Abstract
Propaganda practices involve the Party-state exercising power in order to affect how discourses are publicly articulated. The Party-state uses propaganda practices to reproduce its official narrative about key political concepts and issues as well as to suppress any rival narratives that threaten to undermine the shared meanings that legitimize CCP rule. This is intended to prevent the emergence of a coherent alternative political project that could challenge the existing political order. Although these attempts to control public discourse cannot guarantee that people will always accept the assumptions embedded in the official narrative, they are designed to increase the likelihood that the Party-state’s official narrative will prevail in its ideological struggles with alternative interpretations of Chinese politics and society. This chapter focuses on the propaganda practices the Party-state uses to exercise power in the domestic political context and begins by identifying the official institutions that are responsible for carrying out the Party-state’s propaganda practices. This shows the extent to which such institutions are embedded in the structure of the Chinese political system and highlights the fact that all areas of public discourse to some degree fall under the purview of the Party-state.
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Notes
Anne-Marie Brady, Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); David Shambaugh, “China’s Propaganda System: Institutions, Processes and Efficacy,” The China Journal, no. 57 (2007): 25–58.
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The others are the PLA, the internal security bureaucracies, and the Organization Department, which is responsible for most CCP and government appointments. Susan L. Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 83–84.
Unger writes that after the Communist revolution historians “were to serve as handmaidens to the Party propagandists.” Jonathan Unger, Introduction, to Using the Past to Serve the Present: Historiography and Politics in Contemporary China, ed. Jonathan Unger (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpé, 1993), 3.
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The intellectual magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu and the Southern Media Group that publishes newspapers such as Nanfang Dushi Bao (Southern Metropolis Daily) and Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern Weekend) are two likely examples of this. Pan describes the Southern Media Group as “a camp for the party’s liberal wing.” Philip Pan, Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (London: Picador, 2008), 239.
Madeline Earp, “Although Not Explicit, Legal Threats to Journalists Persist,” in Challenged in China: The Shifting Dynamics of Censorship and Control (Committee to Protect Journalists, March 2013), http://cpj.org/reports/china2013.pdf.
problems connected to existing institutions. Alex Chan, “From Propaganda to Hegemony: Jiaodian Fangtan and China’s Media Policy,” Journal of Contemporary China 11, no. 30 (2002): 44.
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See Xin Xu, “Modernizing China in the Olympic Spotlight: China’s National Identity and the 2008 Beijing Olympiad,” in Sport Mega-Events: Social Scientific Analyses of a Global Phenomenon, ed. John Horne and Wolfram Manzenreiter (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2006);
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Yongnian Zheng, Technological Empowerment: The Internet, State, and Society in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), xiii.
However, Internet cafes and commercial Internet accounts did not appear until 1995. Guobin Yang, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 162.
On the satirical use of mobile phone text messages during the SARS crisis, see Haiqing Yu, “Talking, Linking, Clicking: The Politics of AIDS and SARS in Urban China,” Positions 15, no. 1 (2007): 46–50.
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The authorities closed the Tsinghua-based BBS in 2005. Yang, The Tower of the Internet in China, 53. Qiangguo Tuntan was originally set up by the Teople’s Daily website in response to the outpouring of nationalist sentiment following NATO’s 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Xu Wu, Chinese Cyber Nationalism: Evolution, Characteristics, and Implications (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 48.
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Guoguang Wu, “In the Name of Good Governance: E-Government, Internet Pornography and Political Censorship in China,” in China’s Information and Communications Technology Revolution: Social Changes and State Responses, ed. Xiaoling Zhang and Yongnian Zheng (London: Routledge, 2009).
Guobin Yang, “Contesting Food Safety in the Chinese Media: Between Hegemony and Counter Hegemony,” The China Quarterly 214 (2013): 341.
For an in-depth discussion of intellectuals in contemporary China, see Edward Gu and Merle Goldman, eds., Chinese Intellectuals between State and Market (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004).
Mark Leonard, What Does China Think? (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 17. This is not to say, however, that there is a simple dividing line between those intellectuals who work for the political establishment and those who follow a dissenting line—the reality is much more complex.
See Timothy Cheek, “Xu Jilin and the Thought Work of China’s Public Intellectuals,” The China Quarterly 186 (2006): 401–20.
Perry Link, “The Anaconda in the Chandelier,” The New York Review of Books 49, no. 6 (2002): 67–70;
Edward Gu and Merle Goldman, “Introduction: The Transformation of the Relationship between Chinese Intellectuals and the State,” in Chinese Intellectuals between State and Market, ed. Edward Gu and Merle Goldman (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 10. According to Link this self-censorship also affects foreign intellectuals and businesspeople of both Chinese and non-Chinese origin. For a personal account of such self-censorship, see Ann Condi, “Changing the Subject: The ‘Invisible’ Control Mechanism in Chinese Media,” AsiaMedia, June 22, 2004, http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=12169.
Kraus notes that most screening of artwork is carried out by editors, managers, and administrators, with only some areas, like film and television, under close official supervision. Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 109–10.
See Pitman B. Potter, “Belief in Control: Regulation of Religion in China,” The China Quarterly 173 (2003): 317–37.
Ibid; Tony Saich, “Negotiating the State: The Development of Social Organizations in China,” The China Quarterly 161 (2000): 129–30.
Guobin Yang, “Environmental NGOs and Institutional Dynamics in China,” The China Quarterly 181 (2005): 54–55.
Yongnian Zheng, The Chinese Communist Party as Organizational Emperor: Culture, Reproduction and Transformation (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2010), 146.
Suisheng Zhao, “A State-Led Nationalism: The Patriotic Education Campaign in Post-Tiananmen China,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 31, no. 3 (1998): 288–89.
Ibid., 292–93. See also Suisheng Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 9.
See Rachel Murphy, “Turning Peasants into Modern Chinese Citizens: “Population Quality” Discourse, Demographic Transition and Primary Education,” The China Quarterly 177 (2004): 1–20.
Andrew J. Nathan, “Authoritarian Resilience,” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 1 (2003): 16.
David Shambaugh, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008), 169.
See ss Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction; Peter Hays Gries, China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004);
William A. Callahan, “National Insecurities: Humiliation, Salvation, and Chinese Nationalism,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29, no. 2 (2004): 199–218;
Maria Hsia Chang, Return of the Dragon: China’s Wounded Nationalism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001);
Edward Friedman, “Still Building the Nation: The Causes and Consequences of China’s Patriotic Fervor,” in Chinese Political Culture 1989–2000, ed. Shiping Hua (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001).
On heroic news narratives, see Peter C. Pugsley, “Constructing the Hero: Nationalistic News Narratives in Contemporary China,” Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 3, no. 1 (2006): 78–93.
On the importance of international status for China see Yong Deng, “Better than Power: ‘International Status’ in Chinese Foreign Policy,” in China Rising: Tower and Motivation in Chinese Foreign Policy, ed. Yong Deng and Fei-Ling Wang (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).
Ian Buruma, Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 335;
Jacques deLisle, “‘One World, Different Dreams’: The Contest to Define the Beijing Olympics,” in Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China, ed. Monroe E. Price and Daniel Dayan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 23.
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© 2014 Kingsley Edney
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Edney, K. (2014). Propaganda in Chinese Domestic Politics. In: The Globalization of Chinese Propaganda. Asia Today. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137382153_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137382153_3
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