The Imagined Table of Civilizations: Historical Narratives, Identity Politics, and Spectacular Mobilization in Douyin “Culture War” Videos

Douyin “culture war” videos and related online discourse constitute the corpus of analysis. The analysis examines how narratives of “five thousand years of civilization,” “stolen culture,” and loss and restoration use temporal compression, civilizational comparison, friend–enemy distinctions, and victimization–revival structures to form historical narratives with the potential for affective mobilization. Drawing on the archaeology of knowledge, habitus and symbolic violence, the society of the spectacle, and the culture industry, the article analyzes how these texts offer positions from which contemporary identity anxiety can be understood and how, at the narrative level, they connect civilizational identity with commodity signs such as guochao (national-trend branding), guohuo (domestic-brand goods), and guofeng (national-style aesthetics). The analysis does not infer the actual audience’s social composition or psychological motivations, the effects of platform recommendation, or consumer behavior; these relations are treated as hypotheses requiring further audience research and platform data. A critique of “culture war” content should therefore examine not only factual inaccuracies but also the textual structure linking historical narrative, subject positions, and commodity identification.