Abstract
Authoritarian states talk about liberal values derived from Western democracies frequently. Why do they do so? How do they articulate these terms in authoritarian political discourse? This research analyze the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s incorporation and reformulation of modernization through a multi-method approach. The first step of analysis is a historical tracing of modernization’s Western origins and its travelling to modern-era China. Second, this research employs computational text analytics and qualitative interpretation of over 90,000 articles on modernization in the People’s Daily (1950-2023). The findings reveal that, first, modernization historically became a transcendent and open-ended mythic symbol representing national consensus. Then, modernization was an enduring symbol with shifting substance to legitimize evolving policy priorities during the CCP’s governance. This article proposes a framing strategy of taking western concepts as symbolic tools through selective adoption, creative linking, and dialectical integration. This rhetoric strategy recurse with performance legitimacy to support authoritarian resilience.