The Politics of Love: Feeling, Authority, and Public Life
In her book Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China, Ting Guo shows how the discourse of love can be cultivated, shaped, and directed in public life—even by political systems. Guo demonstrates how different forms of love--bo’ai (universal love), re’ai (ardent love), and familial or parental love—have been taken up by political leaders in modern China as ways of forming collective identity, inspiring loyalty, and stabilizing authority. In doing so, she invites us to see politics not only as a matter of institutions or ideas, but also as a matter of feeling—of what people are encouraged to love, and how.
In many parts of the world today, there are analogies. The rise of authoritarian regimes often includes the cultivation of popular devotion to the nation, understood not simply as a political community but as an ethnic, cultural, or civilizational inheritance that must be defended. It also includes devotion to political leaders who present themselves as guardians of that inheritance—figures who promise protection, restoration, and strength. In such settings, love of country can be fused with fear of outsiders, reverence for authority, and resentment toward those seen as threats to the social body. Love, in other words, is not always gentle or liberating. It can be organized, intensified, and mobilized in the service of exclusion, hierarchy, and control.
What Guo helps us recognize is that this mobilization of love often draws upon older, deeply embedded patterns of feeling. Familial love—especially the reverence of children for parents—can be transposed into political life, where the leader becomes a symbolic father and the people his devoted children. Loyalty becomes filial piety writ large. Dissent, in turn, can be recast as betrayal—not simply of a policy or a program, but of a shared moral bond. In this way, political belonging is not only rationally argued but affectively lived. It is felt in the body, reinforced through ritual, and sustained through narratives of care, sacrifice, and protection.
At the same time, Guo’s analysis opens a wider question: if love can be cultivated for authoritarian ends, can it also be cultivated otherwise? Can public life be shaped by forms of love that are more expansive than tribal loyalty, more critical than blind devotion, and more inclusive than exclusionary nationalism? Traditions of bo’ai, or universal love, suggest one possibility—a love that extends beyond kinship and nation toward a broader human solidarity. Yet even such ideals are fragile. They require institutions, practices, and narratives that nurture empathy without erasing difference, and commitment without collapsing into conformity.
Seen in this light, politics becomes, in part, a contest over the formation of the heart. Competing visions of society are also competing pedagogies of love, each inviting people to feel in certain ways toward neighbors, strangers, leaders, and enemies. The question is not whether love will shape political life—it always does—but what kind of love will be cultivated, and to what ends.
For those working within open and relational frameworks, this raises a further challenge. If reality itself is shaped by relationality and feeling—if, in Whiteheadian terms, experience is always affective—then the cultivation of public love is not peripheral but central to the task of social transformation. The aim would not be to eliminate passion from politics, but to deepen and redirect it: toward forms of care that widen circles of concern, toward solidarities that resist dehumanization, and toward a shared life in which love is not weaponized, but becomes a medium of mutual flourishing.
The Politicization of Familial Love in China
In China today, family love has been elevated to a propaganda level in order to encourage and reassure people’s devotion to the regime and maintain social stability. At the same time, we see the return of charismatic authority in China in the era of digital culture, as images that portray President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan as a modern loving couple become widely circulated in state propaganda and social media. Underneath this highly political image of a loving, modern-looking couple, is a deeply conservative agenda. In the light of an ensuing gender gap and the rise of feminist movements, the new concept of “love”—a loving domestic relationship and family life as the foundation for social harmony, the love and devotion for one’s own family and national strength—is in reality a makeover for the shrinking space for civil participation, gender equality, and individual freedoms. This kind of love is termed as the “familial nationalism of love” in this book.
- Ting Guo, Politics of Love: Secularism, Religion, and Love as a Political Discourse, November 2020
https://criticalreligion.org/2020/11/18/politics-of-love-secularism-religion-and-love-as-a-political-discourse/
Restoring Patriarchy
Xi has added a human touch to the Maoist personality cult—the human touch of familial love. President Xi is celebrated in official propaganda as a loving husband, a family man, a filial son, as well as the supreme leader. Xi’s restoration of the Confucian patriarchy has occurred in a digital era that celebrates the romanticisation and commercialisation of personal relationships. The digital strategy that presents Xi Dada as the ideal husband and perfect leader is occurring at a time when the language of love has become commonplace in both the private sphere and state propaganda. The traditionalist discourse of love also reconfigures and reinterprets the official Marxist ideology in the neoliberal, non-revolutionary context, justifying China’s trajectory of development as distinct from the West with a cultural explanation that also conveniently legitimises ethnonationalist, patriarchal politics towards women, ethnic minorities, and dissidents.
- Ting Guo, Politics of Love: Secularism, Religion, and Love as a Political Discourse, November 2020
https://criticalreligion.org/2020/11/18/politics-of-love-secularism-religion-and-love-as-a-political-discourse/
Political Religion and the Language of Love
Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China (Amsterdam University Press, 2025) examines how the language of love (愛 ai) has been appropriated and politicised by Chinese political leaders throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to legitimise authority, mobilise emotion, and shape state ideology. The book traces a genealogy from Sun Yat-sen’s idealistic articulation of bo’ai (博爱, universal love), through Mao Zedong’s emotionally charged re’ai (热爱, ardent love) that energised revolutionary commitment, to Xi Jinping’s deployment of parental love as a means of naturalising authoritarian familial nationalism. These evolving emotional discourses are situated within broader transitions across religious, secular, and postsecular frameworks...This study offers a critical intervention in the cultural politics of emotion, affective governance, and political religion in modern China.
- Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China: A Conversation with Ting Guo
Written on 29 March 2026. Posted in Article, Conversations. Author: Yihuan Zhang and Ting Guo. https://madeinchinajournal.com/author/ting-guo/
Interview with Ting Guo
on Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China
Dr. Ting Guo is an Assistant Professor of Language Studies at the University of Toronto specializing in religion, politics, and gender in transnational Asia. A researcher and author, she focuses on modern Chinese history, secularism, queer cinema, and digital media, with her work often exploring the intersection of love, politics, and state ideology.
Key Academic Profile and Work:
Affiliations: She is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, a former lecturer at the University of Exeter, and has held positions at Hong Kong University.
Publications: Author of Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China (forthcoming 2025, Amsterdam University Press) and Surviving in Violent Conflicts (2016).
Key Academic Profile and Work:
Affiliations: She is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, a former lecturer at the University of Exeter, and has held positions at Hong Kong University.
Publications: Author of Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China (forthcoming 2025, Amsterdam University Press) and Surviving in Violent Conflicts (2016).
- Research Areas: Her research covers Chinese media, gender/sexuality, and fan translation, particularly regarding LGBT+ movements and popular culture in China.
- Media and Outreach: She co-hosts the Mandarin podcast "in-betweenness" (#inbetweenness #時差podcast).