Redefining Propaganda in Modern China: The Mao Era and Its Legacies

✍ Scribed by James Farley; Matthew D Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 337
• Series: Routledge Studies in Modern History
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Redefining propaganda
Propaganda in modern China
Legacies of Maoism
Historical perspectives
Icons and imagery
Reception and affect
Transitions
Legacies
Notes
Part I Historical perspectives
1 Propaganda: A historical perspective
The Mao era and the Chinese experience of propaganda
Conclusion
Notes
2 China’s directed public sphere: Historical perspectives on Mao’s propaganda state
Introduction
A question of perspective
Keywords of the pedagogical state
Doctrinal culture of Chinese statecraft
China’s changing public spheres
Print capitalism and Qing legacies
The birth of China’s propaganda state
Conclusion
Notes
Part II Icons and imagery
3 Liu Hulan – ‘A great life, a glorious death’: Martyrdom across the media
Acknowledgement
Notes
4 The subtle image of the ‘compatriot’ .. in Chinese propaganda posters of the Mao era
Images of Hong Kong and Taiwanese compatriots in the propaganda posters of the Mao era
Embedding the ‘old’ society in the present: The images of Taiwanese compatriots in the 1950s
Creating helpless victims and the poor relatives among the Chinese people
The martyr who could not show his face to the audience36
The distant relatives from a different society: Taiwanese compatriot in posters in the 1970s
Illustrating distance between China’s centre and her periphery
Weaving the HK/TW compatriots into the big family of China in a tianxia system
Conclusion: The image of the familiar ‘others’ – the compatriots of Hong Kong and Taiwan
Notes
5 Anatomy of an emulation campaign: ‘Study from Comrade Wang Guofu’
Depicting a model peasant cadre
Building the mythology of Wang Guofu: Beijing ribao (Beijing Daily) 20 January to 5 February 1970
The return of Wang Guofu (1972–77)
Frozen in time: A socialist model peasant
Notes
Part III Reception and affect
6 Developing patriotic anti-Americanism: Chinese propaganda and the Resist America, Aid Korea Campaign, 1949–53
Imagining an American enemy
Cultivating a patriotic and productive anti-American citizenry
Signing devotion to the Anti-American cause
Popular reactions to and enduring legacies of the Resist America, Aid Korea Campaign
Notes
7 One more time, with feeling: Revolutionary repetition and the Cultural Revolution Red Guard rally documentaries, 1966–67
Mao and zombies
‘A revenge of singularity on representation’
Where have all the film editors gone?
Multiplicity
Deluge
Notes
Part IV Transitions
8 Breaking with the past: Party propaganda and state crimes
The return of the propaganda state
Community through accusation
The asymmetry of representation
The recognition of official wrongdoing
History told through a few million reversed cases
Acknowledgement
Notes
9 From text(s) to image(s): Maoist-era texts and their influences on six oil paintings (1957–79)
Art in context: Three elite visual artists
Quan Shanshi on two Mao text-inspired paintings
Wen Lipeng and two text-inspired martyr paintings
Zhan Jianjun and two paintings on heroism
Conclusion
Acknowledgement
Notes
Part V Legacies
10 Propaganda and security from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping: Struggling to defend China’s socialist system
Combating ‘peaceful evolution’: Propaganda, culture and education as weapons against revisionism, 1953–64
Struggling to the end with ‘bourgeois liberalization’: Thought work, 1979–89
Securing culture against globalization: Continuities in national policy from Jiang to Hu
Conclusion: Putting cultural securitization in context
Notes
11 Whose ‘Chinese Dream’ is it anyway? Temporalities of ‘ethnicity’ in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang
Introduction: The temporalities of the ‘Chinese Dream’
The meaning of ethnicity
Propaganda and pastoral power: Theoretical approach and methodologies
Stories of the past: The provincial museums
The Provincial Museum, Urumqi
The Provincial Museum, Hohhot
Framing the present: Urban spaces
Urumqi
Hohhot
Imagining the future: Whose ‘Chinese Dream’ is it anyway?
Notes
12 China as ‘Third Pole Culture’: Between theorizing and thought work
Introduction: Anatomy of the third
The ‘Third Pole’
Thought work and huayu quan in propaganda
The Third Space and thirding
Towards a conclusion: Cultural diversity and difference in China’s Third Space discourse
Notes
Selected bibliography
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Index