The Globalization of Chinese Propaganda

International Power and Domestic Political Cohesion

K. Edney

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137382153
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book investigates the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party's crucial goal of using the propaganda system to consolidate its power within the domestic political environment and its prominent recent attempts to use propaganda overseas to increase China's international power.

Part 1

Contemporary Chinese Propaganda Practices

1

Propaganda, Power, and Cohesion in Chinese Politics

What role does propaganda play in the Chinese political system? What is the relationship between power and propaganda? How should we begin to think about the influence of domestic propaganda on China’s engagement with discourses beyond its borders? This chapter attempts to address these questions in order to provide a general foundation on which further investigation and analysis can be built. The first section briefly explains the contemporary development of Chinese views on propaganda. The second section examines the various ways in which scholars, using concepts such as soft power and public diplomacy, have understood the influence of the Party-state’s domestic propaganda practices on China’s international relations. The third section develops an approach to propaganda and power that can be applied to the Party-state’s practices at both the domestic and international levels, highlighting the relationship—but also the difference—between the Party-state’s use of propaganda to exercise power and its broader engagement in ideological struggles over discourse. The Party-state’s use of propaganda practices involves both the articulation of particular discourses and the disruption and suppression of unwanted articulations that could threaten the Party-state’s hegemonic political project. The Party-state’s successful use of propaganda practices to affect the public articulation of discourses does not guarantee that the Party-state’s own official narrative will ultimately prevail in the ideological struggle to define the concepts that shape public understanding of Chinese politics and society, but it can tip the balance in such struggles in favor of the existing political order. In the final section of the chapter I introduce the concept of cohesion as it appears in official discourse and use it to highlight the Party-state’s anxiety regarding the Chinese consensus over the meaning of key political ideas, the Party-state’s willingness to exercise power through the use of propaganda practices in pursuit of cohesion, and its recognition that domestic consensus enhances China’s international power position.

It is impossible to understand how and why the Party-state employs propaganda practices within China and internationally without understanding power. Not all interpretations of power are equally useful in this context, however. There are multiple interpretations of power that contain both overlapping and mutually exclusive elements and cannot be resolved into a single, “correct” definition.¹ The boundaries that encapsulate the concept of power and its effects are defined by what kinds of relationships and phenomena the user of the term considers to be significant.² Barnett and Duvall, who define power in the broadest terms as “the production, in and through social relations, of effects on actors that shape their capacity to control their fate,” provide a useful typology for identifying the interpretations of power that are most applicable to the study of Chinese propaganda.³ Although they develop their typology in the context of international relations it is also relevant for analyzing domestic politics. They divide approaches to power into four types—compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive—based on two analytical distinctions. The first is between approaches that view power as working through the interactions of specific actors and those that view power as working through the constitution of social relations. The second is between those that view power relations as working in a direct way and those that view power relations as working in a diffuse way. Thus compulsory power involves direct interactions between specific actors, which results in one actor utilizing various methods, such as force, inducements, or normative appeals, to control the behavior or circumstances of a second actor; institutional power involves a specific actor exercising control over the behavior or circumstances of another in an indirect way, such as through institutional arrangements and agenda-setting; structural power involves unequal social positions, such as class, granting actors unequal capacities and privileges, and shaping the way those actors understand their interests; and productive power involves the discursive production of subject positions and meanings, which define whether certain actions are considered to be possible or impossible and shape how such actions are understood, such as by providing the meanings that can be used to label specific behavior legitimate or illegitimate.⁴

Compulsory power is the interpretation that is most applicable to the examination of Chinese propaganda practices, although productive power also plays an important, if indirect, role. Chinese propaganda is a collection of practices employed by the Party-state to exercise power in relation to the public articulation of discourses. In other words, the Party-state uses propaganda practices to influence the behavior and circumstances of other actors so that the Party-state’s desired discourses are articulated in public and undesirable discourses are suppressed. This involves the efforts of the CCP to exercise control over the other elements of the political system, the efforts of the Party-state to exercise control over Chinese society, and the Party-state’s use of foreign propaganda practices that are intended to influence what is and is not articulated publicly beyond the borders of the Chinese polity. The productive power of discourse is also important here, however, because of the way that public discourse can either support or undermine the subject positions and meanings that perpetuate the Chinese political system and the CCP’s place in that system. The Party-state’s awareness of the power of discourse to shape the field of politics in this way is a crucial factor that drives its attempts to exercise compulsory power through propaganda practices in order to control what can and cannot be articulated in public.

In general terms, we can say that the Chinese propaganda system is designed both to control which ideas and information appear in the public domain as well as to influence the way people think about important political issues such as the legitimacy of CCP rule, China’s historical experience, and the future of the Chinese political system. The political significance of Chinese propaganda practices lies in the complex interplay between the Party-state’s exercise of compulsory power to control what is said or written in public and the productive power of discourse to shape the way people think about China and its place in the world.

The Concept of Propaganda in China

Propaganda in the Chinese context is not simply a label applied to an overtly ideological form of political communication; it involves a set of power practices bound up with the institutional structure of the Party-state system. The Party-state’s use of propaganda practices is a particular characteristic of Chinese political culture that has emerged from a specific historical and ideological context.⁵ It has evolved in response to domestic and international conditions, such as the politics of reform and the processes associated with globalization. At the same time, the threat of various political ideologies, including liberal democracy, has been a constant concern and is still employed by the Party-state to justify its continued use of propaganda practices.

Propaganda plays a vital role in any revolution and the CCP’s ability to use it to mobilize the population was crucial in defeating the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) prior to the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949.⁶ Propaganda occupies both an important and official place within the structure of the Chinese state and the CCP. In its everyday English usage, propaganda often simply means “a persuasive statement that I don’t like.”⁷ In contrast, the Chinese terms for propaganda—usually xuanchuan or sixiang gongzuo—have a largely neutral connotation and even carry positive ones in official discourse.⁸

Standard Chinese dictionary definitions of xuanchuan provide no sense that the term imparts a pejorative connotation and do not highlight any connection between the act of propagandizing and the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of the information that is being disseminated. Xuanchuan is commonly directly translated as “propaganda,” although “to propagandize” is a closer fit given that it is generally used as a verb.⁹ The online Xinhua Dictionary gives two definitions for the term: the first is simply to inform or convey information (gaosu chuanda), while the second is to explain something to the masses (xiang qunzhong shuoming jiangjie). For the second definition the Dictionary gives contextual examples such as “propagandizing the Party’s policies” (xuanchuan dang de zhengce) and “a propaganda team member” (xuanchuan duiyuan).¹⁰

Baidu’s Baike database provides a more in-depth definition of the term xuanchuan. Noting that it is a specialized term that refers to a way of expressing information, Baidu initially says that the original meaning of the term in the West refers to the spreading of a philosophical argument or opinion, before mentioning that in the West the term is now commonly used in the context of supporting a particular government or political group. It then offers the following three definitions of xuanchuan in the Chinese context: to announce or convey information (xuanbu chuanda); to explain something to someone, or to conduct education (xiang ren jiangjie shuoming, jinxing jiaoyu); and to disseminate or publicize (chuanbo, xuanyang).¹¹ While it is useful to understand how these terms are used in the Chinese context, it is also important to note that the dictionary definitions outlined here do not mention censorship, which is a significant component of the Party-state’s propaganda work.

The term xuanchuan is used in the official names of Party-state organs such as the Central Propaganda Department (Zhongyang xuanchuan bu). In recent years, however, the Party-state has recognized the negative connotations of the word “propaganda” in English and now official English translations refer to the “Publicity Department” (although xuanchuan continues to be used in Chinese). Even though an official foreign propaganda organization exists within the institutional structure of the Party-state, the sensitive nature of foreign propaganda work means that it is in the interests of the Party-state to use euphemistic terms such as “media diplomacy” or “cultural exchange” to blur the boundaries between foreign propaganda and other government functions that are more legitimate in the eyes of overseas audiences.¹²

Xuanchuan and related terms such as sixiang gaizao, (“thought reform”) and sixiang gongzuo (“thought work”) have been used in an ideological context where the CCP’s role in shaping public discourse is seen as both necessary and desirable. The role of propaganda in communist ideology was first emphasized by Lenin, who argued that the Communist Party played a vital role in generating class-consciousness in the proletariat.¹³ Lenin also pointed out that it was necessary for the Party to educate Party members as to what was communist ideology.¹⁴

In the early decades after the revolution, the term sixiang gaizao was used to describe the task of shaping the people’s consciousness.¹⁵ The CCP position was that “thought determines action”—if people’s thoughts could be corrected then their actions would also be correct.¹⁶ This provided the ideological basis for the Party-state to carry out extensive campaigns of thought reform. This process was not just designed to generate political loyalty to the CCP, although that was a critical task. It also involved reshaping everyday attitudes and habits so as to produce individuals who would abandon their personal desires to work in the service of the collective cause of building a new society.¹⁷

The task of developing the appropriate propaganda system was closely connected to the idea that a revolution in attitudes and thinking was needed to provide the basis for changes in the field of politics, the economy, and the social and cultural realms.¹⁸ According to Shambaugh, following the revolution the propaganda system was “a—if not the—key mechanism for Mao’s and the Party’s subsequent efforts to transform Chinese society.”¹⁹ After the founding of the PRC, the CCP began expanding the Party-based propaganda apparatus into a large-scale official propaganda system, including a media sector that was intended to act as a mouthpiece for the CCP. In addition to publicizing official information and ideology the propaganda system was also dedicated to suppressing “incorrect” or dangerous bourgeois ideas that might threaten the revolution. It was impo...