong, an imagined sequel to Journey to the West. I argue that the state constructs guochao as a cultural branding strategy that repackages Chinese religious narratives into globally consumable cultural products, envisioning a future in which China reclaims the center of global cultural consumption by converting Chinese identity itself into a marketable commodity.