Redefining Propaganda in Modern China

The Mao Era and its Legacies

James Farley, Matthew D. Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000225761
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

Usage of the political keyword 'propaganda' by the Chinese Communist Party has changed and expanded over time. These changes have been masked by strong continuities spanning periods in the history of the People's Republic of China from the Mao Zedong era (1949–76) to the new era of Xi Jinping (2012–present).

Redefining Propaganda in Modern China builds on the work of earlier scholars to revisit the central issue of how propaganda has been understood within the Communist Party system. What did propaganda mean across successive eras? What were its institutions and functions? What were its main techniques and themes? What can we learn about popular consciousness as a result? In answering these questions, the contributors to this volume draw on a range of historical, cultural studies, propa­ganda studies and comparative politics approaches. Their work captures the sweep of propaganda – its appearance in everyday life, as well as during extraordinary moments of mobilization (and demobilization), and its systematic continuities and discontinuities from the perspective of policy-makers, bureaucratic function­aries and artists. More localized and granular case studies are balanced against deep readings and cross-cutting interpretive essays, which place the history of the People's Republic of China within broader temporal and comparative frames.

Addressing a vital aspect of Chinese Communist Party authority, this book is meant to provide a timely and comprehensive update on what propaganda has meant ideologically, operationally, aesthetically and in terms of social experience.

Part I

Historical perspectives

1Propaganda

A historical perspective

David Welch

The importance of propaganda in the politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries should not be under-estimated. Although propaganda is thousands of years old, it really came of age in the twentieth century, when the development of mass media (and later multimedia communications) offered a fertile ground for its dissemination, and the century’s global conflicts provided the impetus needed for its growth.

Investigating the history of propaganda necessarily invites consideration of what the word itself means. It has largely become a portmanteau word, which can be interpreted in a variety of ways, so ‘propaganda’ has never been a static term, especially at a time of rapidly changing methods of communication. Nevertheless, there are some basic descriptions that can be applied. If we exclude purely religious and commercial propaganda (advertising), it is a distinct political activity that can be distinguished from related phenomena such as information and education. The distinction lies in the purpose of the instigator. Put simply, propaganda is the dissemination of ideas intended to convince people to think and act in a particular way and for a particular persuasive purpose.

Throughout history, those who govern have attempted to influence the way in which the governed viewed the world. The Ancient Greeks, notably Plato and Aristotle, regarded the art of persuasion as being a form of rhetoric and recognized that logic and reason were necessary to communicate ideas successfully. In fourth-century BCE Greece, historians and philosophers were the first people to describe the use of propaganda in the service of the state. In The Republic, while advocating that rules should at least adopt the appearance of truthfulness, Plato recognized that rulers might sometimes need to employ censorship (and deception) in the greater interest of implementing democracy.

Clearly, propaganda can be traced back deep into history. The pyramids of Egypt provide a form of visual eulogy; they are some of the oldest monumental structures designed to symbolize the power and magnificence of individual rulers and dynasties. Around the late sixth century BCE, the Chinese general Sun Tzu was writing The Art of War, and he knew all about the power of persuasion – the ‘munitions of the mind’: ‘For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill’.

The origin of the word ‘propaganda’ can be traced back to the Reformation, when the spiritual and ecclesiastic unity of Europe was shattered. During the ensuring struggle between forces of Protestantism and those of the counter-Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church found itself faced with the problem of maintaining and strengthening its hold in the non-Catholic countries. A Commission of Cardinals was set up by Gregory XIII (1572–85), charged with spreading Catholicism and regulating ecclesiastical affairs in heathen lands. A generation later, in 1622 when the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) had broken out, Gregory XV made the Commission permanent, as the Sacra Congregatio de propaganda fide (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith), charged with the management of foreign missions and financed by a ‘ring tax’ assessed upon each newly appointed Cardinal. Finally, in 1627, Pope Urban VII established the Collegium Urbanum (College of Propaganda), to serve as a training ground for a new generation of Catholic propagandists and to educate young priests who were to undertake such missions. The first propaganda institute was therefore simply a body charged with improving the dissemination of a group of religious dogmas. The word ‘propaganda’ soon came to be applied to any organization set up for the purpose of spreading a doctrine; later it was applied to the doctrine that was being spread; and lastly to the methods employed in undertaking the dissemination.

From the seventeenth century to the twentieth century, the ‘modernization’ of propaganda continued to be refined in accordance with scientific and technological advances. Its employment increased steadily throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly at times of ideological struggle as in the American War of Independence and the French Revolutionary Wars. Yet it was during World War I that the wholesale employment of propaganda as an organized weapon of modern warfare served to transform its meaning into something more sinister. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the introduction of novel forms of communication created a new historical phenomenon: the mass audience. The means now existed for governments to mobilize entire industrial societies for warfare to disseminate information (or propaganda) to large groups of people within relatively short timespans. One of the most significant lesson learned from the experience of World War I was that public opinion could no longer be ignored as a determining factor in the formulation of government policies. Unlike previous wars, the Great War was the first ‘total war’ in which whole nations, and not just professional armies, were locked in mortal combat. Propaganda was an essential part of this war effort, developing in all the belligerent countries as the war progressed.

In World War I, all sides supplemented military engagement with propaganda aimed at stimulating national sentiment, maintaining home front morale, attempting to win over neutrals and spreading disenchantment among the enemy population. The British in particular were credited with having carried out these objectives more successfully than any other belligerent state. Britain’s wartime consensus was generally believed to have held under the exigencies of war – despite major tensions. One explanation for this was the skilful use made by the government of propaganda and censorship. After the war, however, a deep mistrust developed on the part of ordinary citizens, who realized that conditions at the front had been deliberately obscured by patriotic slogans and by ‘atrocity propaganda’ that had fabricated obscene stereotypes of the enemy and their dastardly deeds. The population also felt cheated that their sacrifices had not resulted in the promised homes and a land ‘fit for heroes’. Propaganda was associated with lies and falsehoods, and as a result the Ministry of Information was immediately disbanded. A similar reaction against propaganda took root in the United States in the wake of the wartime experience. In 1920, George Creel published an account of his achievements as director of the CPI, thus contributing to the public’s growing suspicion of propaganda, which created a major obstacle for propagandists attempting to rally American support against fascism in the late 1930s and 1940s.

Fledgling dictators in Europe viewed war propaganda in a different light. The experience of Britain’s propaganda provided the defeated Germans with a fertile source of counter-propaganda aimed against the post-war peace treaties and the ignominy of the Weimar Republic. Writing in Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Adolf Hitler devoted two chapters to propaganda. By maintaining that the German army had not been defeated in the field of battle but rather had been forced to submit due to disintegration of morale from within, accelerated by skilful British propaganda, Hitler (like other right-wing politicians and military groups) was providing historical legitimacy for the ‘stab-in-the-back’ theory. Regardless of the actual role played by British (or Soviet) propaganda in helping to bring Germany to its knees, it was generally accepted that Britain’s wartime experiment was the ideal blueprint on which other governments should subsequently model their own propaganda apparatus. Convinced of the essential role of propaganda for any movement set on obtaining power, Hitler saw propaganda as a vehicle of political salesmanship in a mass market, so it was no surprise that a Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda was the first government body to be established when the Nazis assumed power in 1933.

The task of propaganda, Hitler argued, was to bring certain subjects to the attention of the masses. Propaganda should be simple, concentrating on a few essentials, which then had to be repeated many times with emphasis on such emotional elements as love and hatred. Through the continuity and sustained uniformity of its application, Hitler concluded that propaganda would lead to results ‘that are almost beyond our understanding’. Unlike the Bolsheviks, though, the Nazis did not make a distinction in their terminology between agitation and propaganda. In Soviet Russia, agitation was concerned with influencing the masses through ideas and slogans, while propaganda served to spread the Communist ideology of Marxist-Leninism. The distinction dates back to Georgi Plekhanov’s famous definition, written in 1892: ‘A propagandist presents many ideas to one or a few persons; an agitator presents only one or a few ideas, but presents them to a whole mass of people’. The Nazis did not regard propaganda as merely an instrument for reaching the Party elite, but rather as a means for the persuasion and indoctrination of all Germans.

If World War I demonstrated the power of propaganda, the post-war period witnessed the widespread utilization of the lessons drawn from the wartime experience within the overall context of the ‘communication revolution’. What distinguishes the media of communication in the years between 1870 and 1939 is quite simply their transformation into mass media. During the 1920s and 1930s, the exploitation of the mass media – particularly film and radio – for political purposes became more commonplace. Totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany provide striking examples of media being conscripted for the ideological purposes of the state.

World War II witnessed one of the greatest propaganda battles in the history of warfare. All the participants employed propaganda on a scale that dwarfed other conflicts, including World War I. Britain’s principal propaganda structures were the Ministry of Information (MOI) for home, allied and neutral territory and the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) for enemy territory. The programmes of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) proved an asset long after the war had ended. When Sir John Reith (1889–1971), the former Director General of the BBC, was appointed Minister of Information in 1940, he laid down two of the MOI’s fundamental axioms for the balance of the war: that ‘news is the shock troops of propaganda’ and that propaganda should tell ‘the truth, nothing but the truth and, as near as possible, the whole truth’. Although Hitler believed implicitly in the ‘big lie’, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, took a different view, claiming that propaganda should be as accurate as possible. Similarly, in the early part of the twentieth century, Lenin proclaimed that ‘in propaganda, truth pays off’ and this dictum has largely been accepted by propagandists.

Known in Russia as ‘The Great Patriotic War’, World War II propaganda played a central role in rallying the Soviet population to resist the Nazi invasion. Soviet propaganda was determined by the Council of People’s Commissars and the Political Bureau of the All Union Communist Party. It was supervised by the Directorate of Propaganda and Agitation of the Central Committee under A.S. Scherbakov and administered by the newly established Soviet Information Bureau. The story of US propaganda during World War II can be divided into two phases: a period of neutrality from September 1939 to December 1941, during which a great debate raged among the population at large, and the period of American involvement in the war, when the government mobilized a major propaganda effort through the Office of War Information (OWI). The United States used propaganda to orient troops (most famously in the US Army Signal Corps film series Why We Fight) and to motivate its civilian population. In all phases of war propaganda, the commercial media played a key role.

The extraordinary level of government and commercial propaganda during the war continued during the so-called Cold War (1945–89). This appellation describes the period of hostility between Communist and capitalist countries in the years following World War II. During the Cold War, propagandists on all sides utilized their own interpretations of the ‘truth’ in order to sell an ideological point of view to their citizens and the world at large. President Harry S. Truman described the conflict in 1950 as a ‘struggle above all else, for the minds of men’. From the mid-1950s, US policy-makers believed that cultural diplomacy would successfully complement psychological warfare and that in the long term it might prove more effective. From the 1950s, the export of American culture and the American way of life was heavily subsidized by the US government and coordinated by the United States Information Agency (USIA), which operated from 1953 to 1999. Cultural exchange programmes, international trade fairs and exhibitions, and the distribution of Hollywood movies were some of the activities designed to extract propaganda value from the appeal of America’s way of life, particularly its popular culture and material success. From the 1960s, the Voice of America (VOA) utilised the popularity of American rock music with audiences behind the Iron Curtain, using the music to boost the standing of the United States.

The Soviet leadership under Joseph Stalin, untroubled by negative connotations evoked by ‘propaganda’, viewed the role of the media as mobilizing and legitimizing support for its expansionist policies. Stalin’s determination to control the countries ‘liberated’ by the Soviet armies led to a growth in arms production and strident anti-capitalist propaganda, which contributed to the growing tensions of the Cold War. The Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party fed official propaganda to the media, closely scrutinized by the Soviet censors, while the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in September 1947 began a systematic campaign, masterminded by Agitprop, to marshal international support for Moscow against the West. While radio remained an important weapon for waging psychological warfare against the Soviets, broadcasting was seen by the American authorities as a means by which the United States could win hearts and minds throughout the world through a long-term ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Historical perspectives
• Part II Icons and imagery
• Part III Reception and affect
• Part IV Transitions
• Part V Legacies
• Selected bibliography
• Index