The Chinese Revolution in the 1920s

Between Triumph and Disaster

Roland Felber, A.M. Grigoriev, Mechthild Leutner, M.L. Titarenko, Roland Felber, A.M. Grigoriev, Mechthild Leutner, M.L. Titarenko

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136873171
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Storia
• Sous-sujet: Storia cinese

Uses previously unavailable archive material Presents perspectives on the Chinese revolution from independent outlooks - Chinese, Russian, European and US Covers a crucial period in Chinese modern history

Part I

UNITED FRONT POLICY

1

PATTERNS OF PROPAGANDA ORGANIZATION IN THE NATIONAL-REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT IN CHINA IN THE 1920s

Marianne Bastid-Bruguière

It has been widely acknowledged that a decisive contribution of Moscow and the Comintern to the National-revolutionary Movement in China lay in the field of organization. It involved the building of strongly-structured political parties, the training and equipping of military forces for the purpose of revolution, and the knitting together of the army and the political party. In all these respects, China had little or no experience of its own. The new documents available through the recent opening of Comintern archives have forcefully confirmed this view of the early Soviet role in China.

An important aspect, and lasting legacy, of this organizational work was the introduction of mass propaganda. The emergence in Chinese political life and institutions of planned and sustained action for the purpose not only of imbuing the majority of the population with a cluster of political tenets, but also of channeling the individual commitment of a very large number of people towards the achievement of a set agenda through organized action, was clearly a new feature of the early 1920s.

This chapter will focus on the growth and patterns of propaganda organization, within both the GMD and the CCP until April 1927. The aim here is to explore how these patterns were actually shaped, and more specifically, to what degree they reflected a foreign-imposed unifying structure, or were also nurtured by various practices in the Chinese political culture and by local response to immediate situations from Chinese revolutionaries and Comintern agents. Attention is not directed to analyzing the messages and various instruments of propaganda discourse, but rather to understanding the propaganda machine and its operational techniques.

Modern political propaganda in Europe and the Soviet Union

Political propaganda in a broad sense, understood as the natural political function of building consensus, of advertising rulers' or prospective rulers' decisions and goals, so as to foster people's understanding and support, is as old as politics itself, and has a long record in Chinese tradition. In imperial times, it could even he contended that the Ministry of Rites (libu), in charge of educating and civilizing (jiaohua) the population, was a kind of propaganda department. The phrase xuanchuan, that today designates the modern forms of political propaganda, was in use in imperial literature. It can he found in Chen Shou's (233–297) Standard History of the Three Kingdoms,¹ and in later works. By Qing times, the term had come to refer specifically to the most solemn form of edict proclamation, aimed at publicizing imperial will to the whole population.²

In Europe, the word propaganda appeared for the first time in 1622, in Latin form, when Pope Gregory XV established the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for the Propaganda of Faith), an agency in charge of defining, enacting and controlling the evangelization policy of the Catholic Church. Entwined with the notion of propaganda then was the idea of making a doctrine widely known, of converting people to it, and also of unifying and centralizing the definition of the doctrine, as well as of unifying and centralizing action for its sake.

During the French Revolution, the term propaganda came to be widely used to refer to institutions designed to spread political opinions. In August 1792, in order to “counteract anti-revolutionary propaganda”, the Legislative Assembly created within the Home Ministry a Bureau d'Esprit (Office of Spirit) headed by Roland, in charge of printing and distributing all kinds of pamphlets, books and leaflets to the provinces and to the army, so as to “foster compliance with the revolutionary government decrees and views” (Ellul 1967: 75).

This was, however, an emergency measure. In European governments, propaganda structures long remained a feature of crisis. The organization of propaganda on a permanent basis, with specialized institutions directed to manipulating public opinion of the masses, and using a variety of technical means, together with approaches based on the findings of sociology and psychology, only emerged during the First World War. It was set up by the Allies as a modern warfare technique and was integrated with government action.

At first, propaganda was organized by private groups, then its management passed over to the military and foreign ministries' authorities. The Information Office, headed by Lord Northcliffe, was created in Britain in January 1918 to take charge of psychological action among allied and neutral countries. In 1915, Russia had set up a Committee of the Moral Factor, later renamed the Propaganda Committee, which was supposed to give a boost in morale to the army and the populace and to guide them in the proper direction. It claimed to be organized along Taylorist principles and to make use of Pavlov's findings about conditioned reflexes. Its supervisor, Tchakhotine, organized and headed a powerful propaganda ministry, the Osvag (Information and Agitation), under Denikine during the civil war (Tchakhotine 1952: 329–331).

Contrary to the German Social-Democratic Party, Russian Social-Democrats had not been able to develop an extensive propaganda system. The Iskra emissaries, who numbered only thirty by 1903, had aimed at building a central apparatus, a headquarters for workers' struggles, which would be targeted at very limited and specific audiences. Due to the autocratic system in Russia, which forced them to work underground, the Bolsheviks maintained only restricted capacities for propaganda prior to the October Revolution. These consisted of various technical bureaus under the Central Committee and under the local committees in the major cities, which were in charge of conveying literature from abroad and of distributing it or of reprinting it locally. In 1908, the Moscow committee had a bureau in charge of antimilitarist propaganda among conscripts, another one for training lecturers and journalists and dispatching them wherever necessary, and another one for work among students (Piatnitskii 1931: 136–138). Except for the occasional distribution of pamphlets in the countryside by workers, no work was carried on among peasants.

Only after the October Revolution did propaganda and propaganda instruments develop on a large scale, first as a weapon in the civil war and then for the building of the Soviet Union. Methods relied on Plekhanov's distinction between the two complementary functions of propagating ideology and agitation, as further elaborated by Lenin. Propaganda combined on one hand the spread of ideas, knowledge and doctrine through writings and publications, and on the other hand the mobilization of the masses around one or a few simple ideas in order to carry out concrete tasks. It also borrowed from the organization and material techniques pioneered by the Osvag. Propaganda cells were established in factories, schools and administrations. They used agitators, working on the spot to take charge of stimulating activism and explaining goals, political informers who would spread information, and also trained professional lecturers, who were supposed to bring the dynamics to full efficiency. In addition to persuasive propaganda which pleaded for support of the party program on the basis of logical argument, suggestive propaganda which appealed to sheer emotion was also brought into play by means of symbolic action, emblems or shows, such as flags, songs and propaganda trains.

However, it was only in August 1920 that a special organ was created within the party leadership to centralize the propaganda operation. On the initiative of the Organization Department, the Central Committee established a new department, then headed by R. Katanian, to be in charge of agitation and propaganda. This department included five offices: the agitation office, which was to organize propaganda campaigns and give directives to the local press; the political education office, which was responsible for developing party schools; the publication office, which edited a newspaper for agitators and propagandists and also released the minutes of the Central Committee meetings; the circulation office, which provided for regional distribution of propaganda materials; and a fifth office, which coordinated propaganda among the nationalities. Even so, a large part of the propaganda operation pertained not directly to the party apparatus, hut to government organs, especially to the Commissariat for Culture, headed by Lunacharskii (see Kenez 1985: 121–144).

The beginnings of mass mobilization in China

In the early years of the twentieth century, Chinese cities had experienced various attempts at mobilizing large groups of the population for political action, such as the anti-Russian movements of 1901 and 1903, the anti-American boycott in 1905, the anti-Japanese and anti-German boycotts in 1908. In all these cases, propaganda was undertaken spontaneously by groups of activists, either students or local merchant and gentry elites. It used all available communication media: the press, pamphlets, posters, cartoons, songs and poems. It also organized the crowd for action through meetings, demonstrations, and the establishment of associations or committees in charge of practical implementation. A set vocabulary soon came into common use, including such terms as tongzhi zhu jun or tongzhi shi (those sharing the same will), chuandan (tracts), xuanshi (to propagandize).³ The associations and committees that were formed were often patterned upon the different social groups or trades brought into the movement. The protest against the 21 Demands in 1915 and the National Protection Movement of 1915–1916 enrolled even larger numbers in wider areas.

In none of the above cases had the propaganda been led by any political party or by a single political constituency. It came out of simultaneous and converging initiatives from several informal groups, and eventually achieved some kind of coordination later.⁴ Late Qing and early Republican political parties conducted propaganda on a very limited scale: they aimed at extending their membership among the educated elite, to whom they directed their journals and newspapers (see Zhang Yufa 1971: 62–67, 300–494). As for the common people, party propaganda hardly went beyond distributing a few pamphlets and presenting occasional lectures. It seemed more efficient to win over opinion leaders, including eventually heads of secret societies, as did the Tongmenghui. It was taken for granted that ordinary people would simply comply with the direction taken by elites. Even the Anfu club, which by the end of the 1910s had developed probably the widest capacity for propagandizing, with solid financial means and a tight network of associations, press organs and lobbies, only catered to select circles.

Propaganda at the time of the boycotts or other movements had been shortlived. As had been the case in revolutionary France and nineteenth-century Europe, it was a phenomenon linked to a time of crisis, a response to a situation of heightened tension in the face of national emergency.

The May Fourth Movement also generated a large propaganda drive. As Lü Fangshang's research has shown, the students were able to organize themselves not only on a school and regional basis, as had happened in earlier movements, but, within forty days, a national student union, the Zhonghua minguo xuesheng lianhehui, was established. Moreover, this union proved able to stir up the students' self-organization process in each province (Lü Fangshang 1994: 118–119). The organizational c...