Propaganda

Ideas, Discourses and its Legitimization

Hailong Liu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000730395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Propaganda is subjective information primarily used to influence an audience and further a political agenda. In China, it has a long history but has been most effective in modern society. What exactly is propaganda? Why does it exist and why does the public tolerate it? The book answers these questions by tracing back to the emergence and development of integrated propaganda and scientific propaganda. On this basis it focuses on the emergence of propaganda concept in China, the establishment of Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China's propaganda concept, intellectuals and propaganda, the debate on the propaganda concept in China after 1949 as well as the emergence of Propaganda 3.0 that coordinates integrated propaganda and scientific propaganda.
Setting propaganda in the framework of modernity, the book explains how various groups have legitimatized propaganda since the 20th century. From a reasonable and neutral standpoint, the author describes the confrontation among various propaganda concepts and discourses, displaying a panorama of the mutual conflicts between nations and individuals, control and freedom, ideas and bodies. Not only will scholars and students studying journalism and communication find this book interesting, but professionals working in journalism, advertising, public relations and publicity will also find it engaging and enlightening.

1Propaganda

A concept ambiguous but important

Development of “propaganda”

The subject of this book is the concept of “propaganda”. First, the book investigates the development of propaganda in various contexts that give rise to heterogeneous concepts. Meanwhile, because of the strong infectivity of propaganda (one party is forced to use the same propaganda as its opposing side), the concept of propaganda can also be communicated from its birthplace to another culture. Traveling in diverse cultures is a curious process for this concept—a process by which we are able to observe how it is resisted, negotiated, accepted, transformed and utilized in another space and context.

The term propaganda originated from Latin and is related to agricultural production, meaning “to propagate” or “to sow”. It first emerged in 1622 when Pope Gregory XV set up Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the “Sacred Congregation for the Propagation” to oppose religious reform and disseminate the Catholic doctrine.

The concept of propaganda in the West came from religion and was not adopted in the political realm until modern times. In 1718, propaganda was added to the English vocabulary. It was first endowed with political implications in the 19th century in the United States. In 1843, propaganda was explained with dictionary entries unrelated to religion.¹ Before World War I, the word propaganda was hardly used. There was even no entry of propaganda in the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1911 other than a single cross-reference entry.

During World War I, propaganda received extensive attention as a result of the large-scale propaganda activities adopted by the Entente countries (Britain, France and Russia) and the postwar propagandists. With the rise of critiques from liberal intellectuals and following related controversies, propaganda was spontaneously added to daily vocabularies. At the beginning of the 20th century, activities emerged such as advertising and public relations, which were also touted as propaganda, directing this concept toward the business arena. Consequently, politics, in turn, had to learn propaganda from business, as can be illustrated by the typical example of so-called political marketing.² From religion to politics and business, changes in the implications of propaganda have in a way reflected shifts in social power.

The debut of the concept of propaganda is never a bright way without shadows. In 1627, Pope Urban VIII established Collegium Urbanum, an institute specialized in studying and training propagandists (missionaries). The word propaganda was positive for the Catholics, but it represented an ideology that distorted facts and disseminated errors for other denominations, and thereby was interpreted as a negative word by other believers. In particular, when an opposing party was found to use identical tactics to capture people’s minds, the concept of propaganda would become uncomfortable. The Department of Propaganda set up by Soviet Russia and the Department of Mass Enlightenment and Propaganda initiated by Nazi Germany forced countries with conflicting ideologies, such as Britain and the United States, to abandon the positive implication of propaganda, rendering it a completely negative word used in particular for referring to the dissemination and persuasion activities conducted by their enemies.

Susanne K. Langer said, “Words offer a way of thinking and become attached to objects as their names”.³ Langer’s form theory is aligned with the viewpoint of linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, who maintained that the words themselves conjured the objects of thinking and even the way of thinking. American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, however, held a slightly different point of view, emphasizing more the practicability of vocabularies and arguing that people’s dissatisfaction with the existing words may result in what Thomas Kuhn coined as paradigm revolutions. Rorty stated that

revolutionary achievements in the arts, in the sciences, and in moral and political thought typically occur when somebody realizes that two or more of our vocabularies are interfering with each other, and proceeds to invent a new vocabulary to replace both.⁴

These two schools of thought, despite the existing disputes, reached at least one consensus: The emergence of a new vocabulary is an important “event”. In other words, it is exactly the invention of the concept of propaganda (or rediscovery, to put it in an accurate way) that creates essential changes to people’s promotional activities. Given a name, the long-existing phenomenon eventually came out from behind the screen. The word propaganda has summoned those kinds of phenomena unable to be named and discussed from the darkness, making it possible to discuss the experience used to be ignored and sporadic. Just like the sudden discovery of a new land, people began to talk about this technique employed to manipulate the public with symbols. The emergence of the word propaganda has, for the elite, opened a door to social control and order, with volumes of knowledge starting to cluster around the likes of group psychology, Freudian psychology and mass society theory from Europe, and the emerging polling techniques, public opinion and communications studies from America.

Traveling of the propaganda concept

We can find another phenomenon while observing the concept of propaganda: Once created, this concept can quickly integrate into other cultures. After World War I, myriad countries began to substitute this concept for previous ideas. For instance, in the mind of the Chinese people before the 20th century, hardly anyone, not even Liang Qichao (梁启超), one of the most outstanding Chinese propagandists and columnists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, used propaganda in the modern sense, as they were inclined to use such conventional Chinese ideas as “cultivation”, “immersion” and “guidance” instead.

From the origin of the Chinese language, “宣 (Xuan)” (Xuanchuan, with two Chinese characters together, means propaganda) first referred to the imperial house where the ancient emperors lived. Later, Xuanchuan was extended with meanings of “vastness” and “universality”, which is usually related to the top-down transmission of instructions from senior government authority; “传 (Chuan)”means grant, transmission or delivery. The combination of the two words in Chinese “宣传(Xuanchuan: propaganda）” was first found in the book, Chronicles of the state of Wei—Biography of Lifu (魏略·李孚传):

Lifu said: “Currently, all the citizens, stronger or vulnerable, were fighting against each other, rendering the city tumultuous [and] in great panic. So, I think it’s better to delegate someone who has newly surrendered and is trusted by besieged citizens to announce(宣） and deliver (传) the policies of the conqueror”.

This integrated expression, which put together the two independent concepts, Xuan and Chuan, is also found in Warriors of fate—the Book of Shu—Biography of Peng Yang:

As Liu Bei was surprised by Peng Yang’s performance, he thought highly of Yang and promoted him as the delegate to announce（宣）and deliver（传）the emperor’s military instructions to guide other generals’ operations. His mission satisfied the emperor, thus gaining greater appreciation and promotion from the emperor.

It is also seen in the History of three kingdoms—the Book of Shu—Biography of Ma Zhong, which says, “When seeing the Minister of Defense, General Jiang Wan, he announced （宣）and delivered （传） the emperor’s appointment of him as the general to safeguard the southern territories”. It is clear that by the end of the East Han Dynasty, “宣传” had already became an idiomatic expression in Chinese. In spite of the sufficient modern-sense propaganda activities in ancient China, here propaganda refers specifically to government instructions with no direct connection with its concept in modern Chinese.

According to the Dictionary of loanwords in Chinese compiled by early researchers Liu Zhengyan, Gao Mingkai and Mai Yongqian, “宣传” originated from the Japanese translation of propaganda.⁵

宣传（Xuanchuan）: to explain to the public so as to convince them to follow certain acts. [Origin] [Japanese] 宣伝 senden. (In the ancient work, Book of the Northern Qi Dynasty: Biography of Yuan Wenyao, Wenxiang was appointed to propagandize the government’s ideas and philosophies to all the officials.)⁶

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Japanese terms were adopted in Chinese through the translation of Chinese students studying in Japan during the “Learning from Japan” craze after the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894.⁷ Many of these terms were actually translated from European languages into Japanese Kanji (words in the same form as the Chinese characters). As stated by early researchers Gao Mingkai and Liu Zhengyan, these borrowed words from Japanese could be categorized into three types: (1) compound Chinese characters used only in ancient Japanese without appearing in the ancient Chinese language, such as 人力车 (rickshaw or jinrikisha in Japanese) and 场合 (situation or ba ai in Japanese); (2) ancient Chinese vocabularies borrowed by the Japanese language to “interpret” Western words, whose meanings, however, differ completely from their original meaning in ancient Chinese, such as 革命（revolution）and 文化 (culture); (3) independent ancient Chinese characters borrowed by the Japanese language as compounds (there is no equivalent expression in ancient Chinese with the same character compounds) to interpret Western languages, and then be reshaped by the Chinese language into loanwords in modern Chinese, such as 种族 (race) and 美术(art). In their evidence-based research, scholars such as Liu Zhengyan put “宣传” (propaganda) into the second category, which belongs to the original Chinese words used to interpret Western languages. This statement is also supported by Zhou Zuoren, who was conversant with the Japanese language. When discussing the transliteration of propaganda in Chinese as “普罗巴甘” (puluobagan) in his article “Propaganda” (宣传）in the Essays of Yaotang, he said,

it might be understood as proselytism in China before it was interpreted as propaganda by the Japanese. In terms of the composition of “宣传” in Chinese characters, it is also reasonable to understand it as the abbreviation of “宣讲传道” (which means propaganda and doing missionary work), which is worthy of acclamation among all the new vocabularies in recent times.⁸

However, other studies conducted in recent years found that a large number of loanwords thought of as borrowed from Japanese were actually the words of Western vocabularies translated by missionaries at the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty. These new words, failing to prevail in China back then, were detected by Japanese scholars translating foreign books and then adopted into Japanese dictionaries.⁹ When introducing these vocabularies back to China, overseas Chinese students in Japan ignored their original identity and misused them as Japanese-invented vocabularies.

By comparing Chinese and Japanese dictionaries in the 1850s, Shi Youwei found that propaganda was translated as “传教”（which means, “doing missionary tasks”）in Chinese in the English Chinese dictionary issued between 1847 and 1848 and into “宣传”（the same as propaganda）in the English Chinese dictionary editions released in 1866 and 1869. In comparison, it was translated as Hiro Me Ru (which means “extension and large space” in the English and Japanese pocket dictionary (compiled in 1862) and as Haku Hiro (which means profoundness and extensiveness) in the Illustrated English Japanese dictionary with sound attached (compiled in 1973). Drawing upon similar cases (such as the translation of judgment, disciple, God, Christianity, crucifixion, Catholicism, meditation and gospel), he speculated that Japan was influenced by China in translating these European vocabularies.¹⁰

From the language itself, Shi Youwei’s viewpoint is broadly right. When the already-mentioned phenomenon is considered, the situation is much more complex. Early Christians coming to China were managed by “Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide”, mentioned above, the name of which is exactly the origin of propaganda and it was inevitable to translate the institute’s name. Meanwhile, propaganda is also a common word in religion, which, as the other religious vocabularies observed by Shi Youwei, was already granted with a translated Chinese name. Western missionaries tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1 Propaganda: A concept ambiguous but important
• 2 Discovery of irrational man: Rise of the scientific propaganda concept
• 3 Revolution and governance: Vicissitude of the propaganda concept
• 4 Awaken the people: The emergence of China’s propaganda concept
• 5 Intellectuals and propaganda: Differentiation of China’s modern propaganda concept
• 6 Formation and development of the contemporary idea of Chinese propaganda
• 7 Conflicts and institutionalization of the propaganda concept of the Communist Party of China
• 8 From Propaganda 1.0 to Propaganda 3.0: Transformation of China’s contemporary idea of propaganda
• 9 Conclusion: Shepherd’s predicament
• References
• Index