China's Thought Management

Anne-Marie Brady

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136633881
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'etnia

China's Thought Management argues that by re-emphasizing and modernizing propaganda and thought work since 1989, the CCP has managed to overcome a succession of local and national level crises - the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the impact of the collapse Socialism in the Eastern bloc, SARS, ethnic clashes in Tibet and Xinjiang, to name but a few - emerging re-strengthened and as dominant in Chinese society as ever. The contributors to this book address such crucial issues as the new emphasis on economic propaganda, the continued importance of the PLA propaganda system in China's overall propaganda work and political stability, how the CCP uses "Confu-talk" in its foreign and domestic propaganda, and new approaches to mass persuasion such as "campaigns of mass distraction". Each chapter is a case study of the multiple ways in which the CCP has modified and adjusted its propaganda to reflect China's changed economic and political environment.

Challenging readers to reconceptualise mainstream understandings of the CCP's hold on power and the means the CCP government adopts to maintain its authority to rule, this book will be invaluable reading for anyone interested in the Chinese media and Chinese politics.

Part I

New Themes

1 The Beijing Olympics as a Campaign of Mass Distraction

Anne-Marie Brady

getting propaganda on the Olympics right will be good for China’s international and domestic environment, if Olympics propaganda has a clear direction then China’s overall national strength will continually increase and the masses will give us wide support.

(Meeting on Olympics propaganda, 2007¹)

From 2006 to 2008 Chinese society was inundated with Beijing Olympics propaganda. The Beijing Olympics was also the predominant theme of the Chinese government’s international publicity in this period. Propaganda and thought work (xuanchuan yu sixiang gongzuo) has long been an integral activity in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rule. After undergoing a decline in importance in the 1980s, in the current period it is once again prioritized, albeit updated to reflect changes in Chinese society. For this reason, Beijing’s Olympic preparations were never only about putting up new sports stadiums; hosting the Olympics was used as an opportunity for a major propaganda effort, what I call a campaign of mass distraction.

CCP propaganda and thought work has undergone a transformation in recent years, as has the Chinese economy and certain elements of the political system. China has embraced many new practices and systems from the outside world, especially Western democratic countries, while retaining many traditional features and practices from the past. Examining Beijing Olympics propaganda activities is a useful means to reveal the many ways in which China has adapted its political and economic system while maintaining the core political status quo: one-party rule.

Changes in the methodology and goals of the CCP propaganda system (xuanjiao xitong) reflect substantial changes in China’s system of political control and an adjustment in the nature of the Party’s authority to rule. The propaganda system is the most extensive and, arguably, the most important of all the CCP-controlled bureaucratic systems (xitong)² in China. Hence this chapter analyzes the propaganda activities surrounding the Beijing Olympics as a key to interpreting recent changes in the underpinnings of legitimacy and indeed the whole process of legitimation in contemporary China. It is based on field work trips to China in 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002–3, 2004, 2005–6, 2007, and 2010, where I conducted formal and informal interviews with propaganda officials, theorists, policy-makers and bureaucrats, academics, journalists and dissidents, as well as ordinary Chinese citizens, while scouring propaganda policy documents, secondary sources in Chinese and English, and relevant information from the Chinese and foreign news media.³

The Ccp, Legitimacy, and the Propaganda System

Superficially the two year-long period of “welcome the Beijing Olympics activities” (ying Aoyun xuanchuan huodong) looked rather like a Mao-era style mass campaign (qunzhong yundong): it involved the whole of Chinese society, received saturation coverage in all sectors of the Chinese propaganda system, it centered on a handful of simple, easily understandable slogans, utilized all tools of mass communication including oral communications, and incorporated both the commercial and non-commercial sectors. However, the Beijing Olympics “mass activities” had some unique features which made them strikingly different from the mass campaigns of the past. Analyzing just what those differences were provides a window on to the new underpinnings of the CCP’s right to rule.

One significant difference was avoidance of the term “campaign” (yundong) to describe the movement’s mass, scripted, series of events. The word yundong (when prefixed with either “politics,” “mass” or “propaganda”) has become a negative term in Chinese official discourse.⁴ From the late 1920s and up to the late 1970s, the CCP engaged in a series of mass campaigns, which though aimed at transforming China, often served as the fig leaf for power struggles and purges. The political thought reform of the masses was an essential government task in these years, frequently to the detriment of economic growth. From 1978 to 1989 CCP rule faced a legitimacy crisis;⁵ and many critics both within and without China argued that the source of this crisis was the Mao era’s (1949–76) excessive emphasis on political thought work and mass campaigns. In response to these pressures, in the 1980s the Chinese government downplayed ideological goals (mass persuasion-based legitimacy) and instead focused its efforts on economic development (performance-based legitimacy). The CCP senior leadership was divided on the issue of whether or not political thought work and propaganda should still have a role in China’s modernizing economy and polity.

These debates were brought to a dramatic close with the political crisis of April–June 1989. The post-1989 leadership established the new formula that has been followed up to the present day: that the Party would base its legitimacy on both economic growth and a renewed emphasis on propaganda and political thought work.⁶ However the debates of the 1980s meant that Party propaganda and thought work in the post-1989 years would be very different from what went before. Since the early 1990s and continuing up to the present day, CCP propaganda and thought work has undergone a dramatic modernization, discarding outdated terminology such as yundong and in foreign language publications even avoiding the term “propaganda,” meanwhile incorporating the latest technological and methodological innovations.⁷

In terms of propaganda and thought work, the years from 1989 to 1992 were a period of consolidation and reflection on the lessons of the past. However, not long after the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1992, CCP general secretary Jiang Zemin stated that propaganda should be an “extremely important department” with increased powers.⁸ The Fourteenth Party Congress is also notable as the moment when China formally designated itself as a market economy. For propaganda officials, the challenge was to create propaganda and thought work suitable for both the market economy and for China’s unique political system. For enterprises within the propaganda system, such as sports, media, cultural, and educational organizations, the challenge would be to find new sources of income as state subsidies were progressively withdrawn from this date on.

The period from 1992 to the 2002 Sixteenth Party Congress was a period of substantial reforms in Party propaganda work, reflecting radical, subterranean, shifts which were contemporaneously going on in the political sphere. One early shift in thinking occurred in September 1991, when an article in an internal publication argued that instead of calling itself a “revolutionary party” and trying to revolutionize Chinese society, the CCP should re-brand itself as a “party in power” with the aim of maintaining this status and the political system it led. The article’s suggestions became mainstream opinion by the mid-1990s, and were formally adopted as Party policy during the 2002 Sixteenth Party Congress. This means that propaganda now has an even more crucial role in Chinese politics, as the masses must be persuaded to believe that the party in power and the political system it represents are legitimate and should be sustained.

In the post-1989 years the Central Propaganda Department has overseen the introduction to China of modern methods and tools of mass persuasion more in keeping with the CCP government’s re-forged social contract. China’s propaganda and thought work now incorporates the methodology of political public relations, advertising, mass communications, social psychology, and other modern forms of mass persuasion utilized in Western democratic societies, but adapted to Chinese conditions and needs.

Modern democratis to garner popular support and maintain political legitimacy.⁹ According to political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, “Legitimacy involves the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate or proper ones for the society.”¹⁰ The governing elite in any given society utilizes mass persuasion techniques – propaganda to its detractors – in order to “manufacture consent” for its continuing rule.¹¹ Contemporary CCP-sponsored forums promote Lipset’s minimalist definition of legitimacy; meanwhile the (conflicting) theories of Max Weber and Jürgen Habermas are downplayed¹² or critiqued as irrelevant for China.¹³

As part of the revival of the importance of propaganda and thought work in China, the CCP has reworked many old traditions as well as introducing new approaches. An example of this is the CCP’s revival of the practice of launching periodic mass campaigns in order to guide the public mind. However, since the term yundong is no longer used, the ambiguous huodong (which can be translated as “activities” as well as “campaign”) is now preferred. The Chinese term for PR campaign is “gong guan huodong” and the new-style mass campaigns do have much in common with PR efforts. The campaign to welcome the Beijing Olympics was particularly reminiscent of a PR promotion for a new product. This campaign was formally launched in February 2006 and ended in the last seconds before the opening ceremony.¹⁴ It was the final stage of a long-term effort to link China’s successful Olympics bid to ongoing efforts to maintain the political credibility of the CCP government.

Following the pattern of the Mao era, some contemporary propaganda campaigns are targeted at party members while others are aimed at the Chinese population as a whole. Since 1994, every two years or so, Party members and senior non-Party state officials have had to down tools to engage in concentrated political study, sometimes for periods as long as eighteen months. In 1994 Party members were instructed to “Study Deng Xiaoping Theory,” in 1998 they studied Jiang Zemin’s “Three Stresses,” in 2000 and again in 2003 they crammed Jiang’s theories on “The Three Represents,” from 2005 to 2006 they took part in the record-breaking eighteen-month-long “Maintaining the Progressiveness of Party Members Education,” and from 2007 to 2008 they studied the theory of “Scientific Development.” Instead of political study, the masses are now targeted with soft propaganda messages aimed at garnering social and political stability such as the two-year long “Welcome the Beijing Olympics Campaign.”

Beijing Olympic propaganda activities reflect the changed circumstances in the justifications for maintaining the political status quo in China. Rather than being a campaign of political indoctrination, Beijing Olympics propaganda was a campaign of mass distraction, designed to distract the population from more troubling issues such as political representation, inflation, unemployment, corruption, and environmental degradation. It is a form of what Freudenberg and Allario call “diversionary framing,” whereby public opinion is shaped, in part, by distraction.¹⁵ In China today the ultimate goal of propaganda and thought work is manufacturing consent for the continued political status quo. Consent can be active, as shown in societies where citizens choose their governments by election. However, in China passive consent is more appropriate. The Party needs the masses to be as disengaged from politics as possible, and to be optimistic and positive to maintain business confidence and trust in the political status quo. Under these circumstances the role of the Central Propaganda Department has shifted from being the engine house for the political transformation of China, to overseeing the political mummification of the nation.

“Mass distraction” is a common political tactic which was known as far back as the Romans when the poet Juvenal spoke scathingly of the authorities using “bread and circuses” to distract the masses from political concerns. Many commentators have referred to the Bush administration’s 2003...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Introduction Market-Friendly, Scientific, High Tech, and Politics-Lite: China's New Approach to Propaganda
• Part I New Themes
• Part II New Methods of Control
• Index