The art of brainwashing

Longread on contemporary Chinese propaganda: How does the world's largest authoritarian country still manage to massively brainwash its population despite the growing availability of alternative information?

First of all, they write that after the events on Tiananmen Square in 1989 (when Chinese protesters were rolled out by tanks), the Chinese authorities took a slightly different propaganda course, the essence of which is to make the concepts of "party" and "country" synonymous. The party's victory is China's victory. And vice versa. The opponents of the regime, accordingly, are not opponents of the party, but the enemies of the entire Chinese people. Simply put, Chinese propaganda is now about nationalism.

It is immediately clear that this is reminiscent of: the Soviet "change of milestones" and other national-Bolshevik turn under Comrade Stalin, which reached its apotheosis during the war. They abandoned the world revolution and the class struggle, equated the interests of the party with the interests of the motherland. However, this brainwashing is short-lived. She obviously works during the war, when you have to save the country, and in addition, the asses of the party nomenclature are also being saved.Then they tried to continue the war in a cold state, but no matter how the rope twists, people are still able to share the interests of the CPSU and the interests of society. Therefore, the outcome is logical.

How does China manage to maintain this illusion? They write that partly due to natural isolation. In the Chinese language space, an alternative point of view is, perhaps, Taiwan. Everything else is brewed in its own juice. Therefore, it is not so difficult to enclose a field with a great firewall, which is obviously fenced off by language. By the way, this is good news for us Russians - we do not have such linguistic isolation from the rest of the world.

However, the most effective way of propaganda is not at all about how to make sure that alternative information does not get to a person. This is about how to make a person refuse to perceive it himself, even if it is provided to him on a plate in a form ready for consumption. And here the Chinese comrades have interesting achievements. They write that it is generally useless for many Chinese students to give English books (according to their own history) - they blink their eyes and do not understand what to do with them. "Why do we need such a story?", "Will it be useful for the country and the party?"

Which once again brings us to the idea that the true watershed is not at the level of ideology, but at the level of basic values - either you are concerned about issues of ethics and truth, or for you everything is relative and there is only the utilitarian utility of things. It is enough to raise people of the second type - and you can load them with any propaganda. And here it is easy to see that this is approximately the approach of Medinsky and the RVIO. "Let there were no Panfilovites, but this is a useful myth."

Mihail Pojarsky 2019-11-27