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Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China
Organizer: Anne-Marie Brady, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Chair and Discussant: Merle Goldman, Harvard University
China at the beginning of the 21st century is a post-communist society that still retains its communist government. China is a nation on the rise, so long as the government can maintain its hold on political power. How will the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintain its monopoly on political power while dismantling the socialist system? How can the government maintain popular support in China when the uniting force of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology is spent and discredited? In recent years the CCP has undergone a thorough repackaging. In the post-1989 era the outward symbols and the all-important name brand CCP© have remained, but the content and meaning of the party’s activities have changed significantly. Propaganda and thought work have a central role in the repackaging of the CCP. This panel will analyze changes in the propaganda system in China from 1989 to the present day, and will examine how the government has adapted old techniques to new challenges and dilemmas, and the importance of new forms of technology and methodology
The Re-Birth of the Propaganda State: China’s Modernised Propaganda System
Anne-Marie Brady, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
In his influential 1999 book After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and “Thought Work” in Reformed China, Daniel C. Lynch argued that the CCP propaganda system in the 1990s was breaking down due to economic and technical changes such as the impact of the Internet and commercialization. He predicted that the outcome would be a “genuine political crisis.” Lynch’s research finished in 1995; eleven years later his prescriptions now appear excessively pessimistic. A host of other scholars have also argued that either technology or commercialization would overcome the grip of the Central Propaganda Department over China’s public sphere. Yet my own research indicates that the CCP has been quite successful in regaining legitimacy in the post-89 era and that the propaganda system has played a key role in this process. The commercialization of the cultural economy in China has been a deliberate process engineered by the CCP, and has been accompanied by corresponding restraints aimed at maintaining Party control. Unlike other authoritarian states, the government in China has embraced the Internet and ICT, regarding them as extremely effective tools for propaganda work in the modern age.
This paper discusses the role of propaganda and thought work in rebuilding CCP legitimacy after 1989 and the re-birth of the propaganda system that occurred as a result. It presents an overview of the propaganda system in the era of Jiang and Hu and covers recent innovations and preoccupations within that system.
China's Sandwich Media: A Blend of Politics, the Market and Professionalism
Handong Wang, Wuhan University, China
From 2000 on, media concentration and consolidation in China has become the fashion if not the rage. With the reigning logic of “bigger is better”, newspapers combine into “fleets” of many small boats around a flagship, and television super-stations hover over metropolises and provinces with satellites beaming down a menu of channels. It seems that China’s media has diverted its “political-oriented” nature to a “market-oriented”, “technology-oriented” or “professional-oriented” one. However, contrary to common assumptions that economic and professional forces will help China’s media resist political pressure, it is in fact more evident that capital markets, administrative power and media performance are working closely with the dominant ideology. China’s “media reform” is not indicated by a shift from “Party/State-owned” to “private/company-owned”. Instead, we have seen the rise of the “cooperation-mediated” Party media or the media owned by “Party/State-owned” companies, as typified by the catchphrase “take the Party-paper as a trump card in competition”. China’s media reform has developed a typical “sandwich” format that binds politics, the market and professionalism all together. The “sandwich” refers here to (1) the continuity and unification between China’s old and new media landscapes and media policy; (2) the interactions and reciprocity between politics and the market, and between them and the media; (3) moreover, it is also important to know how and with what the sandwich is made, what it tastes like, and whether Chinese people actually enjoy it or not.
Propaganda in China: Role, Content, Organization, and Working Mechanisms
Juntao Wang, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
What changes have come about in the political system as China’s society has been transformed by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) reform and openness policy? We can find the answer to this question by researching the CCP propaganda system. Propaganda and thought work have been an important part of China’s political system from the earliest days of CCP rule. Since China’s economic reform policies began in the late 1970s, the CCP-led propaganda system has changed considerably. In the mid-1980s, propaganda became weakened under the leadership of Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. However, from 1989 onwards, the CCP re-strengthened the propaganda system, recognizing it as an effective means to control the Chinese people. This has meant not simply restoring the old system, it has entailed investing in a new, modern one which fits China’s economic transformation. As China’s social environment and challenging problems change the content of propaganda, new technologies and contemporary knowledge have improved its means and mechanisms in recent years. This paper will explore the origins of those changes as well as investigate their limitations. Up until now, the propaganda system, working in tandem with other means, is still an effective tool for maintaining political stability. From Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao, the CCP shows no desire as yet to loosen control over the propaganda system.
Propaganda Diffused: Media, Spectacles, and the Internet
Haiqing Yu, University of Melbourne, Australia
Media reforms and development in media and communication technologies in the 1990s have transformed Chinese media from a propaganda instrument to what Zhou He calls “Party Publicity Inc.” Propaganda is streamlined and more subtle than the Mao era. The use of media spectacles to shape and propagate a positive image of the Party-State—from the return of Hong Kong, the new millennium celebrations, to China’s accession to the WTO, its successful bidding of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, and even the people’s war on SARS—and the incorporation of the Internet in mass media campaigns are now distinctive features of contemporary Chinese ‘thought work’. Equally spectacular in the renewed media campaigns is the rise of counter propaganda, represented on the one hand by the highly contentious cyber-sectarianism (Falun Gong protest movement), cyber-separatism (Uighur opposition movement), and cyber activism (online protest and petition in the case of Sun Zhigang), and on the other hand by the less contentious, but more dynamic, cyber-expressionism in the everyday domain. The creative use of new media by ordinary individuals through pod-casting and DV (digital video) experiments is in itself an act of counter propaganda. This kind of everyday counter propaganda expressed in the combination of consumerism and expressionism weakens the official ‘thought work’ and dissolves the constructed boundaries between the public and the private, politics and personal life, ‘we’ and ‘I’, expressionism and activism. Propaganda is thus diffused and de-centered, as the State and the non-state appropriate the technologies and ideologies of each other to engage in a perpetual war of propaganda and counter propaganda.
Maintaining the Progressiveness of Language: Linguistic Engineering in China from Mao Zedong to Hu Jintao
Ji Fengyuan, University of Canterbury
Linguistic engineering is the attempt to affect people's attitudes and beliefs by manipulating the language that they hear, speak, read and write. It takes a `pluralistic' form in democratic societies; it took a totalitarian form in Mao Zedong's China; and it takes yet a different form in China today. This paper focuses on linguistic engineering in contemporary China, showing how the Communist Party uses it to control the discursive construction of key political and social issues. It pays particular attention to the recent `Maintain Progressiveness' (bao xian) campaign, identifying key elements of the discourse that it promoted, showing how that discourse was controlled and propagated, exploring links between the discourse and other aspects of the campaign, and showing how the discourse predetermined the way in which issues were discussed. The paper concludes with some observations on the Chinese people's attitudes towards linguistic engineering, and on its effectiveness.