Promoting moral values through entertainment: a social semiotic analysis of the Spring Festival Gala on China Central Television

Abstract

The China Central Television (CCTV) Spring Festival Gala not only entertains hundreds of millions of Chinese on their most important holiday, but also promotes a national spirit and positive social values. This article proposes a social semiotic framework to elucidate discursive strategies for the construction of moral messages. It presents system networks to model specific strategies for constructing articulated and embedded moral values in the Spring Festival Gala shows. The framework provides an explicit metalanguage to guide a systematic analysis of edutainment discourse.